Propositional Attitudes

(DRAFT: I'll update when the book is published.) This started as a book about desire. I was hoping to complement what I had said about belief in my (2022). To believe something, I argued, is to be positioned to do, think and feel things in light of a possibility whose obtaining would make one right. I argued that believing is not representational, that belief states are not causes or causal powers, and that the objects of belief are ways the world (...) might be and not representations of things. Believing is not so much a response to the world as a way of being positioned in it, a way of having an environment, as Frege put it. (Frege 1956, 306) I was trying to put the believer as a rational agent positioned in a world at the heart of my account. I hoped an account of desire could round out this picture of a rational agent’s psychology. But as I thought about desire, I came to see that two ideas about the nature of goodness, one negative and one positive, were really at the heart of my thinking. The negative idea is that there is no such thing as what philosophers have variously called intrinsic goodness or simple goodness or absolute value. I guess I am a nihilist about that. The positive idea is that our world is rich in what I will call sortal quality, what others have called goodness-of-a-kind or attributive goodness. I came to think that sortal quality is at the heart not just of desire but also of pleasure and moral worth. A picture of moral psychology had come into view. And so I re-organised the book. I still say a lot about the nature of desire, or ‘wanting’ as I prefer to call it, and I think my view does complement my externalist view of belief. Wanting, I will argue, is a matter of falling short relative to a standard one falls under, failing to be as good as one could be. If believing is about having an environment to respond to, then desire is about fitting into it well. And so my book offers a comprehensive picture of a moral agent in a world where nothing is simply or absolutely good but where many kinds of things, including people, can be very good and even splendid. (shrink)

Suspension of judgment is often viewed as a member of the doxastic club, alongside belief and disbelief. In this paper, I challenge the widespread view that suspension is a commitment-involving stance on a par with belief and disbelief. Friedman's counterexamples to the traditional view that suspended judgement merely requires considering a proposition and being in a state of non-belief are criticized. I introduce a refined conception, emphasizing that suspension involves a proximal causal link between examining a proposition and the resulting (...) non-belief state. This episode manifests as an incapacity at making a judgement, occurring under specific circumstances. The refined view clarifies the nature of suspended judgement. (shrink)

Physical translation of a mental content must involve a set of causal antecedents A and a set of causal consequents B which instantiate properties that figure in strict laws as antecedent and consequent conditions respectively. Only if there are double-role events in common between A and B capable of migrating to purely A or to purely B in future depending on the role that the mental content play then, psychological anomalism can be established but without any need to give up (...) the type-identity of mental and physical events. This paper argues that belief and desire are explanatorily inextricable likewise. (shrink)

In this paper I outline the PAIR account of joint attention as a perceptual-practical, affectively charged intentional relation. I argue that to explain joint attention we need to leave the received understanding of propositions and propositional attitudes and the picture of content connected to it behind and embrace the notions of subject mode and position mode content. I also explore the relation between joint attention and communication.

I argue for the existence of imaginative beliefs: mental states that are imaginative in format and doxastic in attitude. I advance two arguments for this thesis. First, there are imaginings that play the functional roles of belief. Second, there are imaginings that play the epistemic roles of belief. These arguments supply both descriptive and normative grounds for positing imaginative beliefs. I also argue that this view fares better than alternatives that posit distinct imaginative and doxastic states to account for the (...) same phenomena. Along the way, I demonstrate the theoretical significance of imaginative beliefs by showing how they pose a challenge for standard taxonomies of the mind, clarify the sense in which imagination is occurrent and voluntary, explain the justificatory role of the imagination, and point to a deep but underappreciated symmetry between imagistic and non-imagistic thought. (shrink)

This essay discusses Peter Langland-Hassan's approach to "explaining imagination" as it plays out in his recent book of that title. Langland-Hassan offers a theory of “attitude imagining” that avoids positing what he calls a “sui generis cognitive attitude.” This theory attempts to explain things like pretend play, hypothetical reasoning, and cognition of fiction; to explain them using only (what he calls) more “basic” mental states like beliefs and desires; and thus to explain them without positing a distinct cognitive attitude of (...) imagining, as many theorists do (including me). In other words, “attitude imagining,” for Langland-Hassan, is whatever explains those things (except for a distinct cognitive attitude of imagining itself). Despite the theoretical interest of this approach, I argue it is ontologically pennywise and pound foolish: for a slight savings in ontological complexity it dramatically reduces explanatory power. (shrink)

Abstract In slogan form, the thesis of this paper is that beliefs are self-verifying fictions: We make them up, but in so doing, they come to exist, and so the fiction of belief is in fact true. This picture of belief emerges from a combination of three independently motivated views: (1) a phenomenal intentionalist picture of intentionality, on which phenomenal consciousness is the basis of intentionality; (2) what I will call a “self-ascriptivist” picture of derived representation, on which non-fundamental representational (...) features are a matter of our ascribing contents to ourselves or our mental states or contents; and (3) a representationalist picture of the attitudes, on which the attitude components of mental states (e.g., the “belief” bit of a belief that P) are represented contents. This paper outlines and motivates the view of beliefs as self-verifying fictions, compares the view to alternative views of belief, and contrasts beliefs on the resulting picture to other belief-like mental states. (shrink)

Do emotions represent values? The dominant view in philosophy has it that they do. There is wide disagreement over the details, but this core commitment is common. But there is a new comer on scene: the attitude view. According to it, rather than representing value properties, there is a value-relevant way you represent the targets of emotion. For example, in feeling angry with someone you stand to them in the relation of representing-as-having-wronged-you. Although a recent view, it has quickly generated (...) discussion. But the central considerations in favour of each view are left wanting and it is hard to see how to choose amongst these alternatives. I argue that there is an empirical path to a decision. (shrink)

Attitude verbs like ‘believe’ and ‘want’ exhibit neg-raising: an ascription of the form a doesn’t believe that p tends to convey that a disbelieves—i.e., believes the negation of—p. In ‘Belief is Weak’, Hawthore et al. observe that neg-raising does not occur with verbs like ‘know’ or ‘need’. According to them, an ascription of the form a believes that p is true just in case a is in a belief state that makes p more likely than not, and so—excepting cases of (...) complete indifference—a will either believe p or disbelieve p. I expand and revise this explanation: so-called ‘weak’ attitude verbs are used in ascriptions of an opinion about some subject matter S—a kind of selection from among the elements of S—and these ascriptions are themselves responsive to conversational topics that presuppose that the subject of the ascription has an opinion about S. ‘Strong’ attitude verbs denote more direct relationships between subject and world. (shrink)

Are feelings an essential part or aspect of emotion? Cases of unconscious emotion suggest that this is not the case. However, it has been claimed that unconscious emotions are better understood as either (a) emotions that are phenomenally conscious but not reflectively conscious, or (b) dispositions to have emotions rather than emotions proper. Here, I argue that these ways of accounting for unconscious emotions are inadequate, and propose a view of emotions as non-phenomenal attitudes that regard their contents as relevant (...) to one's motivations. (shrink)

This paper argues that functionalist metasemantic views, such as Conceptual Role Semantics and Interpretivism, face a Euthyphro challenge. The challenge, put roughly, is this: functionalist metasemantic views reverse the order of explanation. According to such views, representational mental states have the contents that they do partly because they play certain roles in our mental lives. According to an intuitive picture of the roles that representational mental states play in our mental lives, however, these states play the roles they do partly (...) because they have the contents that they do. Since explanations—even partial ones—are asymmetric (call this principle ‘the Euthyphro Principle’), we can’t accept both this intuitive picture and a functionalist metasemantics. Hence, we should reject all versions of the latter. This paper can be seen as an attempt to better articulate an intuition that has been suggested in various forms in the literature. The paper proceeds as follows. First, it shows that functionalist metasemantic views imply certain ‘partly because’ claims. Second, it argues for the Euthyphro Principle. Third, it defends the intuitive picture of representational mental states and shows that it implies ‘partly because’ claims that conflict with those made by functionalist metasemantic views. Finally, it considers ways of relaxing the intuitive picture and finds them all wanting. (shrink)

People reason not only in beliefs, but also in intentions, preferences, and other attitudes. They form preferences from existing preferences, or intentions from existing beliefs and intentions, and so on. This often involves choosing between rival conclusions. Building on Broome (Rationality through reasoning, Hoboken, Wiley. https://doi.org/10.1002/9781118609088, 2013) and Dietrich et al. (J Philos 116:585–614. https://doi.org/10.5840/jphil20191161138, 2019), we present a philosophical and formal analysis of reasoning in attitudes, with or without facing choices in reasoning. We give different accounts of choosing, in (...) terms of a conscious activity or a partly subconscious process. Reasoning in attitudes differs fundamentally from reasoning _about_ attitudes, a form of theoretical reasoning in which one discovers rather than forms attitudes. We show that reasoning in attitudes has standard formal properties (such as monotonicity), but is indeterministic, reflecting choice in reasoning. Like theoretical reasoning, it need not follow logical entailment, but for a more radical reason, namely indeterminism. This makes reasoning in attitudes harder to model logically than theoretical reasoning. But it can be studied abstractly, using indeterministic consequence operators. (shrink)

Tomis Kapitan’s work on Peirce’s conception of abduction was instrumental for our coming to see how Peircean abduction both relates to and is importantly different from inference to the best explanation (IBE). However, he ultimately concluded that Peirce’s conception of abduction was a muddle. Despite the deeply problematic nature of Peirce’s theory of abduction in these respects, Kapitan’s work on Peircean abduction offers insight into the nature of abductive inquiry that is importantly relevant to the task of making sense of (...) explanatory inquiry in the sciences in general. The view developed here stems from his work and involves disambiguating three forms of inference involved in Peircean abduction in terms of Reichenbach’s and Laudan’s context models of inquiry. Importantly, this includes understanding that abduction involves the context of pursuit. (shrink)

My belief that Socrates was wise, and your belief that Socrates was mortal can be said to have a common focus, insofar as both these thoughts are about Socrates. In Peter Geach’s terminology, the objects of our beliefs bear the feature of intentional identity, because our beliefs share the same putative target. But what if it turned out that Socrates never existed? Can a pair of thoughts share a common focus if the object both thoughts are about, does not actually, (...) really exist? Object-centric accounts of intentionality which explain the aboutness or directedness of thought in terms of the intentional object the thought in question is about, contend that thoughts which share a common focus do so in virtue of both thoughts simply being about the same intentional object. However, Alexander Sandgren contends that such theories face difficulties in explaining a puzzle of intentional identity put forward by Walter Edelberg, in which a pair of sentences seem to differ in truth value but are purportedly logically equivalent on the object-centric theory. If this is right, then it seems that any account which explains intentionality with reference to an intentional object is threatened by this result, whether this object be abstract, merely possible, Meinongian, or otherwise. In this paper, I argue that Edelberg’s Puzzle is analogous to Frege’s Puzzle and the same tools conventionally used to solve Frege’s Puzzle can be used to solve Edelberg’s Puzzle. I then propose a new object-centric solution to Edelberg’s Puzzle which takes into account modes of presentation and which is able to accommodate all the relevant linguistic data. (shrink)

This paper offers a novel argument against the phenomenal intentionality thesis (or PIT for short). The argument, which I'll call the extended mind argument against phenomenal intentionality, is centered around two claims: the first asserts that some source intentional states extend into the environment, while the second maintains that no conscious states extend into the environment. If these two claims are correct, then PIT is false, for PIT implies that the extension of source intentionality is predicated upon the extension of (...) phenomenal consciousness. The argument is important because it undermines an increasingly prominent account of the nature of intentionality. PIT has entered the philosophical mainstream and is now a serious contender to naturalistic views of intentionality like the tracking theory and the functional role theory (Loar 1987, 2003; Searle 1990; Strawson 1994; Horgan and Tienson 2002; Pitt 2004; Farkas 2008; Kriegel 2013; Montague 2016; Bordini 2017; Forrest 2017; Mendelovici 2018). The extended mind argument against PIT challenges the popular sentiment that consciousness grounds intentionality. (shrink)

In this paper we present a solution to Saul Kripke’s Puzzle About Belief Meaning and use, Dordrecht, 1979) based on Kaplan’s metaphysical picture of words. Although it is widely accepted that providing such a solution was one of the main incentives for the development of Kaplan’s theory, it was never presented by Kaplan in a systematic manner and was regarded by many as unsatisfactory. We agree with these critiques, and develop an extension of Kaplan’s theory by introducing the notion of (...) “conservative” word uses, as well as arguing for the restriction of Kripke’s Disquotational Principle only to such uses. This restriction allows us to solve Kripke’s Puzzle by arguing that the assent of the puzzle’s protagonist does not allow disquotation and ascription of corresponding inconsistent belief, as it contains the non-conservative use of a proper name. At the end of the paper, we defend two of Kaplan’s theses that we find essential for our argument to work: that individuation of word tokens involves taking into account the intention of the speaker, and that different uniquely referring proper names of the same shape should be regarded as different homonymous words. (shrink)

Jaakko Hintikka proposed treating objectual perception sentences, such as “Alice sees Bob,” as de re propositional perception sentences. Esa Saarinen extended Hintikka’s idea to eventive perception sentences, such as “Alice sees Bob smile.” These approaches, elegant as they may be, are not philosophically neutral, for they presuppose, controversially, that the content of all perceptual experiences is propositional in nature. The aim of this paper is to propose a formal treatment of objectual and eventive perception sentences that builds on Hintikka’s modal (...) approach to propositional attitude ascriptions while avoiding controversial assumptions on the nature of perceptual experiences. Despite being simple and theoretically frugal, our approach is powerful enough to express a variety of interesting philosophical views about propositional, objectual, and eventive perception sentences, thus enabling the study of their inferential relationships. (shrink)

Trois questions principales sont examinées dans cette entrée encyclopédique : 1) Qu’est-ce que la suspension du jugement ? Quelle est la relation entre la suspension du jugement et l’enquête ? 3) Quelle est la valeur de la suspension du jugement ?

On the traditional relationalist conception of singular thought, a thought has singular content when it is based on an ‘information relation’ to its object. Recent work rejects relationalism and suggests singular thoughts are distinguished from descriptive thoughts by their inferential role: only thoughts with singular content can be employed in ‘direct’ inferences, or inferences that ‘trade on identity’. Firstly this view is insufficiently clear, because it conflates two distinct ideas—one about a kind of inference, the other a kind of process (...) that grounds inferences—under the title, ‘trading on identity’. Secondly, this leaves us without a notion that can be used as an alternative to relationalism about singular thought. The first notion is no more applicable to singular than to descriptive thought. The second may help us better understand singular thought, but does so, not by replacing the view that singular thoughts are information-based, but by helping us understand the nature of information-based thought. (shrink)

The contemporary view of the relationship between conscious and unconscious intentionality consists in two claims: unconscious propositional attitudes represent the world the same way conscious ones do, and both sets of attitudes represent by having determinate propositional content. Crane has challenged both claims, proposing instead that unconscious propositional attitudes differ from conscious ones in being less determinate in nature. This paper aims to evaluate Crane's proposal. In particular, I make explicit and critique certain assumptions Crane makes in support of his (...) asymmetry, and argue for a conditional claim: if Crane is right that unconscious intentional states are indeterminate, this suggests that conscious intentional states are indeterminate in a similar fashion as well. (shrink)

On an intellectualist approach to belief, the intellectual endorsement of a proposition (such as “The working poor deserve as much respect as the handsomely paid”) is sufficient or nearly sufficient for believing it. On a pragmatic approach to belief, intellectual endorsement is not enough. Belief is behaviorally demanding. To really, fully believe, you must also “walk the walk.” This chapter argues that the pragmatic approach is preferable on pragmatic grounds: It rightly directs our attention to what matters most in thinking (...) about belief. (shrink)

Prior's puzzle is a puzzle about the substitution of certain putatively synonymous or coreferential expressions in sentences. Prior's puzzle is important, because a satisfactory solution to it should constitute a crucial part of an adequate semantic theory for both proposition-embedding expressions and attitudinal verbs. I argue that two recent solutions to this puzzle are unsatisfactory. They either focus on the meaning of attitudinal verbs or content nouns. I propose a solution relying on a recent analysis of that-clauses in linguistics. Our (...) solution is superior, as it not only avoids the problems faced by previous solutions, but it also brings developments in linguistics in line to solve an old puzzle in philosophy. (shrink)

Near the end of 'Naming the Colours', Lewis (1997) makes an interesting claim about the relationship between linguistic and mental content; we are typically unable to read the content of a belief off the content of a sentence used to express that belief or vice versa. I call this view autonomism. I motivate and defend autonomism and discuss its importance in the philosophy of mind and language. In a nutshell, I argue that the different theoretical roles that mental and linguistic (...) content play suggest these kinds of content should be understood as sensitive to different things. (shrink)

Subverting a once widely held Quinean paradigm, there is a growing consensus among philosophers of logic that higher-order quantifiers (which bind variables in the syntactic position of predicates and sentences) are a perfectly legitimate and useful instrument in the logico-philosophical toolbox, while neither being reducible to nor fully explicable in terms of first-order quantifiers (which bind variables in singular term position). This article discusses the impact of this quantificational paradigm shift on metaphysics, focussing on theories of properties, propositions, and identity, (...) as well as on the metaphysics of modality. (shrink)

Are religious beliefs psychologically different from matter-of-fact beliefs? Many scholars say no: that religious people, in a matter-of-fact way, simply think their deities exist. Others say yes: that religious beliefs are more compartmentalized, less certain, and less responsive to evidence. Little research to date has explored whether lay people themselves recognize such a difference. We addressed this question in a series of sentence completion tasks, conducted in five settings that differed both in religious traditions and in language: the US, Ghana, (...) Thailand, China, and Vanuatu. Participants everywhere routinely used different verbs to describe religious versus matter-of-fact beliefs, and they did so even when the ascribed belief contents were held constant and only the surrounding context varied. These findings support the view that people from diverse cultures and language communities recognize a difference in attitude type between religious belief and everyday matter-of-fact belief. (shrink)

Typically, nudging is a technique for steering the choices of people without giving reasons or using enforcement. In benevolent cases, it is used when people are insufficiently responsive to reason. The nudger triggers automatic cognitive mechanisms – sometimes even biases – in smart ways in order to push irrational people in the right direction. Interestingly, this technique can also be applied to doxastic attitudes. Someone who is doxastically unresponsive to evidence can be nudged into forming true beliefs or doxastic attitudes (...) that are propositionally justified. When doxastic nudging uses non-rational mechanisms, the worry is that nudging cannot result in justified beliefs or knowledge, as the resulting doxastic attitudes lack the right kind of basis. In this paper, I will argue that given the right background views about knowledge, justified beliefs and the relevant processes, epistemic nudging is possible even in these cases. That is, all kinds of nudging can – in appropriate circumstances – produce justified beliefs or knowledge in the nudgee. (shrink)

According to the Self-Location Thesis, certain types of visual experiences have self-locating and so first-person, spatial contents. Such self-locating contents are typically specified in relational egocentric terms. So understood, visual experiences provide support for the claim that there is a kind of self-consciousness found in experiential states. This paper critically examines the Self-Location Thesis with respect to dynamic-reflexive visual experiences, which involve the movement of an object toward the location of the perceiving subject. The main aim of this paper is (...) to offer an alternative interpretation of these cases which resists attributing them self-locating content, arguing for a replacement of the de se component with a non-conceptual equivalent of the indexical ‘here’. In its final section, the paper also considers an extension of the h-replacement account to cases of visual kinesthesis. (shrink)

Moral subjectivism is commonly associated with out-of-favour theories like, e.g., Alfred Ayer’s emotivism or John Mackie’s error theory. This paper approaches the field against the background of the attitudinal character of morality and religion. The possibility of a brand of moral subjectivism is established which is common to Ayer’s and Mackie’s theories in name only yet still has significant merits. The perspective from action theory and the philosophy of mind suggests that the problem of moral obligation, central to moral philosophy, (...) is more convincingly dealt with by subjectivism than by its rivals: In contrast to realism or even relativism (with which subjectivism is often confused), subjectivism can help to explain the peculiarities of obligation without forcing us to disregard the parallel problem in the field of religion. This finding calls into question the rationale for, as well as the success of, central assumptions in ontology and semantics which the realist so freely hands out in order to make his point: If religious facts and the truth-aptness of religious judgements will not explain religious obligation, moral facts and the truth-aptness of moral judgements will not help the moral realist either. So unless we do not wish to simply cast the problem of moral obligation aside, in future, moral subjectivism must be seriously considered as a worthwhile position in its own right. [in German] **************************************************************************************************** ********** Moralischer Subjektivismus ist ein Oberbegriff für Theorien wie Alfred Ayers „Emotivismus“ und John Mackies „Irrtumstheorie“, die heute kaum noch Vertreter finden. In diesem Aufsatz beleuchte ich das Feld vom Einstellungscharakter von Moral und Religion her. Ich lege so die Möglichkeit eines anderen moralischen Subjektivismus dar, der mit Ayers oder Mackies Theorie nur das Rubrum gemein hätte und doch gewichtige Vorzüge aufweist. Die handlungstheoretische Betrachtung von Moral und Religion mit Hilfe der Philosophie des Geistes legt nahe, dass dieser moralische Subjektivismus mit dem für die Moralphilosophie zentralen Problem des moralischen Sollens besser umgehen kann als seine Rivalen: Anders als der Realismus oder gar der Relativismus (mit dem der Subjektivismus oft verwechselt wird), kann der hier ausgeleuchtete Subjektivismus mit der besonderen Verbindlichkeit moralischer Forderungen umgehen, ohne die Parallele zur besonderen Verbindlichkeit religiöser Forderungen in Abrede stellen zu müssen. Die Rolle und Durchschlagkraft der vom Realisten so freigiebig gespendeten ontologischen oder semantischen Zusatzannahmen er- scheint vor diesem Hintergrund fragwürdig. Dem religiösen Realisten wird man vergleichbare Annahmen nicht zugeben wollen und muss es auch nicht. Dann aber können wir die Erklärung besonderer Verbindlichkeit generell nicht auf Ontologie oder Semantik gründen. Der verbreitete Appell an sogenannte moralische Tatsachen oder die behauptete Wahrheitsfähigkeit moralischer Sätze erweist sich so als wirkungslos. Sofern wir das Problem des moralischen Sollens überhaupt weiter ernst nehmen wollen, muss der moralische Subjektivismus als Position künftig ernsthaft erwogen werden. (shrink)

According to Lynne Rudder Baker’s Practical Realism, we know that we have beliefs, desires, and other propositional attitudes independent of any scientific investigation. Propositional attitudes are an indispensable part of our everyday conception of the world and not in need of scientific validation. This paper asks what is the nature of the attitudes such that we may know them so well from a commonsense perspective. I argue for a self-ascriptivist view, on which we have propositional attitudes in virtue of ascribing (...) them to ourselves. On this view, propositional attitudes are derived representational states, deriving their contents and their attitude types from our self-ascriptions. (shrink)

What's wrong with modalities in (Wittgenstein 1922)? In (Suszko 1968), the writer argued that "Wittgenstein was somewhat confused and wrong in certain points. For example, he did not see the clear-cut distinction between language (theory) and metalanguage (metatheory): a confusion between use and mention of expressions". Furthermore, a modal logic was proposed in (von Wright 1986) as depicting Wittgenstein's bipolarity thesis in a S5 frame. -/- The aim of the present paper is to deal with the specific case of epistemic (...) modal logic: such a logic of propositional attitudes assumes a philosophy of language that would violate Wittgenstein's two main assumptions. (shrink)

L'article s'intéresse aux obstacles épistémologiques qui empêchèrent Wittgenstein d'admettre l'idée moderne de logique modale et, en particulier, les logiques d'attitudes propositionnelles. Tout en proposant un aperçu rétrospectif de la logique des modalités épistémiques, nous verrons que ces obstacles reposent avant tout sur la nature de l'espace logique présenté dans le Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus et le statut métaphysique du sujet. Des passages éclairants seront rappelés pour justi.

Russell prétend qu’un examen des croyances est indispensable pour définir nos raisonnements quotidiens et comprendre ce que les philosophes entendent par la notion de vérité. Cela étant, l’auteur considère qu’une étude de ces croyances n’a aucun rapport avec la logique, laquelle concerne uniquement le vrai et le faux. En d’autres termes, Russell associe croyance et psychologie tout en réservant le domaine de la logique au thème de la proposition, vraie ou fausse par définition. Une certaine théorie de la vérité sous-tend (...) son rejet primordial d’une logique épistémique ; si la croyance a un intérêt philosophique, c’est parce que Russell se sert de son examen pour discerner la théorie de la vérité que défendent plusieurs philosophes : la théorie de la vérité-cohérence est une cible principale du Britannique, qui défend pour sa part une théorie de la vérité-correspondance en caractérisant la proposition par sa relation de correspondance ou de non-correspondance avec un fait. (shrink)

Traditionally, ‘that’-clauses occurring in attitude attributions are taken to denote the objects of the attitudes. Prior raised a famous problem: even if Frege fears that the Begriffsschrift leads to a paradox, it is unlikely that he fears a proposition, a sentence or what have you as the alleged object denoted by the ‘that’-clause. The usual way out is to say that ‘that’-clauses do not contribute the objects of the attitudes but their contents. I will show that, if we accept this (...) answer, either we’d better stop working on attitude attributions or we’d better work harder on them. (shrink)

In English, in order to speak about Arthur’s attitudes, we use sentences like “Arthur believes that natural language is messy”. For sentences of this kind we have a standard theory, according to which the ‘that’-clause ‘that natural language is messy’ denotes a proposition. As Prior showed for the first time, the standard theory appears to be at odds with some linguistic data. Geach and Prior both assumed that linguistic data are to be taken as reliable guides to a correct semantic (...) account and I will start by raising some worries concerning their methodology. Because of these data, Prior and Geach suggested some non-standard accounts. I will then show that if we take linguistic data seriously, their non-standard accounts do not fare any better than the standard theory. My general conclusion will thus not only be that Prior’s and Geach’s methodology is disputable, but also that their conclusions do not seem to follow even if we grant the reliability of their methodology. (shrink)

We discuss misinformation about “the liar antinomy” with special reference to Tarski’s 1933 truth-definition paper [1]. Lies are speech-acts, not merely sentences or propositions. Roughly, lies are statements of propositions not believed by their speakers. Speakers who state their false beliefs are often not lying. And speakers who state true propositions that they don’t believe are often lying—regardless of whether the non-belief is disbelief. Persons who state propositions on which they have no opinion are lying as much as those who (...) state propositions they believe to be false. Not all lies are statements of false propositions—some lies are true; some have no truth-value. People who only occasionally lie are not liars: roughly, liars repeatedly and habitually lie. Some half-truths are statements intended to mislead even though the speakers “interpret” the sentences used as expressing true propositions. Others are statements of propositions believed by the speakers to be questionable but without revealing their supposed problematic nature. The two “formulations” of “the antinomy of the liar” in [1], pp.157–8 and 161–2, have nothing to do with lying or liars. The first focuses on an “expression” Tarski calls ‘c’, namely the following. -/- c is not a true sentence -/- The second focuses on another “expression”, also called ‘c’, namely the following. -/- for all p, if c is identical with the sentence ‘p’, then not p -/- Without argumentation or even discussion, Tarski implies that these strange “expressions” are English sentences. [1] Alfred Tarski, The concept of truth in formalized languages, pp. 152–278, Logic, Semantics, Metamathematics, papers from 1923 to 1938, ed. John Corcoran, Hackett, Indianapolis 1983. -/- https://www.academia.edu/12525833/Sentence_Proposition_Judgment_Statement_and_Fact_Speaking_about_th e_Written_English_Used_in_Logic. (shrink)

Naturalism in theoretical philosophy comes in three kinds: metaphysical, scientific and semantical. Metaphysical naturalism holds that only natural things exist, scientific (or methodological) naturalism holds that the methods of natural science provide the only avenue to truth, semantic (or analytic) naturalism tries to provide sufficient nonintentional conditions for intentional phenomena. The paper argues that analytic naturalism does not render metaphysical or scientific naturalism obsolete, but can be understood as a further step in elaborating upon these programmes. The intentional idiom of (...) belief-desire psychology is the main obstacle for a scientific view of the world. It is hard to see how human beings and their abilities could get integrated into the natural order if intentional phenomena defy analysis in naturalistically acceptable terms. Against this view, Stephen Stich has argued that the search for a naturalistic criterion of acceptable predicates is misguided, since there is no way of identifying naturalistically acceptable predicates in advance. All that counts, Stich claims, is that the predicates in question are applied in “successful scientific theories”. A naturalist, however, must be able to indicate what he takes to be successful science and why. Perhaps analytic naturalism is without prospect of success. This would be bad news for the naturalist, which he cannot sidestep by claiming hat scientific naturalism must have had something different in mind. (shrink)

Cognitive neuroscientists frequently talk about the brain representing the world. Some philosophers claim that this is a confusion. This paper argues that there is no confusion, and outlines one thing that might mean, using the notion of a model derived from the philosophy of science. This description is then extended to make apply to propositional attitude attributions. A number of problems about propositional attitude attributions can be solved or dissolved by treating propositional attitudes as models.

Propositionalism is the view that the contents of intentional attitudes have a propositional structure. Objectualism opposes propositionalism in allowing the contents of these attitudes to be ordinary objects or properties. Philosophers including Talbot Brewer, Paul Thagard, Michelle Montague, and Alex Grzankowski attack propositionalism about such attitudes as desire, liking, and fearing. This article defends propositionalism, mainly on grounds that it better supports psychological explanations.

Propositional attitude sentences, such as "John believes that snow is white," are traditionally taken to express the holding of a relation between a subject and what ‘that’-clauses like ‘that snow is white’ denote, i.e. propositions. On the traditional account, propositions are abstract, mind- and language-independent entities. Recently, some have raised some serious worries for the traditional account and thought that we were mistaken about the kind of entities propositions are. Over the last ten years there has then been a boom (...) of accounts of propositions in terms of mental acts. But Friederike Moltmann has recently suggested that in accounting for attitudes we should forget about mindand language-independent entities and acts and follow Twardowski in focusing instead on attitudinal objects, which are the products of our mental life. In this paper, I will focus on some semantic problems that any product-based account seems to face. Moreover, I will show that product-based accounts may be also criticised on ontological grounds. My conclusion will be that we lack a reason to think that in accounting for propositional attitudes we should focus on the alleged products of our mental lives. (shrink)

This essay develops the thesis that Frege’s notion of grasping does not refer to some special psychological relation between a subject and a proposition. Instead, the verb “to grasp” is a contextually defined technical term that, taken by itself, has no meaning. If that is right, then not only Frege’s resentment to the idea of grasping singular propositions is unfounded. The view that intentionality without representations is possible, championed by some advocates of the New Theory of Reference, is groundless as (...) well. (shrink)

The communication of de se attitudes poses a problem for “participant- neutral” analyses of communication in terms of propositions expressed or proposed updates to the common ground: when you tell me “I am an idiot”, you express a first person de se attitude, but as a result I form a different, second person attitude, viz. that you are an idiot. I argue that when we take seriously the asymmetry between speaker and hearer in semantics this problem disappears. To prove this (...) I propose a concrete model of communication as the transmission of information from the speaker’s mental state to the hearer’s. My analysis is couched in Discourse Representation Theory, a formal semantic framework that linguists use for modeling conversational common ground updates, but that can also be applied to describe the individual speech participants’ dynamically changing mental states. (shrink)

An important objection to sententialist theories of attitude reports is that they cannot accommodate the principle that one cannot know that someone believes that p without knowing what it is that he believes. This paper argues that a parallel problem arises for propositionalist accounts that has gone largely unnoticed, and that, furthermore, the usual resources for the propositionalist do not afford an adequate solution. While non-standard solutions are available for the propositionalist, it turns out that there are parallel solutions that (...) are available for the sententialist. Since the difficulties raised seem to show that the mechanism by which sentential complements serve to inform us about attitudes and about sentence meaning does not depend on their referring to propositions, this casts doubt on whether talk of propositions should retain a significant theoretical role in the enterprise of understanding thought, language and communication. (shrink)

In this article, the attempts by David Lewis and Brian Loar to make perspicuous the logical form of sentences ascribing propositional attitudes to individuals are set out and criticized. Both work within the assumption of the truth of 'type' physicalism, and require that logically perspicuous attitude ascriptions be compatible with the demands of such a doctrine. It is argued that neither carry out this task successfully - Lewis's perspicuous ascriptions have counter-intuitive implications, while Loar's avoidance of these undermines type physicalism (...) itself. (shrink)

This paper explains what an infinite regress argument is. Part 1 contains some examples of infinite regress arguments. Part 2 presents a schema for all such arguments an defines an infinite regress argument as one that approximates to the schema. Part 3 tests the schema on the examples. Part 4 contrasts my account of infinite regress arguments with that given by Passmore and shows that Passmore's theory succumbs to objections. Part 5 distinguishes an infinite regress argument from an infinite regress (...) and defines an infinite regress. Part 6 explains the dyslogistic force of 'infinite regress'. (shrink)

[Edited from Conclusion section:] We have looked at various challenging issues to do with getting connectionism to cope with high-level cognitive activities such a reasoning and natural language understanding. The issues are to do with various facets of generalization that are not commonly noted. We have been concerned in particular with the special forms these issues take in the arena of propositional attitude processing. The main problems we have looked at are: (1) The need to construct explicit representations of generalizations, (...) not just generalize correctly to individual cases; (2) The need to be able to match two or more complex short-term information structures, to enable rapid generalization from recent examples rather than from long-term memories; (3) The need to represent and reason with anomalous combinations of concepts; (4) The need to perform embedded reasoning. This presents special problems for systems using non-concatenative representations (as in mainstream connectionist approaches). We also touched on vague quantification in attitude report complements. Neither this topic nor that of analogies between short-term structures (point 2) has been adequately addressed in the symbolic framework, let alone in connectionism. -/- The opportunities and problems covered are put forward as things worth being optimistic about or pessimistic about, respectively. They are not put forward as decisive arguments for or against connectionism. The hope is that this chapter contributes to a greater understanding of the connectionist/symbolist gap by presenting some unusual issues and by throwing new light on some well known ones. (shrink)

I argue that one intends that ϕ if one has a desire that ϕ and an appropriately related means-end belief. Opponents, including Setiya and Bratman, charge that this view can't explain three things. First, intentional action is accompanied by knowledge of what we are doing. Second, we can choose our reasons for action. Third, forming an intention settles a deliberative question about what to do, disposing us to cease deliberating about it. I show how the desire- belief view can explain (...) why these phenomena occur when they occur, and why they don't when they don't. (shrink)

I explore the possibility that propositional attitudes are not basic in folk psychology, and that what we really ascribe to people are relations to individuals, those that the apparently propositional contents of beliefs, desires, and other states concern. In particular, the relation between a state and the individuals that it tracks shows how ascription of propositional attitudes could grow out of ascription of relations between people and objects.

One of the benefits of the 2D framework we looked at last week was that it explained how we could understand a sentence without knowing which proposition it expressed. And we could do this even if we give an account of understanding which is closely tied to the possible worlds semantics we use to analyse propositions. Really this can be done very easily, without appeal to any high-flying Kripkean cases. In “Analytic Metaphysics” Jackson discusses a very simple case of it. (...) I can understand an utterance of “I have a beard” without knowing which proposition it expresses. I know how the proposition is generated from context plus meaning, if X is the speaker then the sentence expresses the proposition X has a beard. And that is enough for understanding. But if I don’t know who said the sentence, so I don’t know who X is, I don’t know which proposition is expressed by that utterance. (shrink)

Neosentimentalist accounts of value need an explanation of which of the sentiments they discuss are pro-attitudes, which attitudes are con-attitudes, and why. I argue that this project has long been neglected in the philosophical literature, even by those who make extensive use of the distinction between pro- and con-attitudes. Using the attitudes of awe and respect as exemplars, I argue that it is not at all clear what if anything makes these attitudes pro-attitudes. I conclude that neither our intuitive sense (...) of the distinction nor the vague accounts of it that exist in the philosophical literature are especially helpful in sorting out the hard cases. What is needed is a more explicit and thorough account of what the valence of our attitudes consists in. (shrink)