The emotive emergence of objective thought

Abstract

Davidson’s theory of triangulation is a brilliant exponent of externalists theories of mental content. According to triangulation, thoughts are attributed to an agent regarding evidential bases made of causal and social interactions. Thought is said objective in this precise sense, in that it depends both on world and other people to be ascribed. This kind of externalism must face the problem of objective thought attribution when evidential bases are insufficient, as when we must interpret nonverbal children. This difficulty raises because of a distorted conceptualization of triangulation scenarios. We propose a redefinition of triangulation that employs different sources of emotion theory. Our new conceptualization accounts for the objectivity of thought in cases of interpretation of verbal and nonverbal humans.

Keywords

• externismo
• triangulación
• emoción
• Donald Davidson