Conférence - David Papineau - Thoughts and Things : Confusions about Consciousness
Description
François Recanati
Philosophie du langage et de l'esprit
Collège de France
Année 2024-2025
Conférence - David Papineau - Thoughts and Things : Confusions about Consciousness
David Papineau
Département de philosophie, King's College London
Résumé :
Many of the above ideas found their first clear expression over half a century ago in Kripke's Naming and Necessity. Kripke's work, however, has been misappropriated by many of his interpreters.
This applies particularly to Kripke's anti-materialist challenge at the end of Naming and Necessity. Many read this implicitly endorsing the "two-dimensional semantics" thesis that any term that is not epistemically revelatory must have a semantic content additional to its referent. I shall show that this thesis is not only misguided and but also quite unfaithful to Kripke's intentions. This will allow me to properly explore the options open to the materialist in responding to Kripke's challenge.
Finally I shall relate Kripke's work to the idea with which I started, that the purpose of cognition is to lock on to predictable worldly items, and use this to make sense of Kripke's thinking about metaphysical modality.