Mark David Perlman

Western Oregon University | WOU · Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies

As realistic as many films purport to be, one relatively unique feature of film is its ability to supply the audience with an impossible perspective on reality. In the sense, film unifies physically, geographically, or temporally separate parts of reality for the viewer. Something as simple as cuts from a scene to a scene at a later time transport...

Conductors are unique in the musical world in their having a central role in music-making without making the sounds themselves. Some may even think that a conductor is really more of a dancer than a musician. How does conducting count as making music if the conductor makes no sounds or notes? In fact, conductors communicate musical ideas and direct...

Conductors are unique in the musical world in their having a central role in music-making without making the sounds themselves. They stand on the podium, directing a hundred expert players with a flick of the wrist. In the past, orchestra conductors were powerful, even iconic figures in the musical world. They were accorded the exalted title of “Ma...

Talk of the functions of objects (i.e., what the function of X is, or what X is for) is common throughout biology, indeed in many areas of science, as well as in our everyday understanding of objects in the world. This talk of what things are for, or the purpose for which they function, is the subject-matter of the field of teleology. There is wide...

As presented so far, a strict conceptual role theory that rejects misrepresentation makes content blatantly holistic. If the content of every mental representation is determined exclusively by its use, i.e. by its conceptual role, hence in relation to the content of every other representation, then all the attitudes made up of those representations...

Since we are rejecting non-naturalistic views of meaning, the most obvious approach would seem to be an empiricist one, particularly, a verificationist one, which would focus on finding a naturalistic theory of meaning based on experience. Of course, it is both unnecessary and impractical here to go over the entire long history of verificationism a...

In Chapters 2 and 3 we have seen the arguments for the thesis that no naturalistic theory of mental content can allow for misrepresentation. The attempts to define meaning by a restricted class of uses are unsuccessful, as are attempts to ground a new analytic/synthetic distinction on idealized causal roles, inferential roles, conceptual roles, or...

SCRT’s radical alteration of our understanding of meaning brings with it consequences far beyond the theory of meaning. The rejection of misrepresentation affects metaphysics, epistemology, the theory of truth, philosophy of science, and even philosophy of religion. It also has implications outside of philosophy, for linguistics, psychology, and ar...

We have now seen many objections to SCRT, both to specific arguments and consequences and to general elements of SCRT’s defense. And now that we have worked out some of the details about the holism SCRT generates and the implications it has, we are in a position to examine some large-scale theoretical questions. The first category are general objec...

One more point to be made about the analytic/synthetic distinction and its place in conceptual role theories in general will lead the way to distinguishing between three different views of conceptual role and SCRT. One traditional objection to Conceptual Role Theory, which has already been discussed, is that equating meaning with inferential role (...

The basic outlook of cognitive science is that through empirical research we can discover the functional architecture of the mind/brain. It is anti-verificationist in approach: just as we can have indirect evidence about the real nature of the world, even of unobservable particles, we can use psychological and neurophysiological evidence, to establ...

Strict Conceptual Role Theory is a radical theory of meaning, and as such naturally generates many unintuitive results. The accompanying pragmatic theory of concept change was designed to make the seemingly disastrous no-misrepresentation result more palatable. But there are many possible objections to be considered, and we must now see if we can a...

How can one think about a thing, think something false about it, and still be thinking about that thing at all? If a concept is applied to something outside its meaning, how are we to say it does not mean that thing as well? The problem of misrepresentation is one of the central issues in contemporary philosophy of mind. Here, Mark Perlman criticiz...

Two-Factor conceptual role theories of mental content are often intended to allow mental representations to satisfy two competing requirements. One is the Fregean requirement that two representations, like public language expressions, can have different meanings even though they have the same reference (as in the case of morning star and evening st...