The nature of content: a critique of Yli-Vakkuri and Hawthorne

Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy (forthcoming)
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Abstract

In their book, Narrow Content, Juhani Yli-Vakkuri and John Hawthorne attempt to argue against the claim that there is a kind of thought content which is both narrow and theoretically significant. However, their failure to distinguish indexical from non-indexical thought renders their arguments ineffective; a large class of the arguments they present are in fact irrelevant to the question of whether thought content is narrow. The unified treatment of thought content they advocate fails to capture the distinctively mental aspects of indexical thought, and the kinds of indexical examples to which they appeal can tell us nothing very interesting about mental states.

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Sarah Sawyer
University of Sussex

Citations of this work

Concept Pluralism in Conceptual Engineering.Sarah Sawyer - forthcoming - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 1.

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References found in this work

Demonstratives: An Essay on the Semantics, Logic, Metaphysics and Epistemology of Demonstratives and other Indexicals.David Kaplan - 1989 - In Joseph Almog, John Perry & Howard Wettstein, Themes From Kaplan. New York: Oxford University Press. pp. 481-563.
The meaning of 'meaning'.Hilary Putnam - 1975 - Minnesota Studies in the Philosophy of Science 7:131-193.
Individualism and the mental.Tyler Burge - 1979 - Midwest Studies in Philosophy 4 (1):73-122.
Attitudes de dicto and de se.David Lewis - 1979 - Philosophical Review 88 (4):513-543.

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