The Adaptive Mind

By Richard John Kosciejew

Having by an accenting effect extending for the purposes of interest as the matter that involves to those of concerns to the immediate surroundings that dwell upon certainty, especially connected with those concerning scepticism’, that in, as in fact, quality, or state of being certain is clearly established or assumed. Although Greek scepticism entered on the value of enquiry and questioning, scepticism is now the denial that knowledge or even rational belief is possible, either about some specific subject-matter, e.g., ethics, or in any area whatsoever. Classical scepticism, springs from the observation that the best method in some area seems to fall short of giving us contact with the truth, e.g., there is a gulf between appearances and reality, it frequently cites the conflicting judgements that our methods deliver, with the effectuality that expresses doubt about truth becoming narrowly spaced, that in turn demonstrates their marginality, in at least, ascribed of being indefinable. In classic thought the various examples of this conflict were systemized in the tropes of Aenesidemus. So that, the scepticism of Pyrrho and the new Academy was a system of argument and inasmuch as opposing dogmatism, and, particularly the philosophical system building of the Stoics.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse
• Release date: Jul 22, 2019
• ISBN: 9781728319735

Richard John Kosciejew

Richard john Kosciejew, a German-born Canadian who now takes residence in Toronto Ontario. Richard, received his public school training at the Alexander Muir Public School, then attended the secondary level of education at Central Technical School. As gathering opportunities came, he studied at the Centennial College, he also attended the University of Toronto, and his graduate studies at the University of Western Ontario, situated in London. His academia of study rested upon his analytical prowess and completed ‘The Designing Theory of Transference.’ His other books are ‘Mental Illness’ and ‘The Phenomenon of Transference,’ among others.

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Published by AuthorHouse 07/19/2019

ISBN: 978-1-7283-1974-2 (sc)

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It’s greater of concerns for the immediate issues surrounding certainty are especially connected with those concerning ‘scepticism’. Although Greek scepticism entered on the value of enquiry and questioning, scepticism is now the denial that knowledge or even rational belief is possible, either about some specific subject-matter, e.g., ethics, or in any area whatsoever. Classical scepticism, springs from the observation that the best method in some area seems to fall short of giving us contact with the truth, e.g., there is a gulf between appearances and reality, it frequently cites the conflicting judgements that our methods deliver, with the effectuality that expresses doubt about truth becoming narrowly spaced, that in turn demonstrates their marginality, in at least, ascribed of being indefinable. In classic thought the various examples of this conflict were systemized in the tropes of Aenesidemus. So that, the scepticism of Pyrrho and the new Academy was a system of argument and inasmuch as opposing dogmatism, and, particularly the philosophical system building of the Stoics.

THE ADAPTIVE MIND

Richard John Kosciejew

Following the publication of Isaac Newton’s ‘Principia Mathematica’ in 1687, reductionism and mathematical modelling became the most powerful tools of modern science. The dream that we could know and master the entire physical world through the extension and refinement of mathematical theory became the central feature and principals of scientific knowledge.

The radical separation between mind and nature formalized by Descartes (1596-1650) served over time allowing scientists to concentrate on developing mathematical descriptions of matter as pure mechanisms without any concern about its spiritual dimensions or ontological foundations. Meanwhile, attempts to rationalize, reconcile or eliminate Descartes’s merging division between mind and matter became the most central feature of Western intellectual life.

Philosophers like John Locke (1632-1704), Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679) and David Hume (1711-76) tried to articulate some basis for linking the mathematical describable motions of matter with linguistic representations of external reality in the subjective space of mind. Descartes’ compatriot Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-78) reified nature as the ground of human consciousness in a state of innocence and proclaimed that ‘Liberty, Equality, Fraternities’ are the guiding principles of this consciousness. Rousseau also fabricated the idea of the ‘general will’ of the people to achieve these goals and declared that those who do not conform to this will were social deviants.

The Enlightenment idea of ‘deism’, which imaged the universe as a clockwork and God as the clockmaker, provided grounds for believing in a divine agency, from which the time of moment the formidable creations also imply, in of which, the exhaustion of all the creative forces of the universe at origins ends, and that the physical substrates of mind were subject to the same natural laws as matter. Such that the only means of mediating the gap between mind and matter is pure reason, by the causal tradition of Judeo-Christian theism, which had previously been based on both reason and revelation and responded to the challenge of deism by debasing traditionality as a test of faith and embracing the idea that we can know the truths of spiritual reality only through divine revelation. This engendered by conflict between reason and revelation that persists to this day. And laid the foundation for the fierce completion between the mega-narration of science and religion as frame tales for mediating the relation between mind and matter and the manner in which they should ultimately define the special character of each.

The nineteenth-century Romantics in Germany, England and the United States revived Rousseau’s attempt to posit a ground for human consciousness by reifying nature in a different form. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832) and Friedrich Schelling (1775-1854) proposed a natural philosophy premised on ontological Monism (the idea that adhering manifestations that govern toward evolutionary principles have grounded inside an inseparable spiritual Oneness) and argued God, man, and nature for the reconciliation of mind and matter with an appeal to sentiment, mystical awareness, and quasi-scientific attempts, as he afforded the efforts of mind and matter, nature became a mindful agency that ‘loves illusion’, as it shrouds man in mist, presses him or her heart and punishes those who fail to see the light. Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling (1775-1854), in his version of cosmic unity, argued that scientific facts were at best partial truths and that the mindful creative spirit that unities mind and matter is progressively moving toward ‘self-realization’ and ‘undivided wholeness’.

The British version of Romanticism, articulated by figures like William Wordsworth (1770-1850) and Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834), placed more emphasis on the primary of the imagination and the importance of rebellion and heroic vision as the grounds for freedom. As Wordsworth put it, communion with the ‘incommunicable powers’ of the ‘immortal sea’ empowers the mind to release itself from all the material constraints of the laws of nature. The founders of American transcendentalism, Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882) and Henry David Theoreau (1817-1862) articulated a version of Romanticism that commensurate with the ideals of American democracy.

The fatal flaw of pure reason is, of course, the absence of emotion, and purely explanations of the division between subjective reality and external reality, of which had limited appeal outside the community of intellectuals. The figure most responsible for infusing our understanding of the Cartesian dualism with our contextual understanding with emotional content was the death of God theologian Friedrich Nietzsche 1844-1900. After declaring that God and ‘divine will’, did not exist, Nietzsche reified the ‘existence’ of consciousness in the domain of subjectivity as the ground for individual ‘will’ and summarily reducing all previous philosophical attempts to articulate the ‘will to truth’. The dilemma, forth in, had seemed to mean, by the validation, … as accredited for doing of science, in that the claim that Nietzsche’s earlier versions to the ‘will to truth’, disguises the fact that all alleged truths were arbitrarily created in the subjective reality of the individual and are expressed or manifesting the individualism of ‘will’.

In Nietzsche’s view, the separation between mind and matter is more absolute and total than previously been imagined, to which is based on the assumption that there is no really necessary correspondence between linguistic constructions of reality in human subjectivity and external reality, Nietzsche deuced that we are all locked in ‘a prison house of language’. The prison as he concluded it, was also a ‘space’ where the philosopher can examine the ‘innermost desires of his nature’ and articulate a new message of individual existence founded on ‘will’.

Those who fail to enact their existence in this space, Nietzsche says, are enticed into sacrificing their individuality on the nonexistent altars of religious beliefs and democratic or socialists’ ideals and become, therefore, members of the anonymous and docile crowd. Nietzsche also invalidated the knowledge claims of science in the examination of human subjectivity. Science, he said. Is not exclusive to natural phenomenons and favours ‘reductionistic’ examination of phenomena at the expense of mind? It also seeks to reduce the separateness and uniqueness of mind with mechanistic descriptions that disallow and basis for the free exercise of individual ‘will’.

Nietzsche’s emotionally charged defence of intellectual freedom and radial empowerment of mind as the maker and transformers of the collective fictions that shape human reality in a soulless mechanistic universe proved terribly influential on twentieth-century thought. Furthermore, Nietzsche sought to reinforce his view of the subjective character of scientific knowledge by appealing to an epistemological crisis over the foundations of logic and arithmetic that arose during the last three decades of the nineteenth century. Through a curious course of events, attempted by Edmund Husserl 1859-1938, a German mathematician and a principal founder of phenomenology, wherefor to resolve this crisis resulted in a view of the character of consciousness that closely resembled that of Nietzsche.

The most recognized known disciple of Edmund Husserl was Martin Heidegger (1889-1976), as a German existentialist philosopher. His masterpiece, Being and Time (1927), argued that confronting the question of the meaning of Being, encompassing one’s own death, was central for an authentic human existence. The work of the atheistic existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-1980) and the work of Husserl, and Heidegger became foundational to that of the principal architects of philosophical postmodernism, and deconstructionist Jacques Lacan (1901-1981), Roland Barthes (1915-1980), Michel Foucault (1926-1984) and Jacques Derrida (1930-2004). Its obvious attribution of a direct linkage between the nineteenth-century crisis about the epistemological foundations of mathematical physics and the origin of philosophical postmodernism served to perpetuate the Cartesian two-world dilemma in an even more oppressive form. It also allowed for a better understanding about the origins of cultural ambience and the ways in which they could resolve that conflict.

Plato, in the Meno and in the Theaetetus distinguishes knowledge, belief, opinion and judgement, and advances a conception of these stated allowances, that mind, according to which they incorporate a pair of components, firstly for being intentional or representational, and secondly to the other, being causal, such that Ramsey’s phraselogical descriptions about that which of a belief can be viewed as a map of neighbouring space by which we navigably steer’ (Ramsey, 1978). Frank Plumpton Ramsey (1903-30) was an influential British philosopher of logic and mathematics. Ramsey clarified the logist picture of mathematics by radically simplifying Russell’s ramified theory of ‘types’, eliminating the need for the unarguable axiom of reducibility (Proc. London Math. Soc., 1925). Later, in the canonical Truth and Probability" (1926), he readdressed to knowledge and belief the main questions ordinarily associated with reality, knowledge or values, based on logical reasoning rather than truth, analysing probability theory of choice under uncertainty.

Epistemology concerns itself with the studies with the nature of knowledge, its presuppositions and foundations, and its extent and validity, stressing the mental act+ of acceptance of the conviction in the truth, actuality, validity for being believed or accepted as true, as to believe in the truth or values of something for which to trust what one has seen. The philosophers who claim of their person, who is calm and rational under any circumstances and are found in the investigation of the nature, causes, or principles, of reality, knowledge e, or values based on logical reasoning rather than empirical method.

We use term belief to refer to personal attitudes associated with true or false ideas and concepts. However, belief does not require active introspection and circumspection. For example, we never ponder whether or not the sun will rise. We simply assume the Sun will rise. Since belief is an important aspect of mundane life, according to Eric Schwitzgebel in the Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy, a related question asks: how a physical organism can have beliefs? The role of belief suggests mechanisms for overconfidence of correctness, confirmation bias, wishful believing, vacillating belief, the difficulty with multifactorial reasoning, the inability to withhold judgment, the delusions of mental illness, and the relations between belief, opinion, and knowledge. The intellectualistic theory of belief fails because it gives undue weight to evidence as the most salient or an available factor concerned with belief, which leads to the mistaken conclusion that the purpose of belief is to indicate truth

In the context of Ancient Greek thought, two related concepts were identified with regards to the concept of belief: ‘pistis’ and ‘doxa’. Simplified, we may say that pistis refer to trust and confidence, while doxa refers to opinion and acceptance. Doxa reflects behaviour or practice in worship, and the belief of the whole church rather than personal opinion. It is the unification of these multiple meanings of doxa that is reflected in the modern terms of orthodoxy and heterodoxy, and is used with the meaning of belief or, literally, true belief. The English word orthodoxy derives from doxa. Jonathan Leicester suggests that belief has the purpose of guiding action rather than indicating truth.

Mainstream psychology and related disciplines have traditionally treated belief as if it were the simplest form of mental representation and therefore one of the progressive engines of conscious thought. Philosophers have tended to be more abstract in their analysis, and much of the work examining the viability of the belief concept stems from philosophical analysis.

The concept of belief presumes a subject (the believer) and an object of belief (the proposition). So, like other propositional attitudes, belief implies the existence of mental states and intentionality, both of which are hotly debated topics in the philosophy of mind, whose foundations and relation to brain states are still controversial.

Beliefs are sometimes divided into core beliefs (that is actively thought about) and dispositional beliefs (that may be ascribed to someone who has not thought about the issue). For example, if asked do you believe tigers wear pink pajamas? a person might answer that they do not, despite the fact they may never have thought about this situation before.

This has important implications for understanding the neuropsychology and neuroscience of belief. If the concept of belief is incoherent, then any attempt to find the underlying neural processes that support it will fail.

Philosopher Lynne Rudder Baker (1844-2017) imputes, that scientists’ generally took the view that human beings are just another species rather than a special creation of God: yet, the sciences are relentless in taking human beings to be just another part of nature: a little more complex than chimpanzees, but not essentially different - certainly not morally and ontologically special. We are just one-species among the variations among ourselves. Also, Baker (1944-2017) has outlined four main contemporary approaches to belief in her controversial book Saving Belief: Our commonsense understanding of belief is correct - Sometimes called the mental sentence theory, in this conception, beliefs exist as coherent entities, and the way we talk about them in everyday life is a valid basis for scientific endeavour. Jerry Fodor (1935–2017) was an American philosopher, cognitive scientist, and author of many works in the fields of philosophy of mind and cognitive science, in which he laid the groundwork for the modularity of mind and the language of thought hypotheses, among other ideas. Yet, beliefs exist as coherent entities known to be ‘mental sentence theories’ he is one of the principal defenders of this point of view.

Our commonsense understanding of belief may not be entirely correct, but it is close enough to make some useful predictions - This view argues that we will eventually reject the idea of belief as we know it now, but that there may be a correlation between what we take to be a belief when someone says I believe that snow is white and how a future theory of psychology will explain this behaviour. Most notably, philosopher Stephen Stich (1943) has argued for this particular understanding of belief.

Epistemology is concerned with delineating the boundary between justified belief and opinion, and involved generally with a theoretical philosophical study of knowledge. The primary problem in epistemology is to understand exactly what is needed in order for us to have knowledge. In a notion derived from Plato’s dialogue ‘Theaetetus’, where the epistemology of Socrates (Plato) most clearly departs from that of the sophists, who at the time of Plato seem to have defined knowledge as what is here expressed as justified true belief. The tendency to translate from belief (doxa - common opinion) to knowledge (episteme), which Plato (e.g., Socrates of the dialogue) utterly dismisses, results from failing to distinguish a dispositive belief (gr. ‘doxa’, not ‘pistis’) from knowledge (episteme) when the opinion is regarded true (orthé), in terms of right, and juristically so (according to the premises of the dialogue), which was the task of the rhetors to prove. Plato dismisses this possibility of an affirmative relation between belief (i.e., opinion) and knowledge even when the one who opines grounds his belief on the rule, and is able to add justification (gr. logos: reasonable and necessarily plausible assertions/evidence/guidance) to it.

Plato has been credited for the justified true belief theory of knowledge, even though Plato in the Theaetetus (dialogue) elegantly dismisses it, and even posits this argument of Socrates as a cause for his death penalty. Among American epistemologists, Gettier (1963) and Goldman (1967), have questioned the justified true belief definition, and challenged the sophists of their time.

Justified true belief is a definition of knowledge that gained approval during the Enlightenment, ‘justified’ standing in contrast too ‘revealed’. There have been attempts to trace it back to Plato and his dialogues. The concept of justified true belief states that in order to know that a given proposition is true, one must not only believe the relevant true proposition, but also have justification for doing so of a formal term as agent.

This theory of knowledge suffered a significant setback with the discovery of Gettier problems, situations in which the above conditions were seemingly met but that many philosophers disagree that anything is known. Robert Nozick (1938-2002)who suggested a clarification of justification which he believed eliminates the problem: the justification has to be such that were the justification false, the knowledge would be false. Bernecker and Dretske (2000) argue that no epistemologist since Gettier has seriously and successfully defended the traditional view. On the other hand, Paul Boghossian whose early work was a trenchant critic of naturalistic theories of content. Much of his later work, including his book Fear of Knowledge, criticizes various forms of relativism, especially epistemic relativism, which claims that knowledge and reason are fundamentally cultural or subjective rather than objective. In his article ‘Blind Reasoning’, Boghossian argues that we are blind to our reasons for justifying our methods of inference (the epitome of a method of inference is taken to be the modus ponens (Latin for mode that affirms by affirming) or implication elimination, is a rule of inference. It can be summarized as P implies Q and P is asserted to be true, therefore Q must be true.

Modus ponens are closely related to another valid form of argument, modus tollens. Both are apparently similar but invalid forms such as affirming the consequent, denying the antecedent, and evidence of absence. Constructive dilemmas are the disjunctive version of modus ponens. A hypothetical syllogism is closely related to modus ponens and sometimes thought of as double modus ponens. Nonetheless, Boghossian rejected both Simple Inferential Externalism for its inconsistency and Simple Inferential Internalism because it is difficult to accept, he opts for a third and new form of rational insight. They argue that the Justified True Belief account is the standard, widely accepted definition of knowledge.

According to Explaining Behaviour, a belief that s is F is a brain state that has been recruited (through operant conditioning) to be part of movement-causing processes because of the fact that it did, when recruited, carry the information that s is F. Being recruited because of carrying information gives a thing (such as a brain state) the function of carrying that information, on Dretske’s view, and having the function of carrying information makes that thing a representation.

Beliefs are thus mental representations that contribute to movement production because of their contents (saying P is why the brain state is recruited to cause movement), and so form components of the process known as acting for a reason.

An important feature of Dretske’s account of belief is that, although brain states are recruited to control action because they carry information, there is no guarantee that they will continue to do so. Yet, once they have been recruited for carrying information, they have the function of carrying information, and continue to have that function even if they no longer carry information. This is how misrepresentation enters the world.

Dretske’s last monograph was on consciousness. Between the representational theory of belief, desire, and action in Explaining Behaviour and the representational theory of consciousness found in Naturalizing the Mind, Dretske aimed to give full support to what he calls the Representational Thesis. This is the claim that:

(1) All mental facts are representational facts, and (2) All representational facts are facts about informational functions.

In Naturalizing the Mind Dretske argues that when a brain state acquires, through natural selection, the function of carrying information, then it is a mental representation suited (with certain provisos) to being a state of consciousness. Representations that get their functions through being recruited by operant conditioning, on the other hand, are beliefs, just as he held in Explaining Behaviour.

We are influenced by many factors that ripple through our minds as our beliefs form, evolve, and may eventually change. Psychologists study belief formation and the relationship between beliefs and actions. Three models of belief formation and change have been proposed: Conditional inference process. When people are asked to estimate the likelihood that a statement is true, they search their memory for information that has implications for the validity of this statement. Once this information has been identified, they estimate a) the likelihood that the statement would be true if the information were true, and b) the likelihood that the statement would be true if the information were false. If their estimates for these two probabilities differ, people average them, weighting each by the likelihood that the information is true and false (respectively). Thus, information bears directly on beliefs of other, related statements.

Our commonsense understanding of belief is entirely wrong and will be completely superseded by a radically different theory that will have no use for the concept of belief as we know it – Known as ‘eliminativism,’ this view (most notably proposed by Paul and Patricia Churchland) argues that the concept of belief is like obsolete theories of times past such as the four humours theory of medicine, or the phlogiston theory of combustion. In these cases’ science hasn’t provided us with a more detailed account of these theories, but completely rejected them as valid scientific concepts to be replaced by entirely different accounts. The Churchlands argue that our commonsense concept of belief is similar in that as we discover more about neuroscience and the brain, the inevitable conclusion will be to reject the belief hypothesis in its entirety.

Along with his wife, Churchland is a major proponent of Eliminative materialism, the belief that, every day, commonsense, ‘folk’ psychology, which seeks to explain human behaviour in terms of the beliefs and desires of agents, is actually deeply flawed in theory that must be eliminated in favouring of a privilege or concession, as given of interest or service’s obliged in cognitive neuroscience.

Where by folk psychology is meant every day mental concept such as beliefs, feelings, and desires, which are viewed as theoretical constructs without coherent definition, and thus destined to be obviated by a scientific understanding of human nature. From the perspective of Zawidzki, Churchlands concept of ‘eliminativism’ is suggested as early as his book Scientific Realism and the Plasticity of Mind (1979), with its most explicit formulation appearing in a Journal of Philosophy essay, Eliminative Materialism and the Propositional Attitudes (1981).

From the word (sophos) derives the verb (sophizo), which means to instruct or makes known, and in the passive voice means to become or be wise, or to be clever or skilled in a thing. From this verb is derived the noun (sophistes), which originally meant a master of one’s craft but later came to mean a prudent man or wise man. The word for sophist in various languages comes from sophistes. The word sophist could be combined with other Greek words to form compounds. Examples include meteorosophist, which roughly translates too expertly in celestial phenomena; gymnosophist (or naked sophists, a word used to refer to Indian philosophers, deipnosophist or dinner sophist (as in the title of Athenaeus’s Deipnosophistae - the term is shaded by the harsh treatment accorded to professional teachers in Plato’s Socratic dialogues, which made the English term sophist into a pejorative, however, in English, Euthanases work usually known by its Latin from Deipnosophistae but is also variously translated as The Deipnosophists, and iatrosophist, that being a type of physician in the later Roman period.

Nonetheless, few writings appear in their attractions that carry on from and about the first sophists survive. The early sophists charged money in exchange for education and providing wisdom, and so were typically employed by wealthy people. This practice resulted in the condemnations made by Socrates through Plato in his dialogues, as well as by Xenophon in his Memorabilia and, somewhat controversially, by Aristotle. As a paid tutor to Alexander the Great, Aristotle could be accused of being a sophist. Aristotle did not actually accept payment from Philip, Alexander’s father, but requested that Philip reconstruct Aristotle’s hometown of Stageira as payment, which Philip had destroyed in a previous campaign, terms which Philip accepted James A. Herrick writing, In De Oratore, Cicero blames Plato for separating wisdom and eloquence in the philosopher’s famous attack on the sophists in Gorgias. Through works such as these, sophists were portrayed as specious or deceptive, hence the modern meaning of the term.

The classical tradition of rhetoric and composition refers more to philosophers such as Aristotle, Cicero, and Quintilian than to the sophists. Owing largely to the influence of Plato and Aristotle, philosophy came to be regarded as distinct from sophistry, the latter being regarded as specious and rhetorical, a practical discipline. Thus, by the time of the Roman Empire, a sophist was simply a teacher of rhetoric and a popular public speaker. For instance, Libanius, Himerius, Aelius Aristides, and Fronto were sophists in this sense. Nonetheless, the opposition from philosophers Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, it is clear that sophists had a vast influence on a number of spheres, including the growth of knowledge and on ethical political theory. Their teachings had a huge influence on thought in the fifth century BCE. The sophists focussed on the rational examination of human affairs and the betterment and success of human life. They argued that divine deities could not be the explanation of human action.

In spite the fact, that human action concerns dynamics. The opposite to action is not inaction. Rather, the opposite to action is contentment. In a fully contented state there would be no action, no effort to change the existing order of things (which might be changed by merely ceasing to do some things). Man acts because he is never fully satisfied, and will never stop because he can never be fully satisfied. This might seem like a simple point, but modern economics is built upon ideas of contentment-equilibrium analysis and indifference conditions. It is true that some economists construct models of dynamic equilibrium, but the idea of dynamic equilibrium is oxymoronic to Mises. Actual equilibrium may involve a recurring rhythm cycle but not true dynamics. True dynamics involve non-repeating evolutionary change.

But, still, this picture of belief constitutes what has become the standard picture. It was embellished, for instance, by Hume (1711-76) whose sceptical arguments concerning induction, causation, and religion, including the thesis that human knowledge arises from sense experience, all in which had shaped 19th and 20th-centuries philosophies.

Beginning with his A Treatise of Human Nature (1738), Hume (1711-1776) strove to create a total naturalistic science of man that examined the psychological basis of human nature. Hume argued against the existence of innate ideas, positing that all human knowledge is founded solely in experience.

In what is sometimes referred to as Hume’s problem of induction, he argued that inductive reasoning and belief in causality cannot be justified rationally; instead, our trust in causality and induction results from custom and mental habit, and our trust in casualty as the act of inducing the causing a state for being indicted, in that which produces an effect to cause a form that expresses or suggests a ground for choice or for good reason or principle advocated and supported by an individual or group for which to be the case of producing of an effect.

The constant conjunction of events, only to experience a property is a characteristic of an object; a red object is said to have the property of redness. The property may be considered a form of an object in its own right, able to possess other properties. A property, however, differs from individual objects in that it may be instantiated, and often in more than one thing. It differs from the logical/mathematical concept of class by not having any concept of extensionality, and from the philosophical concept of class in that a property is considered to be distinct from the objects which possess it. Understanding how different individual entities (or particulars) can in some sense have some of the same properties is the basis of the problem of universals. The terms attribute and qualities have similar meanings.

The experience of constant conjunction of events can never actually perceive that one event causes another, but only that the two are always conjoined. Accordingly, to draw any causal inferences from past experience it is necessary to presuppose that the future will resemble the past, a presupposition which cannot be itself is grounded in prior experience.

Hume’s opposition to the teleological argument for God’s existence, the argument from design, is generally regarded as the most intellectually significant attempts to rebut the argument prior to Darwinism.

Hume was also a sentimentalist who held that ethics are based on emotion or sentiment rather than abstract moral principle, famously proclaiming that Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions. Hume’s moral theory has been seen as a unique attempt to synthesise the modern sentimentalist moral tradition to which Hume belonged, with the virtue ethics tradition of ancient philosophy, with which Hume concurred in regarding traits of character, rather than acts or their consequences, as ultimately the proper objects of moral evaluation. Hume maintained an early commitment to naturalistic explanations of moral phenomena, and is usually taken to have firstly taken by clearly expounding - is an ought problem, or the idea that a statement of fact alone can never give rise to a normative conclusion of what ought to be done. Hume also denied that humans have an actual conception of the self, positing that we experience only a bundle of sensations, and that the self is nothing more than this bundle of causally-connected perceptions. Hume’s compatibilism theory of free wills takes causal determinism as fully compatible with human freedom.

Hume influenced utilitarianism, logical positivism, Immanuel Kant (1724-1804), arguing that reason is the means by which the phenomenon of expedience is translated to be an understanding which marks the beginning of idealism, for which the philosophy of science, analytic philosophy, cognitive science, theology, and other movements and thinkers. Kant himself accredited Hume as the spur to his philosophical thought who had awakened him from his dogmatic slumbers.

That he regarded beliefs as ‘ideas’ supplemented by a particular ‘sentiment or feeling’ in virtue of which those ideas come to serve as guides to behaviour. This conception, like Descartes’, depicts beliefs as conscious episodes. Although we are often conscious of our beliefs, however, our being conscious of them seems inessential to their psychological role.

The standard picture is nowadays reflected in the notion that beliefs are to be located among the propositional attitudes, states of mind comprising (1) propositional contents paired with (2) attitudes toward those contents. In addition to beliefs, these include desires, wishes, intentions, fears, doubts, and hopes. The objects of belief, then, are taken to be propositions. Propositions are expressible sententiously: Walter’s belief that rhubarb is poisonous is expressed by the sentence, ‘Rhubarb is poisonous’. This for having to suggesting, which to some literal sense, as Jerry Fodor (1935), for one, supposes beliefs to be internal sentences, neurally realized inscriptions that make up a ‘language of thought’. Others, suspicious of the notion of a language of thought, nevertheless agree that belief poses a logical form mirroring that of sentences. Fodor has defended the views of ordinary propositional attitude psychology that our mental states (1) are somatically evaluable (intentional), (2) have causal powers, and (3) are such that the implicit generalizations of folk psychology are largely true of them. Such that th ee representational components of such states allow us to exokauin the semantic evaluability of the attitude: A propositional attitude is a mental state held by an agent toward a proposition. Linguistically, propositional attitudes are denoted by a verb (e.g., believed) governing an embedded that clause, for example, Sally believed that she had won.

Propositional attitudes are often assumed to be the fundamental units of thought and their contents, being propositions, are true or false from the perspective of the person. An agent can have different propositional attitudes toward the same proposition (e.g., S believes that her ice-cream is cold, and S fears that her ice-cream is cold).

A number of software systems are now available to simulate propositional attitudes for industrial purposes, for customer relation management systems, decision support and content generation (Galitsky 2012).

Propositional attitudes have directions of fit: some are meant to reflect the world, others to influence it.

One topic of central concern is the relation between the modalities of assertion and belief, perhaps with intention thrown in for good measure. For example, we frequently find ourselves faced with the question of whether or not a person’s assertions conform to his or her beliefs. Discrepancies here can occur for many reasons, but when the departure of an assertion from belief is intentional, we usually call that a lie.

This is one way of filling out the standard picture, but not the only way, Robert Stalnaker (1987) who along with Saul Kripke (1940), David Lewis (1941), and Alvin Plantinga (1932), Stalnaker has been one of the most influential theorists exploring philosophical aspects of possible world semantics. According to his view of possible worlds, they are ways this world could have been, which in turn are maximal properties that this world could have had. This view distinguishes him from the influential modal realist Lewis, who argued that possible worlds are concrete entities just like this world.

His work concerns, among other things, the philosophical foundations of semantics, pragmatics, philosophical logic, decision theory, game theory, the theory of conditionals, epistemology, and the philosophy of mind. But all of these interests are in the service of addressing the problem of intentionality, what it is to represent the world in both speech and thought. In his work, he seeks to provide a naturalistic account of intentionality, characterizing representation in terms of causal and modal notions.

Along with Saul Kripke, David Lewis, and Alvin Plantinga, Stalnaker has been one of the most influential theorists exploring philosophical aspects of possible world semantics. According to his view of possible worlds, they are ways this world could have been, which in turn are maximal properties that this world could have had. This view distinguishes him from the influential modal realist Lewis, who argued that possible worlds are concrete entities just like this world.

In addition to his contributions to the metaphysics of possible worlds, he has used the apparatus of possible worlds’ semantics to explore many issues in the semantics of natural language, including counterfactual and indicative conditionals, and presupposition. His view of assertions as narrowing the conversational common ground to exclude situations in which the asserted content is false was a major impetus in recent developments in semantics and pragmatics, in particular, the so-called dynamic turn. He pointed out that the thesis that beliefs are sententiously characterized ability does not entail that beliefs themselves must have a sentential structure. Stalnaker holds that beliefs are altitudes directed, not toward sentence-like propositions, but toward the world. Belief-states are best characterized by sets of ‘possible worlds’, as the alternative ‘ways the world may be’. The content of Walter’s belief that rhubarb is poisonous might be represented as a set of possible worlds, those in which rhubarb is poisonous. The constituents of possible worlds are possible objects and events, than concepts or descriptions of objects and events, and logical relations among propositions believed are grounded in relations among sets of possible worlds.

Some concerning considerations regarding a contentual presentation for which of this sort answer’s the accountabilities in the ambivalence about beliefs for attributing of a species for their lacking of linguistic abilities, in ta t which Spot, we say, believes that there is a squirrel in the tree. Still, how can we be confident that we have captured the content of Spot’s belief? Beliefs seem to owe their character to relations they bear to other beliefs. My believing that this is a tree, for instance, might be thought to require, that I believe many other things: That trees are living things, which trees have leaves and foliage, if I set fire to this tree it will burn, and so on. But how many of these background beliefs could we plausibly credit to Spot?

On Stalnaker’s view, however in ascribing a belief about trees to Spot we need suppose only that Spot has some mechanism for dividing alternative situations into those featuring and those lacking trees. The mechanism may be a crude one, cruder, certainly, than the mechanisms underlying the abilities of adult human beings. Nonetheless, Spot’s belief concerns trees in part because the proposition believed partitions the set of possible worlds relevant to the explanation of Spot’s capacities at the same place the proposition believed by an ordinary human being does.

The standard picture is not without its critics, however, Gilbert Ryle (1900-76) finds that it is a mistake in the logic of mental statement s and mental concepts and leads to the mistaken metaphysical theory that a person is composed of two separate distinct entities, a mind and a body. Nevertheless, he also, regards beliefs as ‘tendencies’ to say and do various things. Ryle thought it was no longer possible to believe that it was a philosopher’s task to study ‘mental’ as opposed to physical objects. However, in its place, Ryle saw the tendency of philosophers to search for objects whose nature was neither physical nor mental. Ryle believed, instead, that philosophical problems are problems of a certain sort; they are not problems of an ordinary sort about special entities, as for Walter believes that rhubarb is poisonous, he will be disposed to assent to the sentence ‘rhubarb is poisonous’, to refuse to eat rhubarb, and so forth. In this respect beliefs resemble dispositions, like fragility. If a glass is fragile, will, under the right conditions, break when struck by a solid object. Gilbert Ryle (1900-76) which of reducing beliefs and other states of mind to behaviour, but this is misleading. A glass’s being fragile is not its breaking, and Walter believing that rhubarb is poisonous is not his saying so.

Gilbert Ryle (1900–1976) was a British philosopher. He was a representative of the generation of British ordinary language philosophers who shared Ludwig Wittgenstein’s approach to philosophical problems, and is principally known for his critique of Cartesian dualism, for which he coined the phrase the ghost in the machine. Some of his ideas in the philosophy of mind have been referred to as behaviourist. Ryle’s most recognized book is The Concept of Mind (1949), in which he writes that the general trends of this book will undoubtedly, and harmlessly, be stigmatised as ‘behaviourist’. Nevertheless, Ryle is explicit on the point: In whatever Walter does that he believes that rhubarb is especially attractive, he believes, what he wants, and so on. If Walter wants to be poisoned, for reasons that posit of the object lesson, of that which he believes that this is rhubarb, he may as well eat it.

The representational theory of intentionality gives rise to a natural theory of intentional states such as believing, desiring and intending, so that a representational theory of cognition is accorded to this theory, intentional states have in factoring into two aspects: A functional aspect that distinguishes believing from desiring and so on, and the contextual aspects that distinguish the tenets of belief, or the desire from each other, and so on, as the belief that ‘p’ might be realized as a representation within which the content that ‘p’ and the function for serving as a premise in inference, for that which of a desire that ‘p’ might be realized of its presented representation with which the content that ‘p’ and the function of initiating procedures for bringing about designating in that ‘p’ as terminating such processing, when the belief, that ‘p’ has taken to form.

Mental representation is the mental imagery of things that are not actually present to the senses. In contemporary philosophy, specifically in fields of metaphysics such as philosophy of mind and ontology, a mental representation is one of the prevailing ways of explaining and describing the nature of ideas and concepts.

Mental representations (or mental imagery) enable representing things that have never been experienced as well as things that do not exist. Think of yourself travelling to a place you have never visited before, or having a third arm. These things either have never happened or are impossible and do not exist, yet our brain and mental imagery allow us to imagine them. Although visual imagery is more likely to be recalled, mental imagery may involve representations in any of the sensory modalities, such as hearing, smell, or taste. Stephen Kosslyn’s theory contends that, contrary to a commonly held assumption, imagery is not a single, unified phenomenon; rather, it consists of a collection of distinct functions, each of which is responsible for a different aspect of imagery. For example, he decomposes imagery into four sets of processes, responsible for generating the image (i.e., activating information stored in long-term memory and constructing a representation in short-term memory, inspecting the object in the image (e.g., by reinterpreting it, maintaining the image over time, and - if so desired - transforming the image (e.g., by rotating it, adding or deleting parts, or changing the colour).

Mental representations also allow people to experience things right in front of them - though the process of how the brain interprets the representational content is debated.

Representationalism (also known as indirect realism) is the view that representations are the main way we access external reality. The representational theory of mind attempts to explain the nature of ideas, concepts and other mental content in contemporary philosophy of mind, cognitive science and experimental psychology. In contrast to theories of naive or direct realism, the representational theory of mind postulates the actual existence of mental representations which act as intermediaries between the observing subject and the objects, processes or other entities observed in the external world. These intermediaries stand for or represent to the representational theory of mind states that he or she forms a mental representation that represents the floor and its state of cleanliness.

The question of direct or naïve realism, as opposed to indirect or representational realism, arises in the philosophy of perception and of mind out of the debate over the nature of conscious experience; the epistemological questions of whether the world we see around us is the real world itself or merely an internal perceptual copy of that world generated by neural processes in our brain.

Naïve realism is known as direct realism when developed to counter indirect or representative realism, also known as epistemological dualism, the philosophical position that our conscious experience is not of the real world itself but of an internal representation, a miniature virtual-reality replica of the world.

Indirect realism is broadly equivalent to the accepted view of perception in natural science that states that we do not and cannot perceive the external world as it really is but know only our ideas and interpretations of the way the world is. Representationalist is one of the key assumptions of cognitivism in psychology. The representational realist would deny that first-hand knowledge is a coherent concept, since knowledge is always via some means. Our ideas of the world are interpretations of sensory input derived from an external world that is real (unlike the standpoint of idealism, which holds that only ideas are real, but mind-independent things are not.)

Intentionality is a philosophical concept and is defined by the Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy as the power of minds to be about, to represent, or to stand for, things, properties and states of affairs. The once obsolete term dates from medieval scholastic philosophy, but in more recent times it has been resurrected by Franz Brentano (1838-1917) for applying the distinction between psychological and physical phenomena on the basis of intentionality or internal object-directedness of thought.

There seems to be some anecdotal evidence that representationalism has started to become much more popular during the last decade. For example, Brent Allsop remembers when he first met Steve back in the early 90s Steve was the first and only representationalists he had the chance to meet and talk with at the time. Yet now, it seems, there are many more representationaists, and representationalist’s ideas seem much more prevalent in the literature.

When Brent Allsop first started topics on consciousness, he thought that representationalism was indeed still very much a minority view. He expected some other theories of consciousness to quickly establish dominance over representationalism, though he wasn’t sure which theories this might be. Of course the already more than 18,000 plus publications already in Chalmers’ Mind Papers bibliography, for it being created on this topic, is of no use to anyone since no mortal can be expected to produce any kind of comprehensive survey of that mess. Brent simply wanted to get a general unbiased idea of what the best competing theories were, what the most popular terminality to describe them was, and who was in what camp.

While it is true that Brent Allsop, being himself a representationalist, is surely biassing the data at this early stage, perhaps working harder to recruit representationalists than supporters of other theories. But he is not intentionally doing this. He is recruiting people to participate in all possible forums, and of all possible beliefs, making explicit efforts not to only recruit representationalists.

Whether the current tentative data is biassed or not, as an ever larger percentage of experts ‘canonize’ their beliefs this will obviously become less of a possibility. There does seem to already be clear evidence that a revolution is taking place in this field as we speak. Members of the representational camp believe no other theory will ever be able to match the amount of scientific consensus going forward, and that ultimately demonstrable scientific evidence will convert all others to this camp making it a very good possibility of becoming the dominant paradigm of consciousness.

Edmund Husserl (1859-1938) an Austrian-born German philosopher and mathematician, a leader in the development of phenomenology, he had a major influence upon existentialism. The earliest theory of intentionality is associated with St. Anselm’s ontological argument for the existence of God, and with his tenets distinguishing between objects that exist in the understanding and objects that exist in reality.

The concept of intentionality was reintroduced in 19th-century, contemporary philosophy by Franz Brentano (a German philosopher and psychologist who is generally regarded as the founder of act psychology, and called intentionalism) in his work Psychology from an empirical standpoint (1874). Brentano described intentionality as a characteristic of all acts of consciousness that are thus psychical or mental phenomena, by which they may be set apart from physical or natural phenomena.

Every mental phenomenon is characterized by what the Scholastics of the Middle Ages called the intentional (or mental) inexistence of an object, and what we might call, though not wholly unambiguously, reference to a content, direction toward an object (which is not to be understood here as meaning a thing), or immanent objectivity. Every mental phenomenon includes something as object within itself, although they do not all do so in the same way. In presentation something is presented, in judgement something is affirmed or denied, in love loved, in hate hated, in desire desired and so on. This intentional in-existence is characteristic exclusively of mental phenomena. No physical phenomenon exhibits anything like it. We could, therefore, define mental phenomena by saying that they are those phenomena which contain an object intentionally within themselves.

-Franz Brentano, Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint, edited by Linda L. McAlister (London: Routledge, 1995). - Brentano coined the expression intentional inexistence to indicate the peculiar ontological status of the contents of mental phenomena. According to some interpreters the in- of in-existence is to be read as locative, i.e., as indicating that an intended object exists … in or has in-existence, existing not externally but in the psychological state (Jacquette 2004), while others are more cautious, stating: It is not clear whether in 1874 this … ended to carry any ontological commitment (Chrudzimski and Smith 2004).

A major problem within discourse on intentionality is that participants often fail to make explicitly whether or not they use the term to imply concepts such as agency or desire, i.e., whether it involves teleology. As Daniel Clement Dennett (1942) explicitly invokes teleological concepts in the intentional stance. However, most philosophers use intentionality to mean something with no teleological import. Thus, a thought of a chair can be about a chair without any implication of an intention or even a belief relating to the chair. For philosophers of language, what is meant by intentionality is largely an issue of how symbols can have been meaning. This lack of clarity may underpin some of the differences of view indicated below.

To bear out further the diversity of sentiment evoked from the notion of intentionality, Husserl followed on Franz Brentano (1838-1917), and gave the concept of intentionality more widespread attention, both in continental and analytic philosophy. In contrast to Brentano’s view, French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre whose major work (Being and Nothingness) identified intentionality with consciousness, stating that the two were indistinguishable. German philosopher Martin Heidegger (Being and Time), defined intentionality as care (Sorge), a sentient condition where an individual’s existence, facticity, and being in the world identifies their ontological significance, in contrast to that which is merely ontic (thinghood).

Parmenides were among the first to propose an ontological characterization of the fundamental nature of reality. Ontology is the philosophical study of being. More broadly, it studies concepts that directly relate for being, in particular becoming, existence, reality, as well as the basic categories of being and their relations. Traditionally listed as a part of the major branch of philosophy known as metaphysics, ontology often deals with questions concerning what entities exist or may be said to exist and how such entities may be grouped, related within a hierarchy, and subdivided according to similarities and differences.

While the etymology is Greek, the oldest extant record of the word itself, the New Latin form ontologia, appeared in 1606 in the work Ogdoas Scholastica by Jacob Lorhard (Lorhardus) and in 1613 in the Lexicon philosophicum by Rudolf Göckel (Goclenius).

The first occurrence in English of ontology as recorded by the OED (Oxford English Dictionary, online edition, 2008) came in a work by Gideon Harvey (1636/7–1702): Archelogia philosophica novas; - being the New principles of Philosophy. Containing Philosophy in general, Metaphysicks or Ontology, Dynamilogy or a Discourse of Power, Religio Philosophi or Natural Theology, Physicks or Natural philosophy, London, Thomson, 1663, the word was first used in its Latin form by philosophers based on the Latin roots, which they are based on the Greek.

Leibniz is the only one of the great philosophers of the 17th century to have used the term ontology.

Some philosophers, notably in the traditions of the Platonic school, contend that all nouns (including abstract nouns) refer to existent entities. Other philosophers contend that nouns do not always name entities, but that some provide a kind of shorthand for reference to a collection either of the objects or of events. In this latter view, mind, instead of referring to an entity, refers to a collection of mental events experienced by a person; society refers to a collection of persons with some shared characteristics, and geometry refers to a collection of specific kinds of intellectual activities.need quotation to verify. Between these poles of realism and nominalism stand a variety of other positions.

Other 20th-century philosophers such as Gilbert Ryle (1900-76) and A.J. Ayer (1910-89) was both critical of Husserl’s concept of intentionality and his many layers of consciousness. Ryle insisted that perceiving is not a process, and Ayer that describing one’s knowledge is not to describe mental processes. The effect of these positions is that consciousness is so fully intentional that the mental act has been emptied of all content, and that the idea of pure consciousness is that it is nothing. (Sartre also referred to consciousness as nothing).

Chisholm’s writings have attempted to summarize the suitable and unsuitable criteria of the concept since the Scholastics, arriving at a criterion of intentionality identified by the two aspects of Brentano’s thesis and defined by the logical properties that distinguish language describing psychological phenomena from language describing non-psychological phenomena, Roderick Milton Chrisholm’s (1916-99) criteria for the intentional use of sentences are: existence independence, truth-value indifference, and referential opacity.

Uncertain issues surrounding certainty are especially connected with those concerning ‘scepticism’. Although Greek scepticism entered on the value of enquiry and questioning, scepticism is now the denial that knowledge or even rational belief is possible, either about some specific subject-matter, e.g., ethics, or in any area whatsoever. Classical scepticism, springs from the observation that the best method in some area seems to fall short of giving us contact with the truth, e.g., there is a gulf between appearances and reality, it frequently cites the conflicting judgements that our methods deliver, with the result that questions of truth have become undefinable. In classic thought the various examples of this conflict were systemized in the tropes of Aenesidemus. So that, the scepticism of Pyrrho and the new Academy was a system of argument and inasmuch as opposing dogmatism, and, particularly the philosophical system building of the Stoics.

As it has come down to us, particularly in the writings of Sextus Empiricus who finds that its method was typically to cite reasons for finding our issues undecidable (sceptics devoted particular energy to undermining the Stoics conception of some truths as delivered by direct apprehension.) Which of an important premise regarding one’s state of mind as in relation to his grasping for the fundamental philosophical concepts, and it represents the Stoic solution to the problem of the criterion. As a result the sceptics concluded of Epoché, or the suspension of belief, and then go on to celebrate a way of life whose object was ataraxia, or the tranquillity resulting from suspension of belief.

The Pyrrhonist’s developed the concept of Epoché for describing the state where all judgments about non-evident matters are suspended in order for that of inducing a state of ‘ataraxia’ (freedom from worry and anxiety). The Pyrrhonist philosopher Sextus Empiricus gives this definition: This concept is similarly employed in Academic Skepticism, but without the objective of ‘ataraxia’ which is a central aim of Pyrrhonist practice. Pyrrhonist’s view ataraxia as necessary for bringing about eudaimonia (happiness) for a person, representing life’s ultimate purpose, in which of the Pyrrhonist’s method for achieving ‘ataraxia’ is through achieving Epoché (i.e., suspension of judgment) regarding all matters of dogma (i.e., non-evident belief). An important distinction is to be made is the difference between the interpretative acclamations of the Stoical term ‘ataraxia’ and the Stoic idea of ‘apatheia’. However, apatheia is integral for a Stoic of knowing reaches for the stage of an ‘ataraxia’. Since the Stoic the individual does not care about matters outside of himself and is not susceptible to emotion because of his state of ‘apatheia,’ then the Stoic, in knowing would be unable to be disturbed by anything at all, meaning that he was in a stage of mental tranquillity and thus was in the state of ‘ataraxia’. Achieving the ataraxia is a common goal for Pyrrhonism, Epicureanism, and Stoicism, but the role and value of the ‘ataraxia’ within each philosophy vary depending on their philosophical theories. The mental disturbances that prevent one from achieving the ataraxia vary among the philosophies, and each philosophy has a different understanding as to how to achieve the ‘ataraxia.’

The Pyrrhonist philosopher Sextus Empiricus summarized Pyrrhonism as "a disposition to oppose phenomena and noumenal to another in any way whatever, with the result that, owing to the equipollence between the things and statements thus opposed, we are brought first to Epoché and then to an ataraxia … Epoché is a state of the intellect on account of which we neither deny nor affirm anything. The ataraxia is an untroubled and tranquil condition of the spirited entity.

The terminological phrasing of the word Epoché plays an implicit role in subsequent philosophical skeptic thought, as in René Descartes’ epistemic principle of methodic doubt, its term was popularized in modern philosophy by Edmund Husserl (1859-1938). Husserl elaborates upon the notion of ‘phenomenological Epoché’ or ‘bracketing’ in Idea, though the systematic procedure of ‘phenomenological reduction’, one is thought to be able to suspend judgment regarding the general or naive philosophical belief in the existence of the external world, and thus examine phenomena as they are originally given to consciousness. On or upon the outset, least of mention, the ground-level epistemological concepts of ‘truth’, ‘falsity’, and ‘justification’ apply primarily to beliefs, and only derivatively, if at all, to knowledge found in the belief, that for belief is thus central to epistemology.

Plato, in the Memo and the Theaetetus distinguishes knowledge, belief, opinion and judgement, and advances a conception of these states of mind according to which they incorporate a pair of elemental components, one intentional or representational, the other causal. In F.P. Ramsey (1903-30) whose primary interests were of logic and mathematics whose phrasing of a belief is viewed for being a map of our neighbouring space by which we navigate and steer (Ramsey, 1978).

This dual-component picture of belief constitutes what has become the standard picture. It was embellished, for instance, by Hume, who regarded beliefs as ‘ideas’ supplemented by a particular ‘sentiment or feeling’ in virtue of which those ideas come to serve as guides to behaviour. This conception, like Descartes’, depicts beliefs as conscious episodes. Although we are often conscious of our beliefs, however, our being conscious of them seems inessential to their psychological role.

The standard picture is nowadays reflected in the notion that beliefs are to be located among the propositional attitudes, states of mind comprising (1) propositional contents paired with (2) attitudes toward those contents. In addition to beliefs, these include desires, wishes, intentions, fears, doubts, and hopes. The objects of belief, then, are taken to be propositions. Propositions are expressible sententiously: Walter’s belief that rhubarb is poisonous is expressed by the sentence, ‘Rhubarb is poisonous’. This is to suggest, to some literal sense, for which of Jerry Fodor (1981), for one, supposes beliefs to be internal sentences, neurally realized inscriptions that make up a ‘language of thought’, while other suspicions of the notion of a language of thought, are nevertheless, agreeing that belief posses a logical form mirroring that of sentences.

The language of a thought hypothesis sometimes known as thought ordered mental expression (TOME), is a view in linguistics, philosophy of mind and cognitive science, forwarded by American philosopher Jerry Fodor. It describes the nature of thought as possessing language-like or compositional structure (sometimes known as mentalese). On this view, simple concepts combine in systematic ways (akin to the rules of grammar in language) to build thoughts. In its most basic