I aim to alleviate the pessimism with which some philosophers regard the 'objective attitude', thereby removing a particular obstacle which P.F. Strawson and others have placed in the way of more widespread scepticism about moral responsibility. First, I describe what I consider the objective attitude to be, and then address concerns about this raised by Susan Wolf. Next, I argue that aspects of certain attitudes commonly thought to be opposed to the objective attitude are (...) in fact compatible with it. Finally, I examine the prospects of someone who wishes to adopt the objective attitude permanently. In response to philosophers who claim that this would be psychologically impossible, I argue that our commitment to attitudes that presuppose moral responsibility can soften and fade, often without our noticing it. (shrink)

In the context of his highly influential defence of compatibilism, P. F. Strawson 1962 introduced the terms "reactive attitude" and "objective attitude" to the free-will lexicon. He argued, in effect, that relinquishing such reactive attitudes as resentment and moral indignation isn't a real possibility for us, since doing so would commit us to exclusive objectivity, a stance incompatible with ordinary interpersonal relationships. While most commentators have challenged Strawson's link between personal relationships and the reactive attitudes, Tamler Sommers (...) 2007 has taken up Strawson's claim that exclusive objectivity would preclude meaningful relationships. Here I set out a defence of this claim by identifying a kind of interpersonal caring that is plausibly both required for such relationships and excluded by the objective attitude. I then argue that this defence helps to support Strawson's more controversial claim about personal relationships and the reactive attitudes. (shrink)

In this article, I discuss Gerbert Faure’s Vrije wil, moraal en het geslaagde leven (Free Will, Morality, and the Well-lived Life). I summarize and elucidate Faure’s argument. My criticisms are directed primarily at the first chapter of the book, in which Faure develops what he regards as a Strawsonian account of free will and moral responsibility. Faure denies that we have free will; I argue that Strawsonians should not deny this. Faure argues that, although we do not have free will, (...) it is often justified to hold others responsible, because we owe it to the victim(s) of a wrong to hold the perpetrator responsible; it is our moral duty. I argue that we only have a moral duty to hold perpetrators responsible if they are morally responsible. I also comment on the way in which Faure presents Strawson’s distinction between theory and practice. (shrink)

Propositions are the things we believe, intend, desire, and so on, but discussions are often less precise than they could be and an important driver of this deficiency has been a focus on the objects but a neglect of the attitudinal relations we bear to them. In what follows, we will offer some thoughts on what it means for a proposition to be the object of an attitude and we will argue that an important part of the story lies (...) with the attitude relations rather than the propositions. As we will see there are infinitely many relations we might bear to a proposition, but the propositional attitude relations are special amongst them. Accounting for what makes them special will be an important component in the discussion that follows. We will argue that once one appreciates certain facts about propositional attitude relations, various claims that metaphysicians often make regarding propositions themselves begin to look undermotivated. In fact, many views on the metaphysical nature of propositions come to look like plausible candidates for being that to which our propositional attitudes relate us. As will emerge, we will see that the principle role of propositions in the theory of mind is simply to keep track of how our attitudinal states represent things as being. But, we argue, in order to do this work, very few constraints must be placed on the nature of propositions themselves. In particular, contra much of the recent work on the metaphysics of propositions, they need not represent nor must they be structured. In light of these observations, we conclude by sketching our own favored minimalist view of propositions. (shrink)

This paper offers a positive account of an important but under-explored class of mental states, non-propositional attitudes such as loving one’s department, liking lattice structures, fearing Freddy Krueger, and hating Sherlock Holmes. In broadest terms, the view reached is a representationalist account guided by two puzzles. The proposal allows one to say in an elegant way what differentiates a propositional attitude from an attitude merely about a proposition. The proposal also allows one to offer a unified account of (...) the non-propositional attitudes that captures both empty and non-empty cases by properly locating the posited representations in the metaphysical structure of the attitudes. (shrink)

In a range of recent and not so recent work, I have developed a novel semantics of attitude reports on which the notion of an attitudinal object or cognitive product takes center stage, that is, entities such as thoughts claims and decisions. The purpose of this note is to give a brief summary of this account against the background of the standard semantics of attitude reports and to show that the various sorts of criticism that Felappi recently advanced (...) against it are mistaken. (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)

This is a prepublication version of my book Objects and Attitudes. The book develops a novel semantics of attitude reports, modal sentences, and quotation based on the view that sentences semantically act as predicates of various attitudinal and modal objects, entities like claims, requests, promises, obligations, and permissions, rather than standing for abstract propositions playing the role of objects. The approach develops truthmaker semantics for attitudinal and modal objects and has a wide range of applications to issues in philosophy (...) of language, semantics, and philosophy of mind. (shrink)

These are my replies to comments on my book *On Believing* (OUP 2022) by Daniel Drucker, Miriam Schleifer McCormick, and Mark Richard.

I argue that the problem of responsibility for attitudes is best understood as a puzzle about how we are responsible for responding to our object-given reasons for attitudes – i.e., how we are responsible for being (ir)rational. The problem can be solved, I propose, by understanding the normative force of reasons for attitudes in terms of blameworthiness. I present a puzzle about the existence of epistemic and mental blame which poses a challenge for the very idea of reasons for attitudes. (...) We are left with three options: denying that there are any reasons for attitudes, opting for pragmatism about reasons for attitudes, or arguing that the challenge rests on a misunderstanding of the normative force of reasons for attitudes. I finally suggest a version of the last strategy. We can understand the normative force of reasons for attitudes, and thereby solve the problem of mental responsibility, by acknowledging that the way we blame each other for failing to respond correctly to our reasons for attitudes is different from the way we blame each other when one failed to respond correctly to reasons for action. (shrink)

How should we understand the notion of moral objectivity? Metaethical positions that vindicate morality’s objective appearance are often associated with moral realism. On a realist construal, moral objectivity is understood in terms of mind-, stance-, or attitude-independence. But realism is not the only game in town for moral objectivists. On an antirealist construal, morality’s objective features are understood in virtue of our attitudes. In this paper I aim to develop this antirealist construal of moral objectivity in further (...) detail, and to make its metaphysical commitments explicit. I do so by building on Sharon Street’s version of “Humean Constructivism”. Instead of the realist notion of attitude-independence, the antirealist account of moral objectivity that I articulate centres on the notion of standpoint-invariance. While constructivists have been criticized for compromising on the issue of moral objectivity, I make a preliminary case for the thesis that, armed with the notion of standpoint-invariance, constructivists have resources to vindicate an account of objectivity with just the right strength, given the commitments of ordinary moral thought and practice. In support of this thesis I highlight recent experimental findings about folk moral objectivism. Empirical observations about the nature of moral discourse have traditionally been taken to give prima facie support to moral realism. I argue, by contrast, that from what we can tell from our current experimental understanding, antirealists can capture the commitments of ordinary discourse at least as well as realists can. (shrink)

According to the fitting attitude (FA) analysis of value concepts, to conceive of an object as having a given value is to conceive of it as being such that a certain evaluative attitude taken towards it would be fitting. Among the challenges that this analysis has to face, two are especially pressing. The first is a psychological challenge: the FA analysis must call upon attitudes that shed light on our value concepts while not presupposing the mastery of these (...) concepts. The second challenge is normative: the FA analysis must account for the fittingness of the relevant attitudes in terms of a kind of normativity intimately related to these attitudes, but again without presupposing the mastery of the relevant value concepts. In this paper, we show that real progress is possible if we pay close attention to the nature of the attitudes recruited by the analysis. More specifically, we claim that an FA analysis that appeals to emotions conceived as evaluative attitudes — as opposed to, for instance, evaluative judgements or evaluative perceptions — has the best prospects of meeting the two challenges and of putting the FA analysis on a strong footing. (shrink)

Against the background of standard possible-worlds semantics, this paper outlines a truthmaker approach to the semantics of attitude reports and modal sentences based on an ontology of attitudinal and modal objects.

This paper defends the view that attitudinal objects such as claims, beliefs, judgments, and requests form an ontological category of its own sharply distinguished from that of events and states and that of propositions. Attitudinal objects play a central role in attitude reports and avoid the conceptual and empirical problems for propositions. Unlike the latter, attitudinal objects bear a particular connection to normativity. The paper will also discuss the syntactic basis of a semantics of attitude reports based on (...) attitudinal objects. (shrink)

This paper argues for the philosophical and semantic importance of attitudinal objects, entities such as judgments, claims, beliefs, demands, and desires, as an ontological category distinct from that of events and states and from that of propositions. The paper presents significant revisions and refinements of the notion of an attitudinal object as it was developed in my previous work.

According to most accounts of trust, you can only trust other people (or groups of people). To trust is to think that another has goodwill, or something to that effect. I sketch a different form of trust: the unquestioning attitude. What it is to trust, in this sense, is to settle one’s mind about something, to stop questioning it. To trust is to rely on a resource while suspending deliberation over its reliability. Trust lowers the barrier of monitoring, challenging, (...) checking, and questioning. Trust sets up open pipelines between yourself and parts of the external world. Trust permits external resources to have a similar relationship to one as one’s internal cognitive faculties. This creates efficiency, but at the price of exquisite vulnerability. We must trust in this way because we are cognitively limited beings in a cognitively overwhelming world. Crucially, we can hold the unquestioning attitude towards objects and technologies. When I trust my climbing rope, I stop worrying about its reliability. When I trust my online calendaring system, I simply go to the events indicated, without question. But, one might worry, how could one ever hold such a normatively loaded attitude as trust towards mere objects? How could it ever make sense to feel betrayed by an object? Trust is our engine for expanding and outsourcing our agency — for binding external processes into our practical selves. Thus, we can be betrayed by our smartphones in the same way that we can be betrayed by our memory. When we trust, we try to make something a part of our agency, and we are betrayed when our part lets us down. To unquestioningly trust something is to let it in—to attempt to bring it inside one’s practical functioning. This suggests a new form of gullibility: agential gullibility, which occurs when agents too hastily and carelessly integrate external resources into their own agency. (shrink)

Moral non-cognitivists hope to explain the nature of moral agreement and disagreement as agreement and disagreement in non-cognitive attitudes. In doing so, they take on the task of identifying the relevant attitudes, distinguishing the non-cognitive attitudes corresponding to judgements of moral wrongness, for example, from attitudes involved in aesthetic disapproval or the sports fan’s disapproval of her team’s performance. We begin this paper by showing that there is a simple recipe for generating apparent counterexamples to any informative specification of the (...) moral attitudes. This may appear to be a lethal objection to non-cognitivism, but a similar recipe challenges attempts by non-cognitivism’s competitors to specify the conditions underwriting the contrast between genuine and merely apparent moral disagreement. Because of its generality, this specification problem requires a systematic response, which, we argue, is most easily available for the non-cognitivist. Building on premisses congenial to the non-cognitivist tradition, we make the following claims: (1) In paradigmatic cases, wrongness-judgements constitute a certain complex but functionally unified state, and paradigmatic wrongness-judgements form a functional kind, preserved by homeostatic mechanisms. (2) Because of the practical function of such judgements, we should expect judges’ intuitive understanding of agreement and disagreement to be accommodating, treating states departing from the paradigm in various ways as wrongness-judgements. (3) This explains the intuitive judgements required by the counterexample-generating recipe, and more generally why various kinds of amoralists are seen as making genuine wrongness-judgements. (shrink)

It is often assumed that singular thought requires that an agent be epistemically acquainted with the object the thought is about. However, it can sometimes truthfully be said of someone that they have a belief about an object, despite not being interestingly epistemically acquainted with that object. In defense of an epistemic acquaintance constraint on singular thought, it is thus often claimed that belief ascriptions are context sensitive and do not always track the contents of an agent’s mental states. This (...) paper uses first-person attitude reports to argue that contextualism about belief ascriptions does not present an adequate defense of an acquaintance constraint on singular thought. (shrink)

In these comments on David Hunter's insightful new book On Believing, I consider Hunter's account of believing that p as being in a position to act in light of the fact (or apparent fact) that p. After investigating how this kind of view is supposed to work, I raise a challenge for it: the account is unlikely to generalize to other attitudes like hoping and fearing that p. I then argue that this really is an objection to the account of (...) believing, since all the attitudes have so many fundamental features in common that there should be a common core to the accounts of all the different attitudes. Since hoping and fearing that p in no way even commit the speaker to the belief that p, they can't allow the agent to act in light of the (apparent) fact that p. Thus, I conclude, believing isn't a matter of being in such a position, and neither is the having of any other type of attitude. (shrink)

In virtue of what do we enjoy episodes of pleasure? According to the phenomenological theory of pleasure, we enjoy pleasures in virtue of having certain kinds of phenomenal experiences. According to the attitude theory of pleasure, we enjoy pleasures in virtue of having a certain kind of pro-attitude. In this chapter, we show that the attitude theory faces a dilemma. The attitude that is relevant to pleasure—the desire, liking, or favoring—is either necessarily co-instantiated with certain phenomenology, (...) or not. If the attitude theorist denies that the relevant attitudes are phenomenologically enriched in this sense, then their theory has the problematic implication that pleasure can come radically apart from phenomenology. This leads to a *problem of hedonic inversion*. If the attitude theorist instead affirms that the relevant attitudes are phenomenologically enriched, then they undermine their main objection to the phenomenological theory of pleasure. This is the so-called *heterogeneity problem*, according to which pleasures do not feel alike. Either way, the attitudinal theorist faces a difficult challenge in their ongoing debate with phenomenological theorists. (shrink)

Most contemporary philosophical discussions of intentionality start and end with a treatment of the propositional attitudes. In fact, many theorists hold that all attitudes are propositional attitudes. Our folk-psychological ascriptions suggest, however, that there are non-propositional attitudes: I like Sally, my brother fears snakes, everyone loves my grandmother, and Rush Limbaugh hates Obama. I argue that things are as they appear: there are non-propositional attitudes. More specifically, I argue that there are attitudes that relate individuals to non-propositional objects and do (...) so not in virtue of relating them to propositions. I reach this conclusion by not only showing that attempted analyses of apparently non-propositional attitudes in terms of the propositional fail, but that some non-propositional attitudes don’t even supervene on propositional attitudes. If this is correct, then the common discussions of intentionality that address only propositional attitudes are incomplete and those who hold that all intentional states are propositional are mistaken. (shrink)

I argue that de se attitudes pose a special problem for philosophical theories of attitudes. Attitude contents are supposed to play a role in characterizing agreement and are also supposed to play a role in the explanation of action. De se attitudes reveal that no single type of object can play both roles.

Academic social networks and social media have revolutionised the way individuals gather information and express themselves, particularly in academia, science, and research. Through the lens of academics, this study aims to investigate the epistemological and psychosocial aspects of these knowledge sources. The epistemological attitude model presented a framework to delve into and reflect upon the existence of knowledge sources, comprising subjective, interactional, and knowledge dimensions. One hundred and twenty-six university academics participated in this study, including lecturers and researchers from (...) different higher education institutions in Latvia. The study employed two methods: the Epistemological Attitudes towards Sources of Knowledge Questionnaire and the Epistemological Attitudes towards Sources of Knowledge Semantic Questionnaire. The data analysis involved several procedures, including exploratory and confirmatory factor analysis, correlation analysis, and test statistics. By implementing these methods, the study gained valuable insights into the sources of knowledge, examining them from two perspectives. The first perspective brought attention to the differences in academics’ appraisals by discussing their understanding, approach, use, and valuations of these sources. By scrutinising the constructs of meanings, the second perspective sheds light on the anticipated knowledge which is deemed ideal, the concrete knowledge that is both social and objective, and the subjectively valuable nature of academic social networks and social media. The findings underscore the specialised knowledge and qualities that academics rely on for producing knowledge. In terms of epistemology, methodology, social science, and education, the study holds theoretical and practical implications, especially in comprehending knowledge and its sources. (shrink)

A pressing problem for many non-realist1 theories concerning various specific subject matters is the challenge of making sense of our ordinary propositional attitude claims related to the subject in question. Famously in the case of ethics, to take one example, we have in ordinary language prima facie ascriptions of beliefs and desires involving moral properties and relationships. In the case, for instance, of “Jason believes that Kylie is virtuous”, we appear to have a belief which takes Kylie to be (...) a certain way. If Jason desires that Kylie acts as she ought, he appears to have a desire which has as its content that Kylie perform actions of a certain sort (i.e. the actions that she ought to perform). However, for non-cognitivists in ethics who reject the idea that sentences such as “Kylie is virtuous” or “Kylie acts as she ought” are in the business of making truth-apt claims, or representing that certain moral features are possessed by objects or events, or even, in extreme cases, that such claims express propositions at all, the semantic analysis of the example propositional attitude claims made about Jason will have to be non-standard. (This is merely an application of the well-known “Frege-Geach problem” (see Geach 1965) to the case of embedding moral vocabulary in propositional-attitude ascriptions.). (shrink)

Many philosophers have understood the representational dimension of affective states along the model of sense-perceptual experiences, even claiming the relevant affective experiences are perceptual experiences. This paper argues affective experiences involve a kind of personal level affective representation disanalogous from the representational character of perceptual experiences. The positive thesis is that affective representation is a non-transparent, non-sensory form of evaluative representation, whereby a felt valenced attitude represents the object of the experience as minimally good or bad, and one experiences (...) that evaluative standing as having the power to causally motivate the relevant attitude. I show this view can make sense of distinctive features of affective experiences, such as their valence and connection to value in a way which moves beyond current evaluativist views of affect. (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 chapter we focus on the structure of close personal relations and diagnose how these relationships are disrupted by addiction. We draw upon Peter Strawson’s landmark paper ‘Freedom and Resentment’ (2008, first published 1962) to argue that loved ones of those with addiction veer between, (1) reactive attitudes of blame and resentment generated by disappointed expectations of goodwill and reciprocity, and (2) the detached objective stance from which the addicted person is seen as less blameworthy but also as (...) less fit for ordinary interpersonal relationships. We examine how these responses, in turn, shape the addicted person’s view of themselves, their character and their capacities, and provide a negative narrative trajectory that impedes recovery. We close with a consideration of how these effects might be mitigated by adopting less demanding variations of the participant stance. (shrink)

The use of tobacco is a major cause of preventable mortality. The estimated number of smokers is 1.1 billion. Of these, 700 million men and 100 million women are in developing countries. The objective of this study was to find out attitude towards tobacco consumption among residents of Dhankuta Municipality. The cross sectional study was conducted among the residents of Dhankuta Municipality where 205 households were taken as subjects. Pretested semi structured questionnaire was administered to the study subjects (...) and face to face interview was conducted. The collected data was entered in MS Excel 2000. The quantitative data was analyzed using Statistical Package for the Social Sciences SPSS software package. The study subjects consist of 50.2 of male and 49.8 of female. Regarding respondent's education, study population showed high level of SLC and above 40.5 followed by below SLC 36.1 and very less was illiterate 14.1 . Majority of the respondents think that there should be ban of the advertising of tobacco products 87.3 and smoking in public places 79 . Almost 67 of respondents think that patient's chances of quitting smoking will be increased if health professionals will give advice to patients. Almost 72.6 of the study population feel cut down tobacco use and 80.3 feel guilty about this habit. Almost 65.8 have tried to discontinue tobacco consumption. We conclude that the residents of Dhankuta reflect good attitude towards cessation of tobacco but poor practice to prevent of tobacco consumption. Dr. Ram Bilakshan Sah | Jha N "Attitude towards tobacco consumption among residents of Dhankuta Municipality of Nepal" Published in International Journal of Trend in Scientific Research and Development (ijtsrd), ISSN: 2456-6470, Volume-1 | Issue-4 , June 2017. (shrink)

Despite contemporary moral philosophers' renewed attention to the moral significance of emotions, the attitudinal repertoire with which they equip the mature moral agent remains stunted. One attitude moral philosophers neglect (if not disown) is contempt. While acknowledging the nastiness of contempt, I here correct the neglect by providing an account of the moral psychology of contempt. In the process, I defend the moral propriety of certain tokens of properly person-focused contempt against some prominent objections -- among them, objections stemming (...) from Kantian worries that contempt is incompatible with the respect we owe to persons as such. (shrink)

The recent debate on cognitive phenomenology has largely focused on phenomenal aspects connected to the content of thoughts. By contrasts, aspects pertaining to their attitude have often been neglected, despite the fact that they are distinctive of the mental kind of thought concerned and, moreover, also present in experiences and thus less contentious than purely cognitive aspects. My main goal is to identify two central and closely related aspects of attitude that are phenomenologically salient and shared by thoughts (...) with experiences, namely the rational role that they play in our mental lives and their determination by factors external to them, such as external objects or reasons. In particular, I aim to defend Phenomenal Rationalism about judgemental thoughts and perceptual experiences: the view that their phenomenal character reflects their rational role, that is, their capacity to provide and/or respond to reasons. I conclude with some remarks about how this view may be extended to other kinds of th... (shrink)

Determiner phrases embedded under a propositional attitude verb have traditionally been taken to denote answers to implicit questions. For example, 'the capital of Vermont' as it occurs in 'John knows the capital of Vermont' has been thought to denote the proposition which answers the implicit question 'what is the capital of Vermont?' Thus, where 'know' is treated as a propositional attitude verb rather than an acquaintance verb, 'John knows the capital of Vermont' is true iff John knows that (...) Montpelier is the capital of Vermont. The traditional view lost its popularity long ago, because it was thought to rest on the controversial assumption that determiner phases embedded under a propositional attitude verb function semantically in the same way as the corresponding wh-clauses. Here we defend the traditional assumption against objections. We then argue that wh-clauses are not to be given a uniform treatment as indirect questions. When occurring under a propositional attitude verb, wh-clauses are better treated as having a predicate-type semantic value. We conclude by considering some possible objections to the predicate view. (shrink)

This paper addresses the plausibility of practical apatheism: an attitude of apathy or indifference about philosophical questions pertaining to God’s existence grounded in the belief that they lack practical significance. Since apatheism is rarely discussed, we begin by clarifying the position and explaining how it differs from some of the other positions one may take with regard to the existence of God. Afterward, we examine six distinct objections to practical apatheism. Each of these objections posits a different reason for (...) thinking that belief in God is practically significant. Five of these objections prove unsuccessful. The sixth, which appeals to the practical significance of belief in God with respect to our fates in the afterlife, is more promising but nonetheless encounters significant obstacles. Since the success of this objection is controversial, whether we have good grounds to reject practical apatheism should be similarly controversial, and the view should be given further examination. (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)

The folk Psychology frames propositional attitudes as fundamental theoretical entities for the construction of a model designed to predict the behavior of a subject. A trivial, such as grasping a pen and writing reveals - something complex - about the behavior. When I take a pen and start writing I do, trivially, because I believe that a certain object in front of me is a pen and who performs a specific function that is, in fact, that of writing. When I (...) believe that the object that stands before me is a pen, I am in relation to "believe" with the propositional content: that in front of me is a pen. Philosophers of the proposition, from Frege onwards, have dedicated their studies to the analysis of what kinds of entities are the propositional attitudes. Jerry Fodor says that now, the proper prediction of the psychology of common sense, can not be questioned and that the propositional attitudes represent the most effective way to describe our behavior. What Fodor says, however, is that propositional attitudes function, but not how they work. Most philosophers interested in the issue, we are dedicated to the search for a theory that can account consistently both a semantics for propositional attitudes, both of these entities that seem to cause the behavior of a rational subject. There are two main paradigms in the theory of the proposition that contributed to the discussion of the propositional attitudes. One is the one that begins with Gottlob Frege, the other with Bertrand Russell. Defenders of Frege argue that the paradigm scrub objects and properties can not be constituents of the propositional content which have a purely conceptual. In other words, the philosophers belonging to the paradigm of Frege, but not all, mean that you can test in a rigorous way the truth conditions of propositional attitudes. Who defends the russellian’s paradigm argues that the propositional content are made by the objects and properties on which propositional attitudes relate. The purpose of this article is not to rebuild - in detail - both paradigms, nor to reconstruct one but, in a sense, my work will be a completely partial objective is to demonstrate how the paradigm is more profitable russell not only to make a coherent semantic theory for propositional attitudes2 but also to predict the behavior of a rational subject thing, completely innovative, given the repeated objections in contemporary literature3. At the end of this paper will be drafted a proposal to build a consistent model to predict the behavior,of a rational agent, based on a referential theory of propositional attitudes. (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)

When our choice affects some other person and the outcome is unknown, it has been argued that we should defer to their risk attitude, if known, or else default to use of a risk avoidant risk function. This, in turn, has been claimed to require the use of a risk avoidant risk function when making decisions that primarily affect future people, and to decrease the desirability of efforts to prevent human extinction, owing to the significant risks associated with continued (...) human survival. I raise objections to the claim that respect for others’ risk attitudes requires risk avoidance when choosing for future generations. In particular, I argue that there is no known principle of interpersonal aggregation that yields acceptable results in variable population contexts and is consistent with a plausible ideal of respect for others’ risk attitudes in fixed population cases. GPI Working Paper No. 20-2022. (shrink)

This paper addresses a certain objection to the quantificational theory of definite descriptions. According to this objection, the quantificational account cannot provide correct interpretations of definite descriptions embedded in the non-doxastic attitude ascriptions and therefore ought to be rejected. In brief, the objection says that the quantificational theory is committed to the view that a sentence of the form “The F is G” is equivalent to the claim that there is a unique F and it is G, while the (...) ascription such as, e.g., “S wants the F to be G” is not equivalent to the statement that S wants there to be a F and for it to be G. I argue that this objection is invalid as it rests on a false assumption concerning the substitutivity of the relative clauses in the non-doxastic attitude ascriptions. (shrink)

Space tourism is an emerging field where few people have direct experience. However, considering the potential in the near future, it is beneficial to better understand how related information influences people’s attitudes about this new form of tourism. Employing information-processing-based Bayesian Mindsponge Framework (BMF) analytics on a dataset of 361 respondents consuming content related to space tourism on Chinese social media, we found that induced happiness and impression are positively associated with willingness to try space tourism. Information authenticity positively moderates (...) these two associations. Our findings emphasize three aspects of information during the processes of reception and filtering: meaning, intensity, and trust. Since promotional materials for space tourism rely heavily on mental simulations rather than objective feedback, creative uses of digital technology are advantageous. However, precautions must be taken to prevent exploitation, such as false advertising, exaggeration, and emotional manipulation. (shrink)

We outline a novel theory of natural language meaning, Rich Situated Semantics [RSS], on which the content of sentential utterances is semantically rich and informationally situated. In virtue of its situatedness, an utterance’s rich situated content varies with the informational situation of the cognitive agent interpreting the utterance. In virtue of its richness, this content contains information beyond the utterance’s lexically encoded information. The agent-dependence of rich situated content solves a number of problems in semantics and the philosophy of language (...) (cf. [14, 20, 25]). In particular, since RSS varies the granularity of utterance contents with the interpreting agent’s informational situation, it solves the problem of finding suitably fine- or coarse-grained objects for the content of propositional attitudes. In virtue of this variation, a layman will reason with more propositions than an expert. (shrink)

The debate between Uniqueness and Permissivism concerns whether a body of evidence sometimes allows multiple doxastic attitudes towards a proposition. An important motivation for Uniqueness is the so-called ‘arbitrariness argument,’ which says that Permissivism leads to some unacceptable arbitrariness with regard to one's beliefs. An influential response to the argument says that the arbitrariness in beliefs can be avoided by invoking epistemic standards. In this paper, I argue that such a response to the arbitrariness argument is unsuccessful. Then I defend (...) a new response: contrary to common conception, the arbitrariness resulted by Permissivism is acceptable. The basic idea is that the arbitrariness resulted by Permissivism is analogous to the arbitrariness in permissive actions and the latter arbitrariness is intuitively acceptable. I answer three possible objections against this analogy, which are all motivated by the thought that beliefs aim at the truth. In addressing the last objection, I draw inspiration from the recent debate on transformative experience. (shrink)

Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems are ubiquitous. From social media timelines, video recommendations on YouTube, and the kinds of adverts we see online, AI, in a very real sense, filters the world we see. More than that, AI is being embedded in agent-like systems, which might prompt certain reactions from users. Specifically, we might find ourselves feeling frustrated if these systems do not meet our expectations. In normal situations, this might be fine, but with the ever increasing sophistication of AI-systems, this (...) might become a problem. While it seems unproblematic to realize that being angry at your car for breaking down is unfitting, can the same be said for AI-systems? In this paper, therefore, I will investigate the so-called “reactive attitudes”, and their important link to our responsibility practices. I then show how within this framework there exist exemption and excuse conditions, and test whether our adopting the “objective attitude” toward agential AI is justified. I argue that such an attitude is appropriate in the context of three distinct senses of responsibility (answerability, attributability, and accountability), and that, therefore, AI-systems do not undermine our responsibility ascriptions. (shrink)

It is popular to hold that emotions are evaluative. On the standard account, the evaluative character of emotion is understood in epistemic terms: emotions apprehend or make us aware of value properties. As this account is commonly elaborated, emotions are experiences with evaluative intentional content. In this paper, I am concerned with a recent alternative proposal on how emotions afford awareness of value. This proposal does not ascribe evaluative content to emotions, but instead conceives of them as evaluative at the (...) level of intentional mode or attitude. I first argue that this proposal fails to make emotions intelligible as value apprehensions. There are reasons to suppose that emotions do not apprehend value to begin with, but are related to values in a different, non-epistemic sense. I then go on to show that the notion of an evaluative intentional mode can still help elucidate the evaluative character of emotion. I argue that there is a plausible non-epistemic understanding of the view that emotions are evaluative modes. On this account, emotions are not ways of apprehending values, but ways of acknowledging values. (shrink)

As rational agents, we are governed by reasons. The fact that there’s beer at the pub might be a reason to go there and a reason to believe you’ll enjoy it. As this example illustrates, there are reasons for both action and for belief. There are also many other responses for which there seem to be reasons – for example, desire, regret, admiration, and blame. This diversity raises questions about how reasons for different responses relate to each other. Might certain (...) such reasons be more fundamental than others? Should certain reasons and not others be treated as paradigmatic? At least implicitly, many philosophers treat reasons for action as the fundamental or paradigmatic case. In contrast, this paper articulates and defends an alternative approach, on which reasons for attitudes are fundamental, and reasons for action are both derivative and, in certain ways, idiosyncratic. After outlining this approach, we focus on defending its most contentious thesis, that reasons for action are fundamentally reasons for intention. We offer two arguments for this thesis, which turn on central roles of reasons: that reasons can be responded to, and that reasons can feature as premises of good reasoning. We then examine objections to the thesis and argue that none succeed. We conclude by sketching some ways in which our approach is significant for theorising about reasons. (shrink)

This paper gives an outline of truthmaker semantics for natural language against the background of standard possible-worlds semantics. It develops a truthmaker semantics for attitude reports and deontic modals based on an ontology of attitudinal and modal objects and on a semantic function of clauses as predicates of such objects. It also présents new motivations for 'object-based truthmaker semantics' from intensional transitive verbs such as ‘need’, ‘look for’, ‘own’, and ‘buy’ and gives an outline of their semantics. This paper (...) is a commissioned 'target' article, with commentaries by W. Davis, B. Arsenijevic, K. Moulton, K. Liefke, M. Kaufmann, R. Matthews, P. Portner and A. Rubinstein, P. Elliott, G. Ramchand and my reply. (shrink)

While epistemologists routinely employ disbelief talk, it is not clear that they really mean it, given that they often equate disbelieving p with believing ¬p. I argue that this is a mistake—disbelief is a doxastic attitude of rejection and is distinct from belief. I first clarify this claim and its opposition, then show that we must distinguish disbelieving p from believing ¬p in order to account for the fact that we continue to hold doxastic attitudes toward propositions that we (...) reject. After defending this argument against some possible objections, I examine several cases that reveal disbelieving p to be not only non-identical to believing ¬p, but independent of that attitude as well. Finally, I sketch some immediate and potential consequences of recognizing disbelief as a distinct doxastic attitude, particularly for work on epistemic rationality. (shrink)

What do our reactive attitudes towards perceived moral infractions truly represent? According to Gary Watson, Peter Strawson argues that agents can become exempted from negative or positive reactive attitudes under type 2 pleas. These are conditions wherein we might not consider the agent to qualify for moral judgement based on certain biological, cognitive or psychological traits that they might exhibit. Gary Watson feels that this account is not conclusive, that it does not fully represent the inhibition of a moral demand (...) that we might place on an agent. He feels that a better account considers whether or not the agent is a proper object for the moral demands that we might place on him. In this paper I question whether or not Watson's reading of Strawson based on his paper entitled "Freedom and Resentment" is a full account of his argument. I respond by arguing that a critical feature of Strawson's paper that is missing is that of a concern we might have of our own wellbeing whenever we consider another's actions. I argue that more than any perceived rightness or wrongness of another's actions, we worry about the what effects their actions will have in our lives. I believe that this is a sentiment that is missing in Watson's response to Strawson. (shrink)

Many philosophers have claimed that we might do well to adopt a hybrid theory of well-being: a theory that incorporates both an objective-value constraint and a pro-attitude constraint. Hybrid theories are attractive for two main reasons. First, unlike desire theories of well-being, hybrid theories need not worry about the problem of defective desires. This is so because, unlike desire theories, hybrid theories place an objective-value constraint on well-being. Second, unlike objectivist theories of well-being, hybrid theories need not (...) worry about being overly alienating. This is so because, unlike objectivist theories, hybrid theories place a pro-attitude constraint on well-being. However, from the point of view of objectivists, hybrid theories are not objectivist enough, and this can be seen clearly in missing-desires cases. For instance, hybrid theories entail that, if someone lacks the desire for health, then health is not a component of her well-being. This, objectivists say, is implausible. It is obvious, objectivists say, that someone’s life goes better for herself inasmuch as she is healthy, and hence that health is a component of her welfare. This paper focuses on the missing-desires objection (as leveled by objectivists) to hybrid theories of well-being. My argument is that the missing-desires objection can be answered in a way that is generally convincing and, in particular, in a way that pays a good deal of respect to objectivist intuitions about well-being. My hope, then, is that this paper will help to persuade objectivists about well-being to become hybrid theorists. (shrink)

Permissivism says that for some propositions and bodies of evidence, there is more than one rationally permissible doxastic attitude that can be taken towards that proposition given the evidence. Some critics of this view argue that it condones, as rationally acceptable, sets of attitudes that manifest an untenable kind of arbitrariness. I begin by providing a new and more detailed explication of what this alleged arbitrariness consists in. I then explain why Miriam Schoenfield’s prima facie promising attempt to answer (...) the Arbitrariness Objection, by appealing to the role of epistemic standards in rational belief formation, fails to resolve the problem. Schoenfield’s strategy is, however, a useful one, and I go on to explain how an alternative form of the standards-based approach to Permissivism – one that emphasizes the significance of the relationship between people’s cognitive abilities and the epistemic standards that they employ – can respond to the arbitrariness objection. (shrink)

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)

The representation of propositional attitudes (beliefs, desires, etc.) and the analysis of natural-language, propositional-attitude reports presents difficult problems for cognitive science and artificial intelligence. In particular, various representational approaches to attitudes involve the incorrect “imputation,” to cognitive agents, of the use of artificial theory-laden notions. Interesting cases of this problem are shown to occur in several approaches to attitudes. The imputation problem is shown to arise from the way that representational approaches explicate properties and relationships, and in particular from (...) the way they explicate propositional attitudes themselves. Another factor contributing to imputation is the compositional nature of typical semantic approaches to propositional-attitude reports. Some strategies for avoiding undesirable imputation are examined. One of the main conclusions is that the importance of imputations that arise in a representation scheme depends strongly on the use to which the scheme is put -- on whether, for instance, the scheme is used as part of a formal, objective account of natural language, or is used rather as a representational tool within an agent. (shrink)