Publisher's Synopsis
What is it to have a concept? What is it to make an inference? What is it to be rational? On the basis of recent developments in semantics, a number of authors have embraced answers to these questions that have radically counterintuitive consequences, for example: One can rationally accept self-contradictory propositions (e.g. Smith is a composer and Smith is not a composer). Psychological states are causally inert: beliefs and desires do nothing. The mind cannot be understood in terms of folk-psychological concepts (e.g. belief, desire, intention). One can have a single concept without having any others: an otherwise conceptless creature could grasp the concept of justice or of the number seven. Thoughts are sentence-tokens, and thought-processes are driven by the syntactic, not the semantic, properties of those tokens. In the first half of Conceptual Atomism and the Computational Theory of Mind
