 |
I shall argue for a view defended by Peter Geach (1958; 1969) half a century ago and recently reworked by Matthew Soteriou (2013): the process in which a subject comes to think or judge that such and such a thing is the case, or that something follows from something else, cannot but be composed of discrete thoughts, judgments, or inferences that have no genuine duration. This view opposes the idea that thinking consists in a process that guides or determines the inferences that we state in, or with, words or diagrams, but that is distinct from, or parallel to, these inferences because they are discontinuous—and which, being so, cannot but fail to represent this process as it really is. The view that to think or judge that p, or that p follows from q, is not in itself processual in nature and has no genuine duration—even though these thoughts, judgments, or inferences may result from, or take place in a process that is temporally extended—opposes the idea that, in contrast with having the intuition that p, for example, thinking that p, or inferring that p from q, necessarily has some temporal extension. I shall indicate how radical this view is, why it sheds new light on certain puzzling remarks from Wittgenstein and Peirce on the nature of thought, and why it goes against the possibility of any phenomenology of thought.
