Philosophy of Mind Workshop 2007-05-31

Can You Have a Demonstrative Thought About a Color?

Last night the workshop met for the final time this academic year to discuss Rachel Goodman's paper "Demonstrative Thoughts as a Response to Lewis". Both the paper and discussion were complicated and interesting. I'll just summarize a few central topics here. Rachel's target was anyone who wanted to respond to Jackson's knowledge argument by saying that what Mary acquires when she leaves her black and white room is the ability to have demonstrative thoughts about colors. Jason and David tentatively suggested that they were interested in that way of describing what happens to Mary when she leaves the room during the last meeting of the workshop. Rachel's strategy was to try to show that there are disanalogies between a paradigmatic kind of demonstrative thought that concerns objects individuated according to their location in space and time and putatively demonstrative thoughts ...

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