Hume

pp. 57-74

in: Anne J. Jacobson, Keeping the world in mind, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2013

Abstract

We can think of ourselves in ordinary life as having two quite different ways of making an audience aware of various things. One is by verbal description and the other is by example. These distinct methods correspond, as we have seen, to two different theses about the mind's relation to the environment. On each account theorists talk about representations,but the two are of very different kinds. One sort of representation, coming from language as a model, has semantic properties such as reference or aboutness. The other does not.