Philosophy

Basically, phenomenology studies the structure of various types of experience
ranging from perception, thought, memory, imagination, emotion, desire, and
volition to bodily awareness, embodied action, and social activity, including
linguistic activity. The structure of these forms of experience typically
involves what Husserl called "intentionality", that is, the directedness of
experience toward things in the world, the property of consciousness that it is
a consciousness of or about something. According to classical Husserlian
phenomenology, our experience is directed toward — represents or "intends" —
things only through particular concepts, thoughts, ideas, images, etc.
These make up the meaning or content of a given experience, and are distinct
from the things they present or mean.

Holmes's correspondence offers no shortage of examples of this disdain. About
a pacifist in World War I, he wrote, "What damned fools people are who believe
things. . . . All 'isms seem to me silly-but this hyperaethereal respect for
human life seems perhaps the silliest of all." In another letter, he wrote, "I
see no reason for attributing to a man a significance different in kind from
that which belongs to a baboon or a grain of sand."

He took a similarly jaundiced view of the concepts of rights, truth, and
justice. "All my life I have sneered at the natural rights of man." Rights were
merely "what a given crowd will fight for." Truth was "what I can't help
believing. . . . I can't help preferring port to ditch- water, but I see no
ground for supposing that the cosmos shares my weakness." And de gustibus non
est disputandum. "[W]hen men differ in taste as to the kind of world they want
the only thing to do is go to work killing."

Yet Holmes eventually came to appreciate aspects of the wartime experience
that had snuffed out his ideals. The highest expression of that appreciation
came in "The Soldier's Faith," an address Holmes gave at Harvard on Memorial Day
in 1895: "I do not know what is true. I do not know the meaning of the universe.
But in the midst of doubt, in the collapse of creeds, there is one thing I do
not doubt, that no man who lives in the same world with most of us can doubt,
and that is that the faith is true and adorable which leads a soldier to throw
away his life in obedience to a blindly accepted duty, in a cause which he
little understands, in a plan of campaign of which he has no notion, under
tactics of which he does not see the use." Teddy Roosevelt, of course, loved the
speech.

Naturalism and LOTH

One of the most attractive features of LOTH is that it is a central component
of an ongoing research program in philosophy of psychology to naturalize the
mind, to give a theoretical framework in which the mind could naturally be seen
as part of the physical world without postulating irreducibly psychic entities,
events, processes or properties

The Language of Thought Hypothesis is so-called because of (B): token mental
representations are like sentences in a language in that they have a
syntactically and semantically regimented constituent structure. Put
differently, the mental representations that are the direct "objects" of
attitudes are structurally complex symbols whose complexity lends itself to a
syntactic and semantic analysis. This is also why the LOT is sometimes called
Mentalese.

Representational Realism 

To be a representational realist is to think
that some, many or most mental state attributions that involve apparent content,
e.g., the belief that there is no justice in poverty, correspond to mental
states that are related to explicit tokens with the expressed content. That is,
what makes the above attribution true is that the mind/brain actually possesses
a representation that means that there is no justice in poverty.