Examinations of Naturalistic Approach to Human Cognitive Activities

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Certain puzzling elements can be detected in recent attempts to give a thoroughly naturalistic explanation of the human cognitive activities. First, such prima facie unnaturalistic notions as meaning, proposition and "unverifiable" causal relations between mind and cirsumstances are often appealed to in semantic explanations of intentional attitudes. Secondly, genuine modal notions (logical or mathematical necessity and possibility) are usually introduced into nominalistic reconstructions of the mathematical theories either as surrogate for abstract entities or, at least, as indispensable primitive logical properties. We find it necessary to inquire whether these notions are capable of re-analysis so as to be acceptable according to the basic principles of naturalism. TANJI points out that what narturalism tells us is that our naive faith in uniquely specifiable "genuine" belief-contents is inherently inconsistent amtd untenable. NOMOTO seeks to reforge the notion of Frege's sense by way of developing a global semantic analysis of belief ascriptions. SHINOHARA suggests that we reexamine the problem of self-knowledge front the standpoint of naturalism. ISHIKAWA concentrates on the Kant's analysis of the notion of possibility and warns against naive modal realism. KANZAKI attempts to elucidate what consequences naturalism will have in relation to moral philosophy, in particular, to moral realism. OKAMOTO seeks to explain the possibility of our mathematical knowlegde by scrutinizing the way we invent and construct the (informal and formalized ) languages of mathematics.