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Language, Belief and Human Beings

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  08 January 2010

Extract

We may think of the core of Cartesian dualism as being the thesis that each of us is essentially a non-material mind or soul: ‘non-material’ in the sense that it has no weight, cannot be seen or touched, and could in principle continue to exist independently of the existence of any material thing. That idea was, of course, of enormous importance to Descartes himself, and we may feel that having rejected it, as most philosophers now have, we have rejected what is of greatest philosophical significance in Descartes' conception of the self. That would, I believe, be a mistake. Something akin to the Cartesian mind-body contrast still has a pervasive grip on philosophical thought across a whole range of issues. The contrast is, I believe, reflected in common philosophical versions of the contrasts between mind and body, fact and value, reason and emotion, word and deed, reason and persuasion, and no doubt others. My central concern in this paper is, however, a familiar philosophical understanding of the relation between, on the one hand, belief and its articulation in words and, on the other, action or feeling.

Type
Papers
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy and the contributors 2003

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References

1 There are familiar difficulties about the force of the word ‘radically’ there. Roughly: even to be wrong about some things—for example, the colour of George Bush's hair—I must be right about an awful lot. But this kind of point does not bear directly on my central concerns in this paper.

2 Davidson, Donald, ‘Radical Interpretation’, in his Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation (Oxford University Press, 1984), 135Google Scholar.

3 While it is sometimes acknowledged—in passing, I think it fair to say —that this too is an aspect of our use of words that is relevant to claims about what we mean by them, it is suggested (for example, by Dummett) that this is a ‘secondary’ aspect of use that flows from, and so can be taken care of after we have got clear about, the central feature of use: that is, to say how things stand. Brandom's, Robert recent book, Making it Explicit (Harvard University Press, 1994)Google Scholar, is, up to a point, an interesting exception to this tendency.

4 Op. cit. note 2, 134–5.

5 Locke, John, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690), Woozley, A. D., (ed.) (Glasgow: Collins, 1964), 259Google Scholar.

6 Brandom, op. cit. note 3, 644.

7 Horwich, Paul, Meaning (Oxford University Press, 1998), 186CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

8 Lenman, James, ‘Belief, Desire and Motivation: An Essay in Quasi- Hydraulics’, American Philosophical Quarterly, 33, No. 3 (07 1996), 291301Google Scholar. See also Smith, Michael, ‘The Humean Theory of Motivation’, Mind, 96, (1987)Google Scholar.

9 Something akin to this notion appears to feature in everyday locutions of the form ‘Would you say that it is going to rain?’: an enquiry about his beliefs formulated in terms of ‘what he would say’. I would be embarrassed by this were it not so clear, as it seems to me, that this is an odd locution.

10 I am very grateful for comments on earlier drafts of this paper to Lars Hertzberg, Maureen Meehan, Anniken Greve and to participants in seminars at the University of Witwatersrand, Rhodes University, and the University of Cape Town.