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Identity and Mental Files

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The purpose of this paper will be to show that the 'merge' model of mental files is to be preferred to the 'link' model of mental files because some of the problems that arise for the 'merge' model also arise for the 'link' model, and because the problems for the…

The purpose of this paper will be to show that the 'merge' model of mental files is to be preferred to the 'link' model of mental files because some of the problems that arise for the 'merge' model also arise for the 'link' model, and because the problems for the 'merge' model can be argued against via counterexamples or explained away. This will be shown by giving a detailed description of what both the link model and the merge model of mental files entail. The flaws of the mental file merge model will be presented, followed by the advantages of the link model, ending with several arguments as to why the merge model is better suited to explain our intuitions about identity than the link model.
ContributorsZimmerman, Thomas Scott (Author) / Pinillos, N. Angel (Thesis director) / Kobes, Bernard (Committee member) / Reynolds, Steven (Committee member) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2015-05
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Here be dragons: a primer for tropology and the philosophical cartography thereof

Description
My job in this thesis is to explore a supposedly dragon-filled area of philosophy, tropology. By 'tropology,' I only mean the study of figurative speech, or, more particularly, metaphors. It seems clear to most people that metaphors have meaning. But this fact flies in the face of several different theories…

My job in this thesis is to explore a supposedly dragon-filled area of philosophy, tropology. By 'tropology,' I only mean the study of figurative speech, or, more particularly, metaphors. It seems clear to most people that metaphors have meaning. But this fact flies in the face of several different theories of meaning. Such as, the meaning of a metaphor can't be properly conveyed by Possible Worlds Semantics or Truth-Conditional Semantics. Tropology is also an area of philosophy with very few commonly accepted theories. It is not like the study of reference, where there are two theories, each having a large following. The the various theories in tropology are so radically different, with each having relatively few followers, that the it is widely unexplored in philosophy. Some theories claim that metaphors is the exact same as another use of speech (namely, similes). Another claims that metaphors lack “meaning.” And a third claims that metaphors do 'mean' but getting at that meaning requires some special mental operations. By the end of this thesis, you will not only have my map of tropology, my theory of metaphors, but also some experimental philosophy about them to help put to rest some theories.
ContributorsSmith, Davis Alexander (Author) / Pinillos, Angel (Thesis advisor) / Kobes, Bernard (Committee member) / Reynolds, Steven (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2016