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Doctoral thesis
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Believing without modes of presentation

ContributorsBonardi, Paolo
Defense date2012-10-24
Abstract

In my dissertation I devise a number of new puzzles about belief reports which, unlike Frege's and Kripke's classical puzzles, cannot be solved by appealing to the notion of a mode of presentation. A solution to both classical and new puzzles can be achieved by adopting a new Russellian account of belief reports, which I present in this dissertation. The new account involves two psychological devices (which will be proved not to be modes of presentation): belief subsystems and cognitive coordination. The former device originates in Donald Davidson's idea of explaining away cases of apparent irrationality of a subject by partitioning her mind into semi-autonomous compartments or subsystems. The latter device takes its cue from Kit Fine's notion of coordination and deals with the ability (or inability) of a subject to recognize two occurrences of an object within Russellian propositions as occurrences of the same object.

eng
Keywords
  • Belief
  • Belief reports
  • Modes of presentation
  • Russellianism
  • Coordination
  • Belief subsystems
Citation (ISO format)
BONARDI, Paolo. Believing without modes of presentation. 2012. doi: 10.13097/archive-ouverte/unige:34013
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Creation12/20/2013 1:12:00 PM
First validation12/20/2013 1:12:00 PM
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