REPRESENTATIONS of MIND by David Lindeman a Dissertation

REPRESENTATIONS OF MIND by David Lindeman A dissertation submitted to Johns Hopkins University in conformity with the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Baltimore, Maryland July 2019 © 2019 David Lindeman All Rights Reserved ABSTRACT After defending the view that we can read off the metaphysics of the things we talk about from the form and interpretation of the language we use to talk about things, I develop and defend an account of the form and interpretation of propositional attitude reports (and some closely related constructions) and then read off the metaphysics of propositional attitudes. Views on the metaphysics of speech acts, propositions, and propositionally articulated thoughts also fall out of the account. The result is a tightly knit sets of views which I think together solve a number of outstanding philosophical problems. Given the centrality and importance of the attitudes and reports thereof to our making sense of ourselves and others as minded beings, not to mention their centrality to many domains of philosophy, the hope is that this makes a contribution to our self- understanding. It should also be a contribution to cognitive science. Committee: Steven Gross (advisor), Justin Bledin, Robert Matthews, Michael Williams, Michael McCloskey ii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This is a progress report, extracted from an enormous, spatiotemporally distributed and disorganized corpus, spread over countless documents, handwritten and typed, alongside barely legible notes sprawling up and down the margins of hundreds of books and articles with different physical embodiments. It is, in fact, a work in progress. Like most longish works, it was composed over a longish period of time – by various time- slices, not all of whom agree with one another. The most recent of these, hopefully, has ironed out their differences. After all this, I wouldn’t want everything to follow from what is written. Of course, I can already see respects in which what is written might be supplemented and revised. But these modifications will have to wait. As is, it is certainly better than it would have been without the help of others. I probably owe thanks to many more people than I realize, but I would like especially to thank Steven Gross, Robert Matthews, Justin Bledin, and Richard Teague. I venture to guess that Steven is among the best advisors in the profession – not to mention a model of all the intellectual virtues. This would have been a much poorer work without his critical remarks and sage advice over the years. I had a very formative semester at Rutgers, where Bob was kind enough to host me. His book The Measure of Mind was in many ways the impetus to my work. I started out agreeing with Bob’s book more than I do now, naturally enough. But I can only hope there’s at least as much truth in my work as I perceive in his. From the beginning, Bob has been very generous with his time and his remarks on my work have been unerringly instructive – and sometimes unsparing. I must thank him especially for promptly correcting some of my first, clumsy attempts to spare with linguists. iii Justin has a way of identifying fatal defects in arguments and positions almost as soon as he is presented with them. In consequence, I didn’t talk to him as much as I should have. But I must thank him for getting me to see, finally, that Davidson’s paratactic analysis just won’t do. For better or for worse, however, I think that a modified version, presented in chapter 2, will. Richard has been subjected to many tediously long emails over the years, mostly concerning possible worlds semantics, the Tractatus, and the limits of what Richard will allow me to say. But whereof one cannot speak, thereof David will write another email. Thanks! I would also like to thank: the participants of Steven’s Language and Mind Lab, especially Nikola Andonovski, Palmer Gunderson, and Patrick O’Donnell; and Michael Williams and Michael McCloskey for enjoyable discussion of the dissertation at my defense. Outside this work, I would like to thank my cohorts, Anton Kabeshkin, Josh McBee, Patrick O’Donnell, and Adam Reid, for their camaraderie over the years. We all made it! I would also like to thank my parents for, among many other things, never questioning my peculiar vocation (at least not within earshot). It’s been a while since they’ve asked to read anything. I’ll be keen to know what they think of what I’ve been doing with my time. My brothers and extended family, too, should be thanked. I should probably also apologize for my lousy correspondence. It’s time to catch up! Finally, I would to thank Emily Feinberg, my fiancé and greatest companion of the last five years. Her presence is always a welcome reminder that there is more to life than is contained in my dissertation – far more, in fact, and far greater. iv DEDICATION I dedicate this work in memory of my paternal grandfather Robert Hammond Lindeman who, in introducing me to Bertrand Russell, helped get me started. v How very different the actuality of a hammer appears, compared with that of a thought! How different a process handing over a hammer is from communicating a thought! Frege “This queer thing, thought”—but it does not strike us as queer when we are thinking. Thought does not strike us as mysterious while we are thinking, but only when we say, as it were retrospectively: “How was that possible?” How was it possible for thought to deal with the very object itself? We feel as if by means of it we had caught reality in our net. Wittgenstein vi PREFACE Principally, this work is concerned with three interrelated subjects. First, the form and interpretation of propositional attitude reports like (1) Galileo believes that the earth moves. Second, the nature of what we report with such reports – to wit, propositional attitudes, like Galileo’s belief that the earth moves. And third, the nature of propositions like, for example, the proposition that the earth moves – expressible, as it happens, with the sentence (2) The earth moves. But many other topics of discussion come up along the way, including the form and interpretation of indirect, direct, and mixed reports like (3) Galileo said that the earth moves. (4) Galileo said ‘the earth moves’. (5) Galileo said that ‘the earth moves’. and the nature of what we report with such reports – to wit, speech acts like saying that the earth moves (with or without that very form of words). The justification for this is that, not only do these constructions have significant syntactic and semantic similarities, but they are used alongside one another with attitude reports in folk-psychological explanations or rationalizations of intentional vii behavior, including importantly linguistic behavior – a topic that I briefly return to in the final chapter. The primary aim and motivation of the work is in fact to uncover the metaphysics of propositional attitudes. But the methodological stance I defend in the first chapter is that the only way to do this rigorously is to first get straight about the form and interpretation of the natural language sentences we use to report these attitudes. For natural languages as individuals speak them are, as I also argue chapter 1, our languages of propositionally articulated thought, thus inscribing our conceptual-categorical schemes. Once the form and interpretation of reports has been established, we can read off the metaphysics. Still other things that come up along the way include several bold empirical hypotheses, including the following: (a) We think propositionally articulated thoughts in our idiolects (which I think we may construe as individual versions of a public language, so for example my idiolect of English and yours). (b) There is a uniquely correct logical form for every contextually used sentence of the language. (c) This form corresponds with LF, viz. that level of syntactic description relevant to semantic interpretation. (d) We should take logical form to be as psychologically real as Chomskyans take LF to be – that is, in other words, we should accept a sort of psychologism. These claims are I think of independent interest, i.e. independently of metaphysical interests. But I also think that they justify the read off method and show metaphysics, as described, to be non- trivial. So conceived, metaphysics is at once an investigation into our conceptual-categorical scheme viii and also an investigation into the notional world, so the things of our Umwelt – the things of the world as we take it to be. And among these things, indeed central among these things, are ourselves qua minded beings, so the attitudes with reference to which we explain, predict, and rationalize one another and ourselves. With the preliminaries in place, I turn in the second chapter to the form of reports. On the received view, reports like the above are relational in logical form. (1), for example, is said to have the form believes(Galileo, that-the-earth-moves) with ‘that the earth moves’ like ‘Galileo’ construed as a singular term, i.e. a referring expression picking out an object: on most views, a proposition. (In the third chapter, I discuss views according to which the object is instead something just proposition-like: a natural language sentence, mental sentence, or the like.) The view of the form of these reports that I elaborate and defend is very different. On this view, which is motivated primarily – but not exclusively – by a certain problem known as Prior’s substitution problem, sentences like the above are not relational in logical form and that-clauses like ‘that the earth moves’ are not singular terms; they do not have the function of picking out an object.

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