Cognition Through Understanding

Cognition Through Understanding presents a selection of Tyler Burge's essays that use epistemology to illumine powers of mind. The essays focus on epistemic warrants that differ from those warrants commonly discussed in epistemology--those for ordinary empirical beliefs and for logical and mathematical beliefs. The essays center on four types of cognition warranted through understanding--self-knowledge, interlocution, reasoning, and reflection. Burge argues that by reflecting on warrants for these types of cognition, one better understands cognitive powers that are distinctive of persons, and (on earth) of human beings. The collection presents three previously unpublished independent essays, in addition to substantial, retrospective commentary. The retrospective commentary invites the reader to make connections that were not fully in mind when the essays were written.

Tyler Burge is Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the University of California, Los Angeles. He is the author of Truth, Thought, Reason: Essays on Frege (OUP, 2005), Foundations of Mind (OUP, 2007), and Origins of Objectivity (OUP, 2010).

1: Introduction
I: Self-Knowledge
2: Individualism and Self-Knowledge
3: Our Entitlement to Self-Knowledge
4: Memory and Self-Knowledge
5: A Century of Deflation and a Moment of Self-Knowledge
6: Mental Agency in Authoritative Self-Knowledge: Reply to Kobes
7: Self and Self-Understanding: the Dewey Lectures - Some Origins of Self
8: Self and Self-Understanding: the Dewey Lectures - Self and Constitutive Norms
9: Self and Self-Understanding: the Dewey Lectures - Self-Understanding
II: Interlocution
10: Content Preservation
11: Postscript: 'Content Preservation'
12: Interlocution, Perception, and Memory
13: Computer Proof, Apriori Knowledge, and Other Minds
14: Comprehension and Interpretation
15: A Warrant for Belief in Other Minds
III: Reasoning and the Individuality of Persons
16: Reason and the First Person
17: Memory and Persons
18: De Se Preservation and Personal Identity: Reply to Shoemaker
19: Modest Dualism
20: Epistemic Warrant: Humans and Computers
IV: Reflection
21: Reasoning about Reasoning
22: Thought Experiments and Semantic Competence: Reply to Benejam
23: Concepts, Conceptions, Reflective Understanding: Reply to Peacocke
24: Reflection
25: Living Wages of Sinn
Bibliography
Index