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International Studies in Phenomenology and Philosophy

Journal | Volume | Article

234315

Are mental representations underdeterminacy-free?

Claudia Picazo Jaque

pp. 633-654

Abstract

According to some views (Carston, Fodor), natural language suffers from underdeterminacy, but thought doesn’t. According to the underdeterminacy claim, sentence types underdetermine the truth-conditions of sentence tokens. In particular, the semantics of a predicate type seems to underdetermine the satisfaction conditions of its tokens. By contrast, mental representation-types are supposed to determine the truth-conditions of its tokens. In this paper I critically examine these mixed views. First, I argue that the arguments supporting the indispensability of including in one’s theory mental representations that are free of the underdeterminacy exhibited by natural language are not sound. As a result, the possibility that mental representation-types are as underdetermined as natural language sentence-types has not been ruled out. Second, I argue that Carston’s ad hoc concept-types are as underdetermined as word-types. I finish by arguing that mental representations are also underdetermined in a second sense—mental representation-tokens only determine a partial function from possible worlds to truth-values.

Publication details

Published in:

Rowbottom Darrell P., Asay Jamin (2019) Scientific realism. Synthese 196 (2).

Pages: 633-654

DOI: 10.1007/s11229-017-1494-9

Full citation:

Picazo Jaque Claudia (2019) „Are mental representations underdeterminacy-free?“. Synthese 196 (2), 633–654.