| Annotation: | Salmon’s (Frege’s Puzzle, 1986) Millian Russellianism is a prominent theory in analytic philosophy of language, which offers a persuasive semantics for sentences, proper names and other linguistic expressions. At a non-semantic level, it employs modes of presentation to solve puzzling cases where intuitively rational subjects believe contradictory Russellian propositions, and to address other problematic issues. Taking cues from Fine (Semantic Relationism, 2007) and Davidson (Problems of Rationality, 2004), in my PhD thesis and recent articles I have developed a version of Millian Russellianism called cognitive relationism. This view rejects modes of presentation mainly due to their lack of clear identity conditions, and replaces them with: a non-semantic, viz. merely cognitive, and subjective relation of coordination; token thoughts, which have a granularity comparable to that of Russellian-proposition occurrences and which are individuated using a method based on Russellian propositions and cognitive coordination; token-attitude states more generally (token beliefs, token desires, token hopes, etc.), constituted by token thoughts plus attitudinal modes; and subsystems of belief, such that if a subject s believes (the Russellian proposition) p and believes not-p without believing p¬-p, then s’s token beliefs that p and that not-p are stored in distinct subsystems. My research aims to naturalize cognitive relationism by grounding it in six philosophically basic yet neuroscientifically analyzable notions: taking as, simulation, detecting, basic attitudinal modes, having in mind and predicating. My IMPULZ project focuses particularly on Kaplan’s (“An Idea of Donnellan”, 2012) causal-Russellian conception of having in mind, and seeks to provide an account of imaginary objects – viz. a naturalistic version of Salmon’s (“Nonexistence”, 1998) creationism, as opposed to Priest’s (Towards Non-Being, 2016) neo-Meinongianism – in which having in mind plays a central role. In fact, drawing from Soames’ (Rethinking Language, Mind, and Meaning, 2015) cognitive approach to propositions according to which a proposition p is the type act or state of entertaining or having in mind p, I hypothesize that any imaginary object o is a mental type, viz. the type state of having in mind o; for example, Holmes (the entity created by Conan Doyle) is the type state of having in mind Holmes. I argue that the apparent circularity of this proposal disappears once having in mind is analyzed neuroscientifically in light of recent discoveries by R.Q. Quiroga (“Concept Cells”, 2012). |
