Tyler Burge presents a substantial, original study of what it is for individuals to represent the physical world with the most primitive sort of objectivity. By reflecting on the science of perception and related psychological and biological sciences, he gives an account of constitutive conditions for perceiving the physical world, and thus aims to locate origins of representational mind. Origins of Objectivity illuminates several long-standing, central issues in philosophy, and provides a wide-ranging account of relations between human and animal psychologies.
Tyler Burge is Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the University of California, Los Angeles. He is the author of Truth, Thought, Reason: Essays on Frege (OUP, 2005) and Foundations of Mind (OUP, 2007).
Preface ; PART I ; 1. Introduction ; 2. Basic Terminology: What the Questions Mean ; 3. Anti-Individualism ; PART II ; 4. Individual Representationalism in the Twentieth Century's First Half ; 5. Individual Representationalism after Mid-Century: Preliminaries ; 6. Neo-Kantian Individual Representationalism: Strawson and Evans ; 7. Language Interpretation and Individual Representationalism: Quine and Davidson ; PART III ; 8. Biological and Methodological Backgrounds ; 9. Origins ; 10. Origins of Some Representational Categories ; 11. Glimpses Forward
As a history, Origins of Objectivity provides an illuminating position from which to view our most recent philosophical inheritance. As a philosophical account of the nature of perceptual representation, it offers an explanatorily rich, empirically grounded, comprehensive theory. As a method, it is an exemplar of the power of empirically informed philosophical inquiry.