The Quality of Thought

by Pitt, David

• ISBN13: 9780198789901
• ISBN10: 0198789904
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2024-04-11
• Publisher: Oxford University Press

Summary

The Quality of Thought develops and defends the thesis that thinking is a kind of experience, characterized by a sui generis phenomenology, and draws out the implications of this thesis for dominant views in philosophy of mind, philosophy of language, and metaphysics. The view defended is radically internalist and intensionalist, and goes against received doctrines in philosophy of mind (externalism) and language (extensionalism). The book offers arguments for the thesis, refutations of classic externalism (Putnam and Burge), arguments that standard motivations for direct reference theories of names, indexicals, and demonstratives are not inevitable, and alternative accounts of their (and their conceptual equivalents') semantics. It also addresses outstanding challenges to the phenomenal intentionalist view of thought content, including the existence of unconscious thought, the elusiveness of conceptual phenomenology, the matching content problem, phenomenal compositionality, and the determination of conceptual reference.

Author Biography

David Pitt, Professor, Department of Philosophy, California State University, Los Angeles

David Pitt received his PhD in philosophy from the City University of New York Graduate Center in 1994. Since 2003 he has been a member of the philosophy department at California State University, Los Angeles. In between he held visiting professorships at Swarthmore College, Hunter College, University of Nebraksa-Lincoln, Brooklyn College, Iowa State University, and Central European University, Budapest, where he was a Fulbright Scholar in 2014-15. He has also held research fellowships at Australian National University, the Institute for Advanced Study at Central European University, and Cambridge University.

Table of Contents

Introduction
1. Phenomenal Intentionality
2. The Experience of Thinking
3. Externalism
4. Indexical Thought
5. Thinking with Names
6. Unconscious Thought
7. Conceptual Reference
Bibliography