Cognitive Hunger: Remarks on Imogen Dickie's Fixing Reference

Although stated in somewhat different terms, R&J is, as Dickie (280) notes, not unlike other meta-semantic principles that have been discussed in the literature. Many causal theories of content attempt, in one way or another, to ground the relation between a representation and what it represents in the fact that the former reliably indicates the latter. What is striking about Dickie’s account, from this point of view, is its unapologetic appeal to the normative notion of justification. In that respect, her view is closer to that of Christopher Peacocke (1992). Another apsect of R&J that is worth noting initially is that it treats belief as essentially structured. Someone who is, as I am, happy to speak of mental representations might say that what R&J is really about is the representational content of a singular mental representation, which Dickie notates as: . But, as Frege (1980, p. x) famously taught, such representations operate only in the context of ‘judgements’, or beliefs, that is, together with other mental representations. Dickie restricts her attention to simple subject-predicate beliefs in which figures. This seems to be, in part, just a practical simplification: The extension