Organon F

2021, Pages 1–31

ISSN 2585-7150 (online) ISSN 1335-0668 (print)

In order to fulfil their essential roles as the bearers of truth and the relata of logical relations, propositions must be public and shareable. That requirement has favoured Platonist and other non-mental views of them, despite the well-known problems of Platonism in general. Views that propositions are mental entities have correspondingly fallen out of favour, as they have difficulty in explaining how propositions could have shareable, objective properties. We revive a mentalist view of propositions, inspired by Artificial Intelligence work on perceptual algorithms, which shows how perception causes persistent mental entities with shareable properties that allow them to fulfil the traditional roles of (one core kind of) propositions. The clustering algorithms implemented in perception produce outputs which are (implicit) atomic propositions in different minds. Coordination of them across minds proceeds by game-theoretic processes of communication. The account does not rely on any unexplained notions such as mental content, representation, or correspondence (although those notions are applicable in philosophical analysis of the result).

Propositions; causal-mentalist view; cluster analysis; game theory; perception algorithms; Platonism; symbol grounding.

Author

Jeremiah Joven B. Joaquin

Affiliation

De La Salle University

Address

Department of Philosophy, De La Salle University, 2401 Taft Avenue, Malate, Manila, Philippines 0922

E-mail

jeremiah.joaquin@dlsu.edu.ph 

Author

James Franklin

Affiliation

University of New South Wales

Address

School of Mathematics and Statistics, University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia 2052

E-mail

j.franklin@unsw.edu.au 

Received

3 May 2020

Revised

20 September 2020

Accepted

24 January 2021

Published online

23 March 2021

Publishers

Institute of Philosophy of the Slovak Academy of Sciences

Institute of Philosophy of the Czech Academy of Sciences

Joaquin, Jeremiah Joven B. – Franklin, James . "A Causal-Mentalist View of Propositions" Organon F 2021, 1–31. https://www.organonf.com/journal/jeremiahjovenjoaquinjamesfranklin/

© Jeremiah Joven B. Joaquin – James Franklin

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