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Thought and Its Objects

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 March 2022

A. I. Melden*
Affiliation:
University of California Berkeley, Calif.

Extract

What are the objects of thought? To consider a familiar case, may we assert that the proposition “I am thinking of a unicorn” entails that there is some object which is being thought of? Theories of subsistent objects provide an affirmative answer and seem to be based on the consideration that we are thinking of something when we think of a unicorn. Otherwise, to paraphrase G. E. Moore's well known statement of the argument, we would be thinking of the same thing whether we thought of a unicorn or a griffen, namely, nothing. But, as G. E. Moore has shown, subsistence theories fail to distinguish between the logical and grammatical forms of such statements as “I am thinking of a unicorn” and “I am hunting a lion”. The latter is of the form (∃x) · φx · Ψx; the former is not since it does not assert that the property of being a unicorn and the property of thought of by me both belong to something. But the problem that suggests itself is the nature of the contention that something is being thought of when, for example, we think of a unicorn. To begin with, is there no acceptable alternative to the various forms of the theory of subsistent objects according to which it would be correct to say that the proposition “I am thinking of a unicorn” entails the proposition “(∃x)·x is being thought of”? And if saying that we are thinking of something, when we think of a unicorn, does not mean that there exists something that is being thought of, what is the force of the contention that we are thinking of something?

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © The Philosophy of Science Association 1940

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Footnotes

1

Read before the meeting of the American Philosophical Association, Pacific Division, Dec. 29, 1939 at the University of Washington.

References

2 Philosophical Studies, “The Conception of Reality”, esp. pp. 215-218.

3 A Modern Introduction to Logic, p. 160.

4 Published in Studies in Philosophy and Psychology, p. 335.

5 It is linguistically correct to say that the proposition “I am thinking of what ‘unicorn’ means” is about thinking and we do speak about thought, characterizing the thought of this or that man as facile, ingenious, true, etc. But it is just as fallacious to infer from these proprieties that thinking is a kind of object as it would be to suppose that since “unicorn” means something that this something is an object of which “unicorn” is a name (or, as it would be to suppose that since the proposition about thinking is also about me that I am a kind of object, an unchanging ego). The present point is another instance of the familiar warning concerning grammatical considerations.