Confusion

Camp rejects the philosophical conceit that confusion is a kind of ambiguity; his fundamental claim is that confusion is not a mental state. He proposes a novel characterization of confusion, and then demonstrates its fruitfulness with several applications in the history of philosophy and the history of science.

Imagine that you think you see your car in the lot at Dodger Stadium, but your key won’t work. You think to yourself, ‘I owe $500 on this car.’ Then you see a stuffed Panda in the backseat and decide that it’s a different car. When you thought about ‘this car,’ were you thinking of the car you couldn’t unlock or the car that you owned? Camp says neither. You were thinking about something like both but you did not succeed in referring to either. Camp…has not just produced a brain twister. His problem can be found in Descartes and Locke, who worried that we seem not to perceive actual things but to confront only ideas of them. If we can’t refer without unique objects of reference, our claims to truth may be in trouble. There are alternatives to his theory of reference, but Camp’s book…will provoke thought.
-- Leslie Armour Library Journal