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Too often today it seems we find ourselves communicating from radically different perspectives on the world and we often despair of communication even being possible. Peter Ludlow argues that perspectival content, or what some call indexical content, is ineliminable and ubiquitous, running through our accounts of human action and emotions, perception, normative behaviour, and even our theories of computation and information. While such content may be ineliminable, it also gives rise to philosophical puzzles - particularly those involving reporting these contents from different perspectival positions. Such puzzles have led some to try and abandon perspectival content, and others to despair of communication across diverse perspectival positions. Ludlow argues that communication across diverse perspectival positions is not only possible, but routine, and develops a theory of interperspectival content and cognitive dynamics to explain how it is accomplished.
List of contents
- Introduction
- 1: Why We Need Interperspectival Content
- 2: Tense and Interperspectival Content
- 3: Communication Using Interperspectival Contents
- 4: Some Alternative Accounts of Interperspectival Contents
- 5: Computation, Information, and Interperspectival Content
- 6: A-series/B-series Compatibilism
- 7: Some Additional Metaphysical Questions
- 8: Interperspectival content and Physical Theory
- 9: Conclusion
- Appendix: Presentism
- A1: Is Presentism Either Trivial or False?
- A2: Presentism and the Problem of Temporal Anaphora
About the author
Peter Ludlow has published in a number of areas, ranging from linguistics and the philosophy of language, to topics concerning group knowledge, blockchain technology, virtual worlds, and hacktivism. His recent published books include Living Words: Meaning Underdetermination and the Dynamic Lexicon, and The Philosophy of Generative Linguistics (both with OUP).
Summary
We often find ourselves communicating from radically different perspectives on the world. In this new book Ludlow explains how we successfully communicate across some radically diverse perspectival positions, including diverse temporal, spatial and personal positions, through our use of cognitive dynamics.
Additional text
Recommended.
Report
Recommended. L.A. Wilkinson, CHOICE
