Combining Philosophers

Ideas for Empedocles, Isaiah and Georges Rey

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3 ideas

18. Thought / C. Content / 1. Content
Problem-solving clearly involves manipulating images [Rey]
     Full Idea: Recent experiments (Shepard 1982) suggest people have imagistic representations they inspect when solving problems. In comparing two rotated images, the time for comparison varies with the angle of rotation.
     From: Georges Rey (Contemporary Philosophy of Mind [1997], 2.5.3)
     A reaction: This doesn't prove that they are slowly rotating something. It may just be harder to make the leap to the new shape, when it is 'further away'. Picturing a 20-sided figure, we don't add sides one-by-one.
Animals map things over time as well as over space [Rey]
     Full Idea: To map things like food over time, animals must somehow represent events as having temporal properties, and somehow store those representations ready for later use.
     From: Georges Rey (Contemporary Philosophy of Mind [1997], 4.3)
     A reaction: If the mechanisms for doing this are basic, then so is the ontology. Objects must be categorised, properties spotted, time-spans correlated etc. 'Represent' needs to be sharp to be useful.
18. Thought / C. Content / 6. Broad Content
Simple externalism is that the meaning just is the object [Rey]
     Full Idea: The oldest version of the externalist theory of meaning is the Fido/Fido theory, according to which the meaning of a representation is the object for which it stands.
     From: Georges Rey (Contemporary Philosophy of Mind [1997], 9.2)
     A reaction: Modern baptismal theories of reference seem to have taken us back to this, for distinct individuals such as Aristotle, or natural kinds like gold. What, though, does 'Fido' mean to me? Asthma!