| This paper mainly discusses the philosophical viewpoint of Gareth Evans, an eminent oxford philosopher, on "Demonstrative Thought". The exploration on "Demonstrative Thought" plays two important role for Evans’s philosophical project.The first, as a Neo-Fregean, Evans’s theory on "Demonstrative Thought" is a defending of Frege’s "sense" against the challenges imposed by the Direct Referentialists such as Saul Kripke, David Kaplan or John Perry who insist that the meaning of demonstratives cannot be explained in a Fregean way at all, rather, they believe, the meaning of the demonstratives can only be the object they refer. Evans’s refutation against the Direct Referentialists introduces a new clarification about the Frege’s "sense". For him, the "sense" can only be interpreted as "ways of thinking of something". Meanwhile, as Evans points out, we are necessarily thinking of the object in one way or another for any objects which constitutes our thought, so the theory of Frege’s "sense", under Evans’s interpretation, became not only correct but, as his interpretation entails, a must.And the second, Evans’s exploration on "Demonstrative Thought" has a more fundamentally philosophical interests which address the question of how our thoughts are related with world. What is the relation between our thoughts and world? According to a long philosophical tradition, it is the concepts we human beings have then can we know the world and, consequently, form thoughts about it. In other words, only because the objects in world satisfy the conditions imposed by our qualitatively conceptual system then can they become the objects of our thought. For instance, a flower we see became our object of our thought in light of it satisfies the concepts such as "red", "fragrant", "stingy", Etc. Russell, for example, held these about the ways we know the world and therefore concluded that we cannot have acquaintance about the world. So the contemporary analytical philosophers such as Hilary Putnam or Peter Strawson, with their thought experiments "Twin Earth" or "Reduplication Universe", has argued that we cannot have a real relation between thoughts and world if we only employ our qualitatively conceptual systems. But if not concepts, what should we do? As we shall see, Evans’s exploration on "Demonstrative Thought" is a philosophical attempt to answer these problems."Demonstrative Thought" are acquired, Evans argues, in a non-conceptual, non-descriptive way. And he postulates two conditions we should meet in order to have a demonstrative thought. The first is that we should receive information from the object ours thoughts concerns about (and hence he excludes the possibility our thoughts are about the twin object in the twin earth); second, he requires that we should be able to discriminate the object we think about with all other objects, and this requirements are called by him "Russell’s Principle". The reason why we should possess these abilities to discriminate things is largely because Evans’s insistence that only sentences in mind can not be regarded as thoughts. But how is it possible that we can discriminate the object we think about from all others things? Evans’s solution is our Actions, and after that he resorts to Space. Evans believes that his solution can transcend Russell’s counterintuitive claims that we cannot have direct acquaintance about the world, and can solve the problems instantiated in the "Twin Earth" or "Reduplication Universe", therefor has proved that the relation between our thoughts and world are direct, and, real.Though Evans claimed that his solutions have solved all of the problems above, and has proved that we are related with world in a non-conceptual, descriptive way, there are still some theoretical difficulties in his theories. The biggest challenge comes from the phenomena of "hallucination", for Evans’s solutions entail that if no information we receive, then no thought at all. But this too is counter-intuitive as well as the claims made by Russell that we cannot have direct acquaintance with objects in the world. All these difficulties will be discussed in detail. |
