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Secondary and Tertiary Qualities: Semantics and Response‐Dependence
Author(s) -
Miscevic Nenad
Publication year - 1997
Publication title -
pacific philosophical quarterly
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.914
H-Index - 32
eISSN - 1468-0114
pISSN - 0279-0750
DOI - 10.1111/1468-0114.00044
Subject(s) - semantics (computer science) , extant taxon , naturalism , representation (politics) , subjectivism , epistemology , psychology , cognitive science , natural (archaeology) , cognitive psychology , linguistics , philosophy , computer science , history , programming language , archaeology , evolutionary biology , politics , political science , law , biology
Secondary and tertiary qualities are plausibly explained along dispositionalist lines. Concepts of such qualities are response‐dependent, denoting properties that are partly mind/brain‐dependent. Unfortunately, dispositionalism is hard to square with extant versions of naturalistic theories of representation. In particular the standard naturalistic (indicational) semantics of representational content cannot handle the question from either the subjectivist or the dispositional viewpoint. The paper proposes a remedy: the problem can be solved in a smooth and natural way, provided that we revise and supplement the standard semantics in a rather obvious fashion, by allowing the mind/brain‐involving properties to figure within it.