Stephen Neale ON REPRESENTING
نویسنده
چکیده
O thoughts, utterances, and inscriptions are taken by many philosophers to have content in virtue of being representations of reality. Such representations can be accurate or inaccurate: those that are accurate are said to be true, to correspond to the facts, to mirror reality (nature, the world). Donald Davidson finds such talk unfortunate: it is thoroughly intertwined with talk of facts, counterfactual states-of-affairs, and correspondence theories oftruth, and it lures us into fruitless discussions about scepticism, realism and anti-realism, the subjective-objective distinction, representational theories of mind, and alternative conceptual schemes that represent reality in different ways.' The time has come, Davidson suggests, to see only folly in the idea of mental and linguistic representations of reality; and with this realization philosophy will be transformed as many of its staple problems and posits evaporate. A proper examination of Davidson's case against representations must include an examination ofhis case against/acts. for Davidson's position boils down to this: in order to give any substance to the idea of representations of reality, reciprocal substance must be given to the idea that there are facts (which true utterances and beliefs represent). Once the case against facts is made, the case against representations (and, with it, the case against correspondence theories of truth) comes more or less for free:
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تاریخ انتشار 2007