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    A lone thinker cannot have thoughts with determinate content — Carmelics
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    Home/Philosophy of Language
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    A lone thinker cannot have thoughts with determinate content

    Consciousness & MindPhilosophy of Language
    ?Rate how convincing each reason is below to see the overall strength.
    1 reason for
    2 reasons against

    Reasons For

    1 perspective
    Reason for
    ?
    • 1.For a thought to have determinate content, a process of triangulation must occur
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    • 2.Triangulation requires another person to correlate the thinker's responses to something in the world
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    • 3.If there were no other people, no such triangulation could occur
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    Reasons Against

    2 perspectives
    Reason against 1 of 2
    ?
    • 1.Wittgenstein's private language argument targets rule-following, not the causal-historical grounding of perceptual content.
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    • 2.A solitary organism can develop reliable differential responses to environmental stimuli that constitute proto-semantic content.
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    • 3.Triangulation adds precision to content but is not the necessary condition for content determinacy itself.
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    Reason against 2 of 2
    ?
    • 1.Fodor's informational semantics grounds content determinacy in asymmetric causal dependence relations between world-states and mental representations.
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    • 2.Such causal-informational relations hold between a lone thinker and their environment without requiring a third interlocutor.
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    Topics

    Philosophy of LanguageConsciousness & Mind

    Connections

    1 topic

    Skepticism1 linked

    Related

    A solitary organism can develop reliable differential responses to environmental...Fodor's informational semantics grounds content determinacy in asymmetric causal...For a thought to have determinate content, a process of triangulation must occurIf there were no other people, no such triangulation could occur
    +4 moreShow less
    Such causal-informational relations hold between a lone thinker and their enviro...Triangulation adds precision to content but is not the necessary condition for c...Triangulation requires another person to correlate the thinker's responses to so...Wittgenstein's private language argument targets rule-following, not the causal-...

    Similar

    Therefore a lone thinker cannot have thoughts with content, and thus c...87%A subject that has no thoughts with determinate content has no thought...86%Having thoughts with determinate content requires triangulation with a...82%The Cartesian assumption that one can be a lone thinker is mistaken80%

    Source

    AI-extracted1/3 agreementValid
    SEP: transcendental-arguments
    View source passageHide passage
    Finally, we may turn to the work of Donald Davidson, who like Putnam bases his transcendental claim on a form of externalism, which links the content of our mental states to how we relate to our environment; but in his case, this idea is directed against skepticism concerning other minds. Thus, while the skeptic holds that the existence of such minds is doubtful, Davidson argues that it would not be possible for a creature like me to have thoughts unless I lived in a world with other creatures w
    Extraction notes

    Validity: Extracted via Max plan + API grounding/validity checks

    Details

    Type
    claim
    Perspectives
    3 (1 for, 2 against)
    Edits
    1 edit