Dretske, Fred

Dretske, Fred. Explaining Behavior Reason in a World of Causes. Cambridge, Mass. The M.I.T. Press, 1988. 

Dretske, Fred I. Knowledge the Flow of Information. Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press, Cambridge, MA. 1981. 

I should add here that my use of the term representationalism differs from the use that one finds in such authors as Fred Dretske and Michael Tye. (See, e.g., Dretske, 1995, and Tye, 2000.) The main tenet of these authors is that the qualitative character of an experience supervenes on its representational content. I read this as committing them to the view that it is possible to explain all... 

Perhaps one more class of relations should be admitted into this elite family. In substantival theories of space, the spatial characteristics of material objects are analyzed in terms of their relations to a special entity, space itself An object has a certain shape or size because it occupies a region of space having that shape or size, and a hand (in Kants 1768 view) is left or right in virtue of some relation it stands in to absolute space. Does this view convert the sizes and shapes of material things into mere relations, or does it make relations to space one more species of quality-making relations Fred Dretske (1996, pp. 143-58). This paper was presented at the same conference as Campbelfs paper on radical extemalism, discussed previously. 

FRED DRETSKE was, at the time of his passing in 2013, Senior Research Scholar in Philosophy at Duke University. 

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