Millian Russellianism Naturalized

Analytic philosophers call the things we believe, think, etc. and we express using sentences propositions. E.g. by uttering Vienna is a city, I express the proposition that Vienna is a city and, in fact, I believe it. There are two major theories of propositions: Millian Russellianism, according to which the proposition above is constituted by Vienna and the property of being a city; and Fregeanism, according to which its constituents are modes of presentation of Vienna and being a city. A mode of presentation of an object o is something corresponding to a class of linguistic expressions or perceptions associated to o. Given a mode of presentation m, on the basis of which criterion we say that an expression or perception belongs to the class c individuating m? According to a theory called semantic relationism, all items that belong to c need to be coordinated. Nevertheless, it is hard to find a characterization of semantic coordination intuitively persuasive and that makes coordination an equivalence relation (whose equivalence classes individuate modes of presentation). In my articles I reject modes of presentation, arguing that coordination is a non-transitive and non- semantic but cognitive and subjective relation. I characterize it in terms of the relations of: taking an object o1 and an object o2 as the same object; and doing as if o1 and o2 were the same object, i.e. simulating someone who takes them as the same object. I explain how starting from cognitive coordination and Russellian propositions we can individuate token thoughts, token beliefs, etc. in our mind, whose constituents (called token concepts) may or may not be coordinated. The goal of my FWF project is to reduce my account formed by Russellian propositions, cognitive coordination and token attitudes to neuroscientifically analyzable notions. As mentioned above, token attitudes are grounded on Russellian propositions and cognitive coordination; and cognitive coordination is grounded on taking as and simulation. Based on ideas from Soames, I characterize Russellian propositions as type states of having in mind such propositions, whose constituents are type states of having in mind individuals, properties and the like. I also use the notion of having in mind to characterize imaginary objects: e.g. Holmes is the type state of having in mind Holmes. In order to avoid circularities in the characterization of proposition (i.e. p = the type state of having in mind p), Soames analyzes e.g. the type state of having in mind that Vienna is a city as the type state of predicating the property of being a city of Vienna. I avoid analogous circularities in the case of imaginary objects by analyzing e.g. the type state of having in mind Holmes using discoveries from the bioengineer Quiroga, according to which when we meet/recognize an individual, some neurons in our medial temporal lobe re/activate. Such a discovery is useful to neuroscientifically elucidate both having in mind and taking as.

Suppose you believe that Cicero is a Roman orator and that Tully is not a Roman orator, failing to realize that the names "Cicero" and "Tully" refer to the same individual, Marcus Tullius Cicero. Do you thereby believe and disbelieve (i.e. believe the negation of) the same thing? While Fregean philosophers and e.g. Stephen Schiffer answer negatively, the advocates of Millian Russellianism, e.g. Nathan Salmon, answer affirmatively: you both believe and disbelieve the same Russellian proposition, an abstract entity whose constituents are the individual Marcus Tullius Cicero and the property of being a Roman orator. According to most Millian Russellians including Salmon, your rationality is guaranteed by the fact that you believe and disbelieve such a thing by thinking of Cicero in two different ways - which do not enter what you (dis)believe. Salmon leaves the nature of such modes of presentation unspecified, while François Recanati conceives them as folders of information in your mind (mental files). My FWF project criticizes Schiffer's conception of belief content and adopts Millian Russellianism, but it also criticizes and dismisses modes of presentation of any sort (e.g. mental files). Instead, I argue that when you believe the Russellian propositions that Cicero is a Roman orator and that Tully (i.e. Cicero) is not a Roman orator by mistakenly taking the two occurrences of Cicero within these propositions as occurrences of different individuals, you do not coordinate them. In my view, coordination is a relation between a subject and pairs of object occurrences, which does not figure among the constituents of what is believed in accordance with Millian Russellianism and against Kit Fine's semantic relationism. I allow that you have two networks of coordinated mental representations about Cicero; but I take these representations (token concepts) to be very fine grained, viz. as having a granularity comparable to that of occurrences of individuals within Russellian propositions; moreover, since I maintain that coordination is not a transitive relation, the two networks cannot serve as the basis for two modes of presentation. What about beliefs concerning imaginary objects, e.g. your belief that Sherlock Holmes is a detective? My FWF project explores the idea that while there is a distinction between e.g. Marcus Tullius Cicero and the type concept of him (i.e. a unique coarse-grained concept tokened by all your aforementioned token concepts of him), Holmes is just the same thing as the type concept Holmes. I further suggest that this mental type in human beings can be partially (viz. neurobiologically) characterized through discoveries by Rodrigo Quian Quiroga.