Propositional Attitudes, Misc

A number of puzzles about propositional attitudes in semantics and philosophy revolve around apparent referential dependencies between different attitudes within a single agent’s mental state. In a series of papers, Hans Kamp offers a general framework for describing such interconnected attitude complexes, building on DRT and dynamic semantics. I demonstrate that Kamp’s proposal cannot deal with referential dependencies between semantically conflicting attitudes, such as those in Ninan’s puzzle about de re imagination. To solve the problem I propose to replace Kamp’s (...) treatment of attitudes as context change potentials with a two-dimensional analysis. (shrink)

We draw attention to a series of implicit assumptions that have structured the debate about Frege’s Puzzle. Once these assumptions are made explicit, we rely on them to show that if one focuses exclusively on the issues raised by Frege cases, then one obtains a powerful consideration against a fine-grained conception of propositional-attitude content. In light of this consideration, a form of Russellianism about content becomes viable.

Belief storage is often modeled as having the structure of a single, unified web. This model of belief storage is attractive and widely assumed because it appears to provide an explanation of the flexibility of cognition and the complicated dynamics of belief revision. However, when one scrutinizes human cognition, one finds strong evidence against a unified web of belief and for a fragmented model of belief storage. Using the best available evidence from cognitive science, we develop this fragmented model into (...) a nascent theory of the cognitive architecture of belief storage. (shrink)

We present an abstract model of rationality that focuses on structural properties of attitudes. Rationality requires coherence between your attitudes, such as your beliefs, values, and intentions. We define three 'logical' conditions on attitudes: consistency, completeness, and closedness. They parallel the familiar logical conditions on beliefs, but contrast with standard rationality conditions like preference transitivity. We establish a formal correspondence between our logical conditions and standard rationality conditions. Addressing John Broome's programme 'rationality through reasoning', we formally characterize how you can (...) (not) become more logical by reasoning. Our analysis connects rationality with logic, and enables logical talk about multi-attitude psychology. (shrink)

To understand what non-propositional content is and whether there are any such contents, we first need to know what propositional content is. That issue will be the focus of the first section of this essay. In the second section, with an understanding of propositional content in hand, we will consider representations that fail to have propositional content. In contrast to recent literature, it will be argued that metaphysical considerations concerning what's represented, rather than linguistic considerations, are a more promising way (...) of establishing non-propositional contents. To keep the discussion containable, focus will be on representational mental states, though many of the considerations can be extended to other forms of representation. (shrink)

How fine-grained are the contents of our beliefs and other cognitive attitudes? Are the contents of our beliefs individuated solely in terms of the objects, properties, and relations that figure in their truth conditions, or rather in terms of our concepts, or modes of presentation of those objects, properties, and relations? So-called Millians famously maintain the former whereas their Fregean rivals hold the latter. Though much ink was spilled on the question of grain, relatively little was ever achieved by way (...) of consensus. We think the lack of consensus itself cries out for explanation. In this paper, we sketch a pluralist resolution (or, better, a dissolution) of the debate that flows from some extremely minimal commitments regarding the metaphysics of propositions and the attitudinal relations we bear to them. In doing so, we focus on the Act-type conception of propositions of Hanks (2015) and Soames (2010, 2016) and our own (2019) favored deflationary account, Minimalism. (shrink)

Book synopsis: Our mental lives are entwined with the world. There are worldly things that we have beliefs about and things in the world we desire to have happen. We find some things fearsome and others likable. The puzzle of intentionality — how it is that our minds make contact with the world — is one of the oldest and most vexed issues facing philosophers. Many contemporary philosophers and cognitive scientists have been attracted to the idea that our minds represent (...) the world. This book explores an important assumption about representation, namely, that when we represent things in the world, we represent them as having properties, and in this way our representations have "propositional" structure. The contributors examine what the commitment to propositionalism amounts to; illuminate why one might find the thesis attractive ; and consider ways in which one might depart from propositionalism. The hope is that this will lead towards a more complete understanding of how the mind and world are connected. (shrink)

What is curiosity? An attractive option is that it is a desire to know. This analysis has been recently challenged by what I call interrogativism, the view that inquiring attitudes such as curiosity have questions rather than propositions as contents. In this paper, I defend the desire-to-know view, and make three contributions to the debate. First, I refine the view in a way that avoids the problems of its simplest version. Second, I present a new argument for the desire-to-know view (...) that focuses on ascriptions of the form ‘S is curious to φ’, which, despite their prevalence, have been ignored in the literature. Third, I examine the central motivation for interrogativism—the argument from metacognition, according to which animals can be curious yet do not have the metacognitive capacities required by desires to know—and argue that it rests on questionable assumptions about desires and attitude ascriptions. (shrink)

The empirical study of belief is emerging at a rapid clip, uniting work from all corners of cognitive science. Reliance on belief in understanding and predicting behavior is widespread. Examples can be found, inter alia, in the placebo, attribution theory, theory of mind, and comparative psychological literatures. Research on belief also provides evidence for robust generalizations, including about how we fix, store, and change our beliefs. Evidence supports the existence of a Spinozan system of belief fixation: one that is automatic (...) and independent of belief rejection. Independent research supports the existence of a system of fragmented belief storage: one that relies on large numbers of causally isolated, context-sensitive stores of belief in memory. Finally, empirical and observational data support at least two systems of belief change. One system adheres, mostly, to epistemological norms of updating; the other, the psychological immune system, functions to guard our most centrally held beliefs from potential inconsistency with newly formed beliefs. Refining our under- standing of these systems can shed light on pressing real-world issues, such as how fake news, propaganda, and brainwashing exploit our psychology of belief, and how best to construct our modern informational world. (shrink)

I present a puzzle for the standard, propositional semantic account of belief reports by considering novel inferences which it incorrectly predicts to be invalid under assumptions that are plausible by its advocates’ own lights. In response, I propose a conservative departure from the standard view on which certain ‘that’-clauses designate novel devices of semantic type that I call open propositions. After outlining some desiderata for a theory of open propositions, I provide some reasons for advocates of the standard view to (...) treat them as properties of a certain kind. Then I give a bridge principle between the core notions of belief and belief-about before showing how the resulting view can be implemented in accordance with formal theories of syntax and semantics. I bring out some of the consequences this investigation has beyond our semantic theorizing and conclude, more generally, that any response to the puzzle requires paying some surprising cost or another. (shrink)

I make a proposal about what wondering is and how it differs from other mental phenomena like curiosity. I argue that, though it's tempting to analyze wondering as a desire to know the answer to the question one wonders about, that would be wrong, since wondering is an activity rather than a state, i.e., something we do. I also argue that wondering about a question needn't even essentially involve a desire to know the answer to that question, even as a (...) necessary part of what rationalizes the wondering. Instead, on my account, to wonder about a question is to consider various possible answers as possible answers, guided by mechanisms whose function is to make the subject epistemically better off with respect to those answers, and which considering ceases at least when a person is consciously certain of the answer to their question. This allows wondering to not be objectionably metacognitive, and allows us to make sense of cases in which the motivating desire isn't to know an answer but just to wonder itself. (shrink)

We offer an interpretation of the mental files framework that eliminates the metaphor of files, information being contained in files, etc. The guiding question is whether, once we move beyond the metaphors, there is any theoretical role for files. We claim not. We replace the file-metaphor with two theses: the semantic thesis that there are irreducibly relational representational facts (viz. facts about the coordination of representations); and the metasemantic thesis that processes tied to information-relations ground those facts. In its canonical (...) statement, the ‘file’-theory makes reference to a certain kind of relational representational feature, and a certain kind of mental activity. Mental files need not come into it. In short, we posit mental filing without mental files. Our interpretation avoids awkward problems that arise on the standard interpretation and clarifies the explanatory commitments of the theory. (shrink)

Vendler’s :161–173, 1979) puzzle about imagination is that the sentences ‘Imagine swimming in that water’ and ‘Imagine yourself swimming in that water’ seem at once semantically different and semantically the same. They seem semantically different, since the first requires you to imagine ’from the inside’, while the second allows you to imagine ’from the outside.’ They seem semantically the same, since despite superficial dissimilarity, there is good reason to think that they are syntactically and lexically identical. This paper sets out (...) the puzzle and offers a novel solution. Our proposal is that, just as there is knowledge-wh, there is also imagining-wh and that the inside/outside distinction Vendler points to is properly understood as a distinction within imagining-wh. In particular, to imagine swimming from the inside is to imagine what it feels like to swim, while to imagine swimming from the outside is to imagine what it looks like to swim. We show that this proposal is well grounded in both the semantics and syntax of ‘imagine.’ We also argue it makes better sense than its rivals of the data Vendler found so puzzling. (shrink)

I observe that the “concept-generator” theory of Percus and Sauerland (2003), Anand (2006), and Charlow and Sharvit (2014) does not predict an intuitive true interpretation of the sentence “Plato did not believe that Hesperus was Phosphorus”. In response, I present a simple theory of attitude reports which employs a fine-grained semantics for names, according to which names which intuitively name the same thing may have distinct compositional semantic values. This simple theory solves the problem with the concept-generator theory, but, as (...) I go on to show, it has problems of its own. I present three examples which the concept-generator theory can accommodate, but the simple fine-grained theory cannot. These examples motivate the full theory of the paper, which combines the basic ideas behind the concept-generator theory with a fine-grained semantics for names. The examples themselves are of interest independently of my theory: two of them constrain the original concept-generator theory more tightly than previously discussed examples had. (shrink)

Fregeanism and Relationism are competing families of solutions to Frege’s Puzzle, and by extension, competing theories of propositional representation. My aim is to clarify what is at stake between them by characterizing and evaluating a Relationist argument. Relationists claim that it is cognitively possible for distinct token propositional attitudes to be, in a sense, qualitatively indistinguishable: to differ in no intrinsic representational features. The idea of an ‘intrinsic representational feature’ is not, however, made especially clear in the argument. I clarify (...) it here and, having done so, offer reason to doubt the argument. This will put us in a position to draw some lessons about the relation between object-directed and representation-internal aspects of cognitive significance. (shrink)

A short reply to Sankey's 'To Believe is to Believe True'.

Philosophers have traditionally held that propositions mark the domain of rational thought and inference. Many philosophers have held that only conceptually sophisticated creatures like us could have propositional attitudes. But in recent decades, philosophers have adopted increasingly liberal views of propositional attitudes that encompass the mental states of various non-human animals. These views now sit alongside more traditional views within the philosophical mainstream. In this paper I argue that liberalized views of propositional attitudes are so liberal that they encompass states (...) of all sorts of apparently mindless systems like circadian clocks in plants. I begin by arguing that on the most well-developed and widely endorsed theories of underived representation in philosophy, circadian clocks qualify as representations. I then argue that standard reasons for thinking that perceptual states and pictures have propositional content carry over to circadian clocks. Finally, I argue that circadian representations in plants play the kind of functional role that is widely taken to be partly constitutive of belief-like attitudes. So according to mainstream theories of representation, propositions, and attitudes, plants have propositional attitudes. Yet on other more traditional views, this conclusion would seem absurd. So, contrary to appearances, there is no shared, stable understanding of what propositional attitudes are in contemporary philosophy. (shrink)

Philosophers have traditionally held that propositions mark the domain of rational thought and inference. Many philosophers have held that only conceptually sophisticated creatures like us could have propositional attitudes. But in recent decades, philosophers have adopted increasingly liberal views of propositional attitudes that encompass the mental states of various non-human animals. These views now sit alongside more traditional views within the philosophical mainstream. In this paper I argue that liberalized views of propositional attitudes are so liberal that they encompass states (...) of all sorts of apparently mindless systems like circadian clocks in plants. I begin by arguing that on the most well-developed and widely endorsed theories of underived representation in philosophy, circadian clocks qualify as representations. I then argue that standard reasons for thinking that perceptual states and pictures have propositional content carry over to circadian clocks. Finally, I argue that circadian representations in plants play the kind of functional role that is widely taken to be partly constitutive of belief-like attitudes. So according to mainstream theories of representation, propositions, and attitudes, plants have propositional attitudes. Yet on other more traditional views, this conclusion would seem absurd. So, contrary to appearances, there is no shared, stable understanding of what propositional attitudes are in contemporary philosophy. (shrink)

Book synopsis: Our mental lives are entwined with the world. There are worldly things that we have beliefs about and things in the world we desire to have happen. We find some things fearsome and others likable. The puzzle of intentionality — how it is that our minds make contact with the world — is one of the oldest and most vexed issues facing philosophers. Many contemporary philosophers and cognitive scientists have been attracted to the idea that our minds represent (...) the world. This book explores an important assumption about representation, namely, that when we represent things in the world, we represent them as having properties, and in this way our representations have "propositional" structure. The contributors examine what the commitment to propositionalism amounts to; illuminate why one might find the thesis attractive ; and consider ways in which one might depart from propositionalism. The hope is that this will lead towards a more complete understanding of how the mind and world are connected. (shrink)

This book explores how our minds represent things in the world, asking whether these representations necessarily have the structure of propositions about the world. The hope is that this will lead towards a more complete understanding of the puzzle of intentionality -- how it is that our minds make contact with the world.

I defend belief-credence dualism, the view that we have both beliefs and credences and both attitudes are equally fundamental. First, I explain belief, credence, and three views on their relationship. Then, I argue for dualism. I do so first by painting a picture of the mind on which belief and credence are two cognitive tools that we use for different purposes. Finally, I respond to two objections to dualism. I conclude that dualism is a promising view, and one that both (...) epistemologists and philosophers of mind should take seriously. (shrink)

Let propositionalism be the thesis that all mental attitudes are propositional. Anti-propositionalists typically point at apparently non-propositional attitudes, such as fearing a dog and loving a spouse, and play defense against attempts at propositional analysis of such attitudes. Here I explore the anti-propositionalist’s prospects for going on the offensive, trying to show that some apparently propositional attitudes, notably belief and judgment, can be given non-propositional analysis. Although the notion that belief is a non-propositional attitude may seem ludicrous at first, it (...) is admirably defended by Franz Brentano, whose analysis I propose to expound, update, and deepen here. The basic strategy can be thought of as follows. First, although the grammar of belief-that reports clearly suggests a propositional attitude, the grammar of belief-in reports suggests instead an ‘objectual’ attitude. Second, with some ingenuity all belief-that reports can be paraphrased into belief-in reports. Third, given certain general considerations, this paraphraseability recommends the view that the psychological reality of belief states is objectual rather than propositional. Nonetheless, I will argue, there are two very real costs associated with this non-propositional analysis of belie. (shrink)

We argue that many intuitions do not have conscious propositional contents. In particular, many of the intuitions had in response to philosophical thought experiments, like Gettier cases, do not have such contents. They are more like hunches, urgings, murky feelings, and twinges. Our view thus goes against the received view of intuitions in philosophy, which we call Mainstream Propositionalism. Our positive view is that many thought-experimental intuitions are conscious, spontaneous, non-theoretical, non-propositional psychological states that often motivate belief revision, but they (...) require interpretation, in light of background beliefs, before a subject can form a propositional judgment as a consequence of them. We call our view Interpretationalism. We argue (i) that Interpretationalism avoids the problems that beset Mainstream Propositionalism and (ii) that our view meshes well with empirical results in contemporary cognitive science. (shrink)

I argue first that attention is a (maybe the) paradigmatic case of an object-directed, non-propositional intentional mental episode. In addition attention cannot be reduced to any other (propositional or non-propositional) mental episodes. Yet, second, attention is not a non-propositional mental attitude. It might appear puzzling how one could hold both of these claims. I show how to combine them, and how that combination shows how propositionality and non-propositionality can co-exist in a mental life. The crucial move is one away from (...) an atomistic, building block picture to a more holistic, structural picture. (shrink)

This dissertation lays the foundation for a new theory of non-relational intentionality. The thesis is divided into an introduction and three main chapters, each of which serves as an essential part of an overarching argument. The argument yields, as its conclusion, a new account of how language and thought can exhibit intentionality intrinsically, so that representation can occur in the absence of some thing that is represented. The overarching argument has two components: first, that intentionality can be profi tably studied (...) through examination of the semantics of intensional transitive verbs (ITVs), and second, that providing intensional transitive verbs with a nonrelational semantics will serve to provide us with (at least the beginnings of) a non-relational theory of intentionality. This approach is a generalization of Anscombe's views on perception. Anscombe held that perceptual verbs such as "see" and "perceive" were ITVs, and that understanding the semantics of their object positions could help us to solve the problems of hallucination and illusion, and provide a theory of perception more generally. I propose to apply this strategy to intentional states and the puzzles of intentionality more generally, and so Anscombe's influence will be felt all through the dissertation. -/- In the first chapter, titled "Semantic Verbs are Intensional Transitives", I argue that semantic verbs such as "refers to", "applies to", and "is true of" have all of the features of intensional transitive verbs, and discuss the consequences of this claim for semantic theory and the philosophy of language. One theoretically enriching consequence of this view is that it allows us to perspicuously express, and partially reconcile two opposing views on the nature and subject-matter of semantics: the Chomskian view, on which semantics is an internalistic enterprise concerning speakers' psychologies, and the Lewisian view, on which semantics is a fully externalistic enterprise issuing in theorems about how the world must look for our natural language sentences to be true. Intensional Transitive Verbs have two readings: a de dicto reading and a de re reading; the de dicto reading of ITVs is plausibly a nonrelational reading, and the intensional features peculiar to this reading make it suitable for expressing a Chomskian, internalist semantic program. On the other hand, the de re reading is fully relational, and make it suitable for expressing the kinds of word-world relations essential to the Lewisian conception of semantics. And since the de dicto and de re readings are plausibly related as two distinct scopal readings of the very same semantic postulates, we can see these two conceptions of semantics as related by two scopal readings of the very same semantic postulates. -/- In chapter two, titled "Hallucination and the New Problem of Empty Names", I argue that the problem of hallucination and the problem of empty names are, at bottom, the same problem. I argue for this by reconstructing the problem of empty names in way that is novel, but implicit in much of the discussion on empty names. I then show how, once recast in this light, the two problems are structurally identical down to an extremely fine level of granularity, and also substantially overlap in terms of their content. If the problems are identical in the way I propose, then we should expect that their spaces of solutions are also identical, and there is signi cant support for this conclusion. However, there are some proposed solutions to the problem of hallucination that have been overlooked as potential solutions to the problem of empty names, and this realization opens new non-relational approaches to the problem of empty names, and to the nature of meaning more generally. -/- In chapter three, titled "Intensionality is Additional Phrasal Unity", I argue for a novel approach to the semantics of intensional contexts. At the heart of my proposal is the Quinean view that intensional contexts should, from the perspective of the semantics, be treated as units, with the material in them contributing to the formation of a single predicate. However, this proposal is subject to a number of objections, including the criticism that taken at face value, this would render intensional contexts, which seem to be fully productive, non-compositional. I begin by discussing the concept of the unity of the phrase, and pointing to various ways that phrases can gain additional unity. I then proposes that the intensionality of intensional transitive verbs is best construed as a form of semantic incorporation; ITVs, on their intensional readings, meet all of the criteria for qualifying as incorporating the nominals in their object positions. I then give a semantics for ITVs that builds on existing views of the semantics of incorporation structures, and gesture at how this can be extended to intensional clausal verbs, including the so-called propositional attitude verbs. (shrink)

In this note, I would like to focus on the two central distinctions Inan draws between varieties of ignorance. One is the distinction between “objectual” and “propositional” ignorance, and the other is the distinction between “truth-ignorance” and “fact-ignorance,” which is a distinction between two types of propositional ignorance. According to Inan, appreciating these distinctions allow us to see what is wrong with the “received view,” according to which ignorance (or awareness of it) is “always about truth,” and enables us to (...) “overcome our [philosophers’] propositional-bias.” I will argue for two theses. First, fact-ignorance appears to be a form of objectual ignorance; and, if this is so, there are no two distinctions but only one distinction that Inan in effect offers, which is between objectual and propositional ignorance. Second, what Inan calls “the received view” can raise some reasonable worries about objectual ignorance that are not taken into account by him. (shrink)

Propositionalists hold that, fundamentally, all attitudes are propositional attitudes. A number of philosophers have recently called the propositionalist thesis into question. It has been argued, successfully I believe, that there are attitudes that are of or about things but which do not have a propositional content concerning those things. If correct, our theories of mind will include non-propositional attitudes as well as propositional attitudes. In light of this, Sinhababu’s recent attack on anti-propositionalists is noteworthy. The present paper aims to sharpen (...) his worries and show that they fail for a range of reasons. Besides merely offering a reply, considering his challenges provides an opportunity to add clarity to this emerging area of research and it allows one to strengthen the case against propositionalism more generally. (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 the third chapter of LOT 2—"LOT Meets Frege's Problem "—Jerry Fodor argues that LOT provides a solution to "Frege's Problem," as well as to Kripke's Paderewski puzzle . I argue that most of what Fodor says in his discussion of Frege's problem is mistaken.

Karttunen observes that a presupposition triggered inside an attitude ascription, can be filtered out by a seemingly inaccessible antecedent under the scope of a preceding belief ascription. This poses a major challenge for presupposition theory and the semantics of attitude ascriptions. I solve the problem by enriching the semantics of attitude ascriptions with some independently argued assumptions on the structure and interpretation of mental states. In particular, I propose a DRT-based representation of mental states with a global belief-layer and a (...) variety of labeled attitude compartments embedded within it. Hence, desires and other non-doxastic attitudes are asymmetrically dependent on beliefs. I integrate these mental state representations into a general semantic account of attitude ascriptions which relies on the parasitic nature of non-doxastic attitudes to solve Karttunen’s puzzle. (shrink)

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.

Scott Soames has recently argued that traditional accounts of propositions as n-tuples or sets of objects and properties or functions from worlds to extensions cannot adequately explain how these abstract entities come to represent the world. Soames’ new cognitive theory solves this problem by taking propositions to be derived from agents representing the world to be a certain way. Agents represent the world to be a certain way, for example, when they engage in the cognitive act of predicating, or cognizing, (...) an act that takes place during cognitive events, such as perceiving, believing, judging and asserting. On the cognitive theory, propositions just are act types involving the act of predicating and certain other mental operations. This theory, Soames argues, solves not only the problem of how propositions come to represent but also a number of other difficulties for traditional theories, including the problem of de se propositions and the problems of accounting for how agents are capable of grasping propositions and how they come to stand in the relation of expression to sentences. I argue here that Soames’ particular version of the cognitive theory makes two problematic assumptions about cognitive operations and the contents of proper names. I then briefly examine what can count as evidence for the nature of the constituents of the cognitive operation types that produce propositions and argue that the common nature of cognitive operations and what they operate on ought to be determined empirically in cross-disciplinary work. I conclude by offering a semantics for cognitive act types that accommodates one type of empirical evidence. (shrink)

In this paper I argue that there is a class of attitudes that have questions (rather than propositions or something else) as contents.

Intentionality, or the power of minds to be about, to represent, or to stand for things, remains central in the philosophy of mind. But the study of intentionality in the analytic tradition has been dominated by discussions of propositional attitudes such as belief, desire, and visual perception. There are, however, intentional states that aren't obviously propositional attitudes. For example, Indiana Jones fears snakes, Antony loves Cleopatra, and Jane hates the monster under her bed. The present paper explores such mental states (...) in an introductory but opinionated way. (shrink)

This paper is about first‐person thoughts—thoughts about oneself that are expressible through uses of first‐person pronouns. It is widely held that first‐person thoughts cannot be shared. My aim is to postpone rejection of the more natural view that such thoughts about oneself can be shared. I sketch an account on which such thoughts can be shared and indicate some ways in which deciding the fate of the account will depend upon further work.

What are the objects of knowledge, belief, probability, apriority or analyticity? For at least some of these properties, it seems plausible that the objects are sentences, or sentence-like entities. However, results from mathematical logic indicate that sentential properties are subject to severe formal limitations. After surveying these results, I argue that they are more problematic than often assumed, that they can be avoided by taking the objects of the relevant property to be coarse-grained (“sets of worlds”) propositions, and that all (...) this has little to do with the choice between operators and predicates. (shrink)

Kristin Andrews proposes a new framework for thinking about folk psychology, which she calls Pluralistic Folk Psychology. Her approach emphasizes kinds of psychological prediction and explanation that don't rest on propositional attitude attribution. Here I review some elements of her theory and find that, although the approach is very promising, there's still work to be done before we can conclude that the manners of prediction and explanation she identifies don't involve implicit propositional attitude attribution.

Jonathan Berg argues for the Theory of Direct Belief, which treats having a belief about an individual as an unmediated relation between the believer and the individual the belief is about. After a critical review of alternative positions, Berg uses Grice's theory of conversational implicature to provide a detailed pragmatic account of substitution failure in belief ascriptions and goes on to defend this view against objections, including those based on an unwarranted "Inner Speech" Picture of Thought. The work serves as (...) a case study in pragmatic explanation, dealing also with methodological issues about context-sensitivity in language and the relation between semantics and pragmatics. (shrink)

In a 2010 article Turri puts forward some powerful considerations which suggest that Williamson's view of knowledge as the most general factive mental state is false. Turri claims that this view is false since it is false that if S sees that p, then S knows that p. Turri argues that there are cases in which (A) S sees that p but (B) S does not know that p. In response I offer linguistic evidence to suppose that in propositional contexts (...) “see” does not have the sort of meaning (a purely perceptual meaning) which would sustain Turri's claims about the cases he offers (specifically, the (A) verdicts). (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)

More than ever, it is in vogue to argue that no norms either play a role in or directly follow from the theory of mental content. In this paper, I present an intuitive theory of intentionality (including a theory of mental content) on which norms are constitutive of the intentional properties of attitude and content in order to show that this trend is misguided. Although this theory of intentionality—the teleological theory of intentional representation—does involve a commitment to representational norms, these (...) norms are not problematic in the way critics have suggested they would be. In particular, these norms do not guide thinking by motivating intentional agents to (intentionally) accord with them; as a result, no obvious vicious regress threatens the theory. In the final section of this paper, I argue that accepting this teleological theory of intentionality need not commit one to thinking that intentionality is the product of natural selection. (shrink)

As one of the world's most eminent living philosophers, John Perry has covered a remarkable breadth of subjects in his published work, including semantics, indexicality, self-knowledge, personal identity, and consciousness. Looking particularly at the way in which he deals with issues of self, communication, and reality, this volume is organized in seven chapters that highlight a different aspect of Perry's work on the intersection of these subjects. A fundamental work for students and scholars, Identity, Language, and Mind explores questions that (...) are not only essential in understanding Perry's writings, but also contemporary philosophy as a whole. (shrink)

Peter Hanks and Scott Soames have recently developed similar views of propositional attitudes on which they consist at least partly of being disposed to perform mental acts. Both think that to believe a proposition is at least partly to be disposed to perform the primitive propositional act: one the performance of which is part of the performance of any other propositional act. However, they differ over whether the primitive act is the forceless entertaining or the forceful judging. In this paper (...) I argue that Soames’s “forceless” approach has an advantage over Hanks’s “forceful” approach which faces a serious problem. (shrink)

This paper presents a puzzle about justification and withholding. The puzzle arises in a special case where experts advise us to not withhold judgment. My main thesis is simply that the puzzle is genuinely a puzzle, and so leads us to rethink some common assumptions in epistemology, specifically assumptions about the nature of justification and doxastic attitudes. Section 1 introduces the common assumptions. Section 2 presents the puzzle case. Section 3 assesses the puzzle case. Section 4 explains the choice we're (...) faced with. Sections 5 and 6 consider and reject some proposed solutions, and in the process refine and clarify the choice we're faced with. Section 7 considers and rejects a miscellany of different proposed solutions. (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)

In a recent paper (2008), I presented two arguments against the thesis that intentional states are essentially normative. In this paper, I defend those arguments from two recent responses, one from Nick Zangwill in his (2010), and one from Daniel Laurier in the present volume, and offer improvements of my arguments in light of Laurier’s criticism.