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    Carmelics

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    LoyalLoyalJusticeJustice
    Made withinDC&Austin
    Statements
    321,452
    Perspectives
    108,905
    Topics
    42
    Home/Original/inverse
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    Inverse View

    It is not the case that On a Humean dispositional account, mental states are individuated solely by their functional roles in producing behavior, not by their propositional content.

    ?Set your confidence on the premises below to see your aggregate.

    Reasons For

    1 perspective
    Reason for
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    • 1.Functional role alone cannot determine reference: 'water' and 'XYZ' play identical functional roles but have different contents (Putnam's Twin Earth).
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    • 2.Two internally identical agents in different environments have identical dispositions but different beliefs, showing content is independent of function.
      ?

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    • 3.Mental state individuation must respect our intuition that believing it's raining differs from believing it's not, even if functional roles somehow matched.
      ?

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    Reasons Against

    1 perspective
    Reason against
    ?
    • 1.Mental states causally produce behavior through their functional roles, so behavior-producing dispositions are what matters for psychological explanation.
      ?

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    • 2.Two states with identical functional roles have identical causal powers, so propositional content beyond function is causally inert and unnecessary.
      ?

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    • 3.Propositional content is notoriously difficult to naturalize, while functional roles can be specified in purely physical, objective terms.
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