The Fragmented Mind by unknow

Author:unknow
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press USA - OSO
Published: 2021-06-16T00:00:00+00:00

5. Conclusion

I have said that the diagonalization and fragmentation stories are complementary parts of the explanation of the necessary a posteriori and of the possibility of beliefs and knowledge with singular propositions as their contents, and I hope I have made the connection between the two accounts clear. To sum up: The diagonalization account began with the observation that it is an empirical fact that names and words have the referents and meanings that they have, and that part of the explanation for our ignorance or error about the truth of certain statements is ignorance or error about the contingent relation between linguistic and mental representations and the propositions they express. The fragmentation account began with the observation that we may have knowledge and beliefs that fail to be integrated with each other and that there may be a nontrivial task of calibrating or integrating separate cognitive states. One way to think of this task of calibration is as the task of understanding, from the perspective of one fragment, what the content is that is represented by another. We are unable to put our Hesperus beliefs together with our Phosphorus beliefs because, relative to each cognitive situation, we lack a full understanding of the representations of the other. The fragmentation strategy helps to explain the role of the contingent metalinguistic or metarepresentational information in terms of which diagonal propositions are defined in representing some of our cognitive limitations and some of our methods of overcoming them.16

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.