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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 6203147" data-attributes="member: 42582">I agree with this: as I said to @howandwy99 upthread, the standard view in contemporary English-speaking philosophy of mind is that thoughts are higher-order properties of function-realising systems like a brain (and another standard view is that there are multiple realisations possibe - eg because (I think) Swedish is your first language, whereas English is my first and only real language, it is likely that our brains realise  (=instantiate) the capability of speaking English in quite different ways).But there is a difference between a thought and its content. The content of your thought "There is a door" is the same whether you are looking at a door (and so engaging the perceptual component of your overall cognitive system) or are imagining a door (and so engaging the imaginative component of your overall cognitive system). In the first case, assuming that there is a door, the word "door" in your thought "There is a door" refers to it. In the second case, in at least one sense of "refers" the word "door" in your (imaginative) though "There is a door" refers to nothing.In particular, while the occurence of the word "door" in your imaginative thought is itself a consequence of the state of your brain, the word does not itself refer to any part of your brain.Fictionalism is the theory of the semantics of these non-referring terms - although they are not really referring, we can treat them as if they were referring, by way of stipulation or supposition. This then underpins what is described as "truth relative to a fiction". For instance, if you imagine a door, and start telling someone (say the players you are GMing) "There is an oaken door" it is now true in the fiction that there is a door, made of wood, and not made of beech.Analysing the semantics of such utterances is technically challenging - as I said, my preferred account is Barker's - but for the purposes of this thread we don't need to go into that. All we need to do is to distinguish between the thought as a psychological entity - this is supervenient upon the state of the thinker's brain - and the content of the thought which yields its semantic properties. The drawing of this distinction goes back to Frege and Bolzano, and although I am not a thorough-going Fregean (in light of Barker's powerful criticisms) I still think we need to draw this distinction between psychological event and content. Otherwise we end up committed to absurdities such as that the word "door" sometimes refers to doors (when you use it to describe a real door) and sometimes refers to parts of people's brains, or at least to states of affairs that supervene upon such parts (when you use it to describe an imaginary door). And that is obviously wrong - apart from anything else, it would entail that we could never truly imagine a real state of affairs because as soon as we tried to imagine it the meaning of our words would change to refer to something else (namely, a part of our head or something supervening thereupon).</blockquote>

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