Thinking about Things

Synopsis

In the blink of an eye, I can redirect my thought from London to Cairo, from cookies to unicorns, from former President Obama to the mythical flying horse, Pegasus. How is this possible? In particular, how can we think about things that do not exist, like unicorns and Pegasus? They are notthere to be thought about, yet we think about them just as easily as we think about things that do exist.Thinking About Things addresses these and related questions, taking as its framework a representational theory of mind. It explains how mental states are attributed, what their aboutness consists in, whether or not they are relational, and whether any of them involve non-existent things likeunicorns.The explanation centers on a new theory of what is involved in attributing attitudes like thinking, hoping, and wanting. These attributions are intensional: some of them seem to involve non-existent things, and they typically have semantic and logical peculiarities, like the fact that one cannotalways substitute one expression for another that refers to the same thing without affecting truth. Mark Sainsbury's new theory, display theory, explains these anomalies. For example, substituting coreferring expressions does not always preserve truth because the correctness of an attributiondepends on what concepts it displays, not on what the concepts refer to. And a concept that refers to nothing may be used in an accurate display of what someone is thinking.