Abstract
The 1970’s brought revolutions in both philosophy of mind and philosophy of language. In the one revolution, mind and mental representation became respectable once more. (Contrast the mentalism of Fodor and other philosophers of cognitive science1 with the antimentalism of Quine, Skinner, and some Wittgensteinians. Ironically, the mind returned on the back of a machine.) In the other revolution, names and indexical pronouns (“this”, “I”, etc.) were said to refer directly, without the mediation of senses or thoughts in the speaker’s head, because their reference is determined by context, e.g., by the causal connection between the speaker and the referent. (Compare the neo-Russellian, anti-Fregean views of Donnellan, Putnam, Kaplan, and Kripke with the great Fregean semantical tradition.2) Where representation was restored to the mind in one revolution, reference was pulled away from mind and thought in the other. And causal theories of reference spawned causal theories of perception, knowledge, mind, and mental representation. All this, within the Anglo-American tradition of analytic philosophy.
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