Philosophical work on the nature of thought has, until recently, focused primarily on what it is for an individual to think, leaving aside important questions about the intersubjective dimension of thought. For example: In what sense, if any, can thoughts really be shared? Is there a shareability requirement on successful communication, disagreement, or the transmission of knowledge? Do particular types of thought such as those based on perception or self-location raise distinctive challenges to their shareability? More generally, how should we understand the communication and coordination of our thoughts in exchanges with others? Are there distinctive rationality constraints governing the intersubjective aspects of thought? Sharing Thoughts brings together original work by established and emerging philosophers to address these and related foundational issues, while also paying attention to more specific questions such as the interplay between the intersubjectivity of thought and the internalism/externalism debate, the elucidation of first-person or egocentric thought, our capacity for joint thinking, the conditions for knowledge transmission and collective inquiry, the expression of thought in music, and more.

Sharing Thoughts: Philosophical Perspectives on Intersubjectivity and Communication

Politics & Social Sciences

Bermúdez, José Luis

Valente, Matheus

Verdejo, Víctor M.

Philosophy

Oxford University Press

Thinking without Words provides a challenging new theory of the nature of non-linguistic thought. Many scientific disciplines treat non-linguistic creatures as thinkers, explaining their behavior in terms of their thoughts about themselves and about the environment. But this theorizing has proceeded without any clear account of the types of thinking available to non-linguistic creatures. One consequence of this is that ascriptions of thoughts to non-linguistic creatures have frequently been held to be metaphorical and not to be taken at face value. Bermúdez offers a conceptual framework for treating human infants and non-human animals as genuine thinkers. Whereas existing discussions of thought at the non-linguistic level have concentrated on how such thoughts might be physically realized, Bermúdez approaches the problem by considering what is required in explaining behavior in psychological terms. In developing a positive account of non-linguistic thought he shows how the experimental tools used by developmental psychologists and students of animal behavior can be used to give a precise account of the way in which a human infant or non-human animal is representing the world. Much of the book is devoted to exploring the differences between thinking without words and language-based thinking. Bermúdez argues that there are clear limits to the expressive power of non-linguistic thought. Nonetheless, he identifies primitive analogues at the non-linguistic level that can be used to explain sophisticated non-linguistic behaviors. Thinking Without Words is the first full-length philosophical study of this important topic. It is written with an interdisciplinary readership in mind and will appeal to philosophers, psychologists, and students of animal behavior.

Thinking without Words (Philosophy of Mind Series)

Thinking without Words provides a challenging new theory of the nature of non-linguistic thought. Many scientific disciplines treat non-linguistic creatures as thinkers, explaining their behavior in terms of their thoughts about themselves and about the environment. But this theorizing has proceeded without any clear account of the types of thinking available to non-linguistic creatures. One consequence of this is that ascriptions of thoughts to non-linguistic creatures have frequently been held to be metaphorical and not to be taken at face value. Bermúdez offers a conceptual framework for treating human infants and non-human animals as genuine thinkers. Whereas existing discussions of thought at the non-linguistic level have concentrated on how such thoughts might be physically realized, Bermúdez approaches the problem by considering what is required in explaining behavior in psychological terms. In developing a positive account of non-linguistic thought he shows how the experimental tools used by developmental psychologists and students of animal behavior can be used to give a precise account of the way in which a human infant or non-human animal is representing the world. Much of the book is devoted to exploring the differences between thinking without words and language-based thinking. Bermúdez argues that there are clear limits to the expressive power of non-linguistic thought. Nonetheless, he identifies primitive analogues at the non-linguistic level that can be used to explain sophisticated non-linguistic behaviors. Thinking Without Words is the first full-length philosophical study of this important topic. It is written with an interdisciplinary readership in mind and will appeal to philosophers, psychologists, and students of animal behavior.

Thinking Without Words (Philosophy of Mind)

Aristotle's De Anima: A Guide (Oxford Guides to Philosophy)

Aristotle's De Anima is an extraordinarily influential text in the history of philosophy; it is also one of the earliest works in what we now call psychology. Aristotle explores the psuchê, a distinctively Greek concept that overlaps in certain respects with our modern notions of the mind and the soul, but also applies to plants and non-human animals. The De Anima develops an innovative and challenging account of the relation between the psuchê and the body, and offers thought-provoking analyses of the different capacities of the psuchê, starting with nutrition and reproduction. A general discussion of perception is followed by detailed accounts of the five individual sense modalities, as well as perceptual imagination. After subtly exploring the intellectual capacities that he considers distinctive to human beings (where we find his famous discussion of the "agent intellect") Aristotle gives a sophisticated account of how desire leads to action. In this lively and accessible Oxford Guide, which presupposes no knowledge of Greek, José Luis Bermúdez situates the De Anima in the context of ancient Greek philosophy, and places it within Aristotle's corpus as a whole. Each chapter is organized around focus readings from the De Anima and elsewhere in Aristotle's writings (as well as from Plato's Phaedo and Theaetetus). Bermúdez develops a historically-informed account of Aristotle's arguments in the De Anima that draws connections with contemporary philosophy of mind as appropriate. The reader is introduced to some of the key topics and controversies in modern Aristotle scholarship, as well as to the insights of the ancient and medieval commentators.

No words in English are shorter than "I" and few, if any, play a more fundamental role in language and thought. In Understanding "I": Thought and Language Jose Luis Bermudez continues his longstanding work on the self and self-consciousness. Bermudez develops a model of how language-users understand sentences involving the first person pronoun "I". This model illuminates the unique psychological role that self-conscious thoughts (typically expressed using "I") play in action and thought - a unique role often summarized by describing "I" as an essential indexical. The book opens with an argument directly supporting the indispensability of "I"-thoughts in explaining action. After motivating a broadly Fregean approach linguistic understanding it critically examines Frege's own remarks on "I" as well as the Fregean account offered by Gareth Evans. The main part of the book develops an account of the sense of "I" that explains a cluster of related phenomena, including essential indexicality, immunity to error through misidentification, the shareability of "I"-thoughts, the relation between "I" and "you", and the role of autobiographical memory in self-consciousness.

Understanding "I": Language and Thought (Lines of Thought)

Decision Theory and Rationality

The concept of rationality is a common thread through the human and social sciences -- from political science to philosophy, from economics to sociology, and from management science to decision analysis. But what counts as rational action and rational behavior? Jose Luis Bermudez explores decision theory as a theory of rationality. Decision theory is the mathematical theory of choice and for many social scientists it makes the concept of rationality mathematically tractable and scientifically legitimate. Yet rationality is a concept with several dimensions and the theory of rationality has different roles to play. It plays an action-guiding role (prescribing what counts as a rational solution of a given decision problem). It plays a normative role (giving us the tools to pass judgment not just on how a decision problem was solved, but also on how it was set up in the first place). And it plays a predictive/explanatory role (telling us how rational agents will behave, or why they did what they did). This controversial but accessible book shows that decision theory cannot play all of these roles simultaneously. And yet, it argues, no theory of rationality can play one role without playing the other two. The conclusion is that there is no hope of taking decision theory as a theory of rationality.

Self-Help

Motivational

The concept of rationality is a common thread through the human and social sciences -- from political science to philosophy, from economics to sociology, and from management science to decision analysis. But what counts as rational action and rational behavior? Jose Luis Bermudez explores decision theory as a theory of rationality. Decision theory is the mathematical theory of choice and for many social scientists it makes the concept of rationality mathematically tractable and scientifically legitimate. Yet rationality is a concept with several dimensions and the theory of rationality has different roles to play. It plays an action-guiding role (prescribing what counts as a rational solution of a given decision problem). It plays a normative role (giving us the tools to pass judgment not just on how a decision problem was solved, but also on how it was set up in the first place). And it plays a predictive/explanatory role (telling us how rational agents will behave, or why they did what they did). This controversial but accessible book shows that decision theory cannot play all of these roles simultaneously. And yet, it argues, no theory of rationality can play one role without playing the other two. The conclusion is that there is no hope of taking decision theory as a theory of rationality.

In this book, José Luis Bermúdez addresses two fundamental problems in the philosophy and psychology of self-consciousness: (1) Can we provide a noncircular account of fully fledged self-conscious thought and language in terms of more fundamental capacities? (2) Can we explain how fully fledged self-conscious thought and language can arise in the normal course of human development? Bermúdez argues that a paradox (the paradox of self-consciousness) arises from the apparent strict interdependence between self-conscious thought and linguistic self-reference. The paradox renders circular all theories that define self-consciousness in terms of linguistic mastery of the first-person pronoun. It seems to follow from the paradox of self-consciousness that no such account or explanation can be given.
Drawing on recent work in empirical psychology and philosophy, the author argues that any explanation of fully fledged self-consciousness that answers these two questions requires attention to primitive forms of self-consciousness that are prelinguistic and preconceptual. Such primitive forms of self-consciousness are to be found in somatic proprioception, the structure of exteroceptive perception, and prelinguistic forms of social interaction. The author uses these primitive forms of self-consciousness to dissolve the paradox of self-consciousness and to show how the two questions can be given an affirmative answer.

The Paradox of Self-Consciousness (Representation and Mind)

Mit Pr

The Bodily Self: Selected Essays

Essays on the role of the body in self-consciousness, showing that full-fledged, linguistic self-consciousness is built on a rich foundation of primitive, nonconceptual self-consciousness.
These essays explore how the rich and sophisticated forms of self-consciousness with which we are most familiar―as philosophers, psychologists, and as ordinary, reflective individuals―depend on a complex underpinning that has been largely invisible to students of the self and self-consciousness. José Luis Bermúdez, extending the insights of his groundbreaking 1998 book, The Paradox of Self-Consciousness, argues that full-fledged, linguistic self-consciousness is built on a rich foundation of primitive, nonconceptual self-consciousness, and that these more primitive forms of self-consciousness persist in ways that frame self-conscious thought. They extend throughout the animal kingdom, and some are present in newborn human infants. 
Bermúdez makes the case that these primitive forms of self-awareness can indeed be described as forms of self-consciousness, arguing that they share certain structural and epistemological features with full-fledged, linguistic self-consciousness. He offers accounts of certain important classes of states of nonconceptual content, including the self-specifying dimension of visual perception and the content of bodily awareness, considering how they represent the self. And he explores the general role of nonconceptual self-consciousness in our cognitive and affective lives, examining in several essays the relation between nonconceptual awareness of our bodies and what has been called our “sense of ownership” for our own bodies.

The MIT Press

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Bermúdez, José Luis. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Bermúdez, José Luis

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Bermúdez, José Luis. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Sharing Thoughts: Philosophical Perspectives on Intersubjectivity and Communication

Thinking without Words (Philosophy of Mind Series)

Thinking Without Words (Philosophy of Mind)

Aristotle's De Anima: A Guide (Oxford Guides to Philosophy)

Aristotle's De Anima: A Guide (Oxford Guides to Philosophy)

Understanding "I": Language and Thought (Lines of Thought)

Decision Theory and Rationality

Decision Theory and Rationality

The Paradox of Self-Consciousness (Representation and Mind)

The Bodily Self: Selected Essays