Propositional or Non-Propositional Attitudes?
Philosophical Studies 168 (1):179-210 (2014)
Abstract
Propositionalism is the view that intentional attitudes, such as belief, are relations to propositions. Propositionalists argue that propositionalism follows from the intuitive validity of certain kinds of inferences involving attitude reports. Jubien (2001) argues powerfully against propositions and sketches some interesting positive proposals, based on Russell’s multiple relation theory of judgment, about how to accommodate “propositional phenomena” without appeal to propositions. This paper argues that none of Jubien’s proposals succeeds in accommodating an important range of propositional phenomena, such as the aforementioned validity of attitude-report inferences. It then shows that the notion of a predication act-type, which remains importantly Russellian in spirit, is sufficient to explain the range of propositional phenomena in question, in particular the validity of attitude-report inferences. The paper concludes with a discussion of whether predication act-types are really just propositions by another name.
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Revision history

From Folk Psychology to Cognitive Science: The Case Against Belief.Stich, Stephen P.
Word and Object.Quine, W. V.
Speech Acts: An Essay in the Philosophy of Language.Searle, John R.
The Things We Mean.Schiffer, Stephen
The Nature and Structure of Content.King, Jeffrey C.
View all 64 references / Add more references

Models for Counterparts.Torza, Alessandro
Act-Based Conceptions of Propositional Content. Contemporary and Historical Perspectives.Moltmann, Friederike & Textor, Mark (eds.)
Grammar, Ontology, and the Unity of Meaning.Reichard, Ulrich
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2013-03-15
Total downloads
476 ( #4,620 of 37,195 )
Recent downloads (6 months)
23 ( #15,258 of 37,195 )
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