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This book makes a stimulating contribution to the philosophy of language and philosophy of mind. It begins with a spirited defence of the view that propositions are structured and thatpropositional structure is 'psychologically real'. The author then develops a subtle view of propositions and attitude ascription. The view is worked out in detail with attention to such topics as the semantics of conversations, iterated attitude ascriptions, and the role of propositions as bearers of truth. Along the way important (...) issues in the philosophy of mind are addressed. Though intended primarily for professional philosophers and graduate students the book will also interest cognitive scientists and linguists. (shrink)

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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 ofpropositionalattitudes such as belief, desire, and visual perception. There are, however, intentional states that aren't obviouslypropositionalattitudes. 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)

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Propositionalattitudes, states like believing, desiring, intending, etc., have played a central role in the articulation of many of our major theories, both in philosophy and the social sciences. Until relatively recently, psychology was a prominent entry on the list of social sciences in whichpropositionalattitudes occupied center stage. In this century, though, behaviorists began to make a self-conscious effort to expunge "mentalistic" notions from their theorizing. Behaviorism has failed. Psychology therefore is again experiencing "formative (...) years," and two themes have caught the interest of philosophers. The first is that psychological theories evidently must exploit a vast array of relations obtaining among internal states. The second is that the use of mentalistic idioms seems to be explicit again in much of current theorizing. These two observations have led philosophers to wonder about the probable as well as the proper role ofpropositionalattitudes in future psychological theories. Some philosophers wonder, in particular, about the role of the contents ofpropositionalattitudes in the forthcoming theories. Their strategy is in part to discern what sorts of theory psychologists now will want to construct, and then discern what rolepropositional attitude contents might play in theories of those sorts. I consider here two sorts of theory, what I call minimal functional theories and what is known aspropositional attitude psychology. ;I outline these two kinds of theory, and show how each defines a role for contents. Contents are ultimately eliminable in minimal functional theories. Although they play an apparently ineliminable role inpropositional attitude psychology, they do so at an apparent cost.Propositional attitude psychology does not seem to accommodate a certain methodological principle, a principle of individualism in psychology, which is endorsed even by some of the philosophers most enamored of the approach. Such philosophers have two options: they can attempt to show that the conflict between the approach and the principle is not genuine, or they can reject the principle. I argue that the conflict is real, and recommend a qualified rejections of the principle. (shrink)

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According to relevance theory, irony comprehension invariably entails the identification of some opinion or thought and the identification of the speaker’s dissociative attitude. In this paper, it is argued that it is also essential for hearers to identify not only thatpropositional attitude, but also the affective attitude that the speaker holds towards the source of this echo so that an optimallyrelevant interpretive outcomeis achieved. This notion comprises feelings and emotions of a non-propositional quality which affect the (...) class='Hi'>propositional effects obtained in ironical communication. The paper further argues for the need to incorporate non-propositional effects into the traditionalpropositional object of pragmatic research. (shrink)

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Some philosophers hold that philosophy is what you do to a problem until it’s clear enough to solve it by doing science. Others hold that if a philosophical problem succumbs to empirical methods, that shows it wasn’t really philosophical to begin with. Either way, the facts seem clear enough: questions first mooted by philosophers are sometimes coopted by people who do experiments. This seems to be happening now to the question: “what arepropositionalattitudes?” and cognitive psychology is (...) the science of note. (shrink)

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Propositionalattitudes are often classified as non-phenomenal mental states. I argue that there is no good reason for doing so. The unwillingness to viewpropositionalattitudes as being essentially phenomenal stems from a biased notion of phenomenality, from not paying sufficient attention to the idioms in whichpropositionalattitudes are usually reported, from overlooking the considerable degree to which different intentional modes can be said to be phenomenologically continuous, and from not considering the possibility (...) thatpropositionalattitudes may be transparent, just like sensations and emotions are commonly held to be: there may be no appropriate way of describing their phenomenal character apart from describing the properties and objects they represent. (shrink)

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

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ABSTRACTIn a series of articles, Asbjørn Steglich-Petersen and Nick Zangwill argue that, sincepropositional attitude ascription judgements do not behave like normative judgements in being subject to a priori normative supervenience and the Because Constraint, PAs cannot be constitutively normative.1 I argue that, for a specific version of normativism, according to which PAs are normative commitments, these arguments fail. To this end, I argue that commitments and obligations should be distinguished. Then, I show that the intuitions allegedly governing all (...) normative judgements do not even purport to hold for commitment-attributing judgements.RÉSUMÉDans une série d'articles, Asbjørn Steglich-Petersen et Nick Zangwill font valoir que, puisque les jugements d'attribution d'attitude propositionnelle ne se comportent pas comme des jugements normatifs en étant soumis à la survenance normative a priori et à la contrainte du Parce que, les AP ne peuvent être constitutivement normatives. Je soutiens que, pour une version spécifique du normativisme, selon laquelle les AP sont des engagements normatifs, ces arguments échouent. À cette fin, je soutiens d'abord que les engagements et les obligations devraient être séparés. Ensuite, je démontre que les intuitions qui régiraient prétendument tous les jugements normatifs ne prétendent même pas s'appliquer aux jugements attributifs d'un engagement. (shrink)

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By drawing on empirical evidence, Matt King and Peter Carruthers have recently argued that there are no consciouspropositionalattitudes, such as decisions, and that this undermines moral responsibility. Neil Levy responds to King and Carruthers, and claims that their considerations needn’t worry theorists of moral responsibility. I argue that Levy’s response to King and Carruthers’ challenge to moral responsibility is unsatisfactory. After that, I propose what I take to be a preferable way of dealing with their challenge. (...) I offer an account of moral responsibility that ties responsibility to consciously deciding to do X, as opposed to a conscious decision to do X. On this account, even if there are no conscious decisions, moral responsibility won’t be undermined. (shrink)

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In Part I of this essay I distinguish perception from sensation and sensory processing, and I argue thatpropositional perceiving is an act, intentional, cognitive, and can go amiss. In Part II I show that perceiving must be committive to go amiss, and since a committive, cognitive, intentional act is assentive, I conclude thatpropositional perceiving is assentive. In Part III of the essay I argue that nonpropositional perceiving is an act, intentional, cognitive, and capable of going amiss, (...) and hence committive. In the course of showing that nonpropositional perceiving is cognitive, I examine Bertrand Russell's views on knowledge by acquaintance and argue that such knowledge is logicallypropositional. Since nonpropositional perceiving is a committive, cognitive, intentional act, I conclude that it too is assentive. Thus, the conclusion I reach in this work is that thepropositional attitude in perception, whetherpropositional or nonpropositional, is one of assent. (shrink)

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The questions of whether episodic memory is apropositional attitude, and of whether it haspropositional content, are central to discussions about how memory represents the world, what mental states should count as memories, and what kind of beings are capable of remembering. Despite its importance to such topics, these questions have not been addressed explicitly in the recent literature in philosophy of memory. In one of the very few pieces dealing with the topic, Fernández (2006) provides a (...) positive answer to the initial questions by arguing that thepropositional attitude view of memory, as I will call it, provides a simple account of how memory possesses truth-conditions. A similar suggestion is made by Byrne (2010) when he proposes that perception and episodic memory have the same kind of content, differing only in degree. Against thepropositional attitude view, I will argue that episodic memory does not havepropositional content, and therefore, that it is not apropositional attitude. My project here is, therefore, mainly critical. I will show that, if empirical work is to inform our philosophical theories of memory in any way, we have good reasons to deny, or at least to be skeptical, of the prospects of thepropositional attitude view of episodic memory. (shrink)

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In this article, I provide an argument against the idea that public hate-speech events are harmful because they cause a discrete, traceable and harmful change in one’spropositionalattitudes. To do so, I identify the essential conceptual architecture of public hate-speech situations, I assess existing arguments for the direct and indirect harm of public hate speech and I propose a novel way to approach public hate-speech situations: a maieutic approach. On this perspective, public hate-speech events do not cause (...) changes inpropositionalattitudes, but rather, if successful, either such events bring a person’s latentpropositionalattitudes into clear consciousness, or they play withpropositionalattitudes speakers and their audience had prior to the public hate-speech situation. (shrink)

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Thepropositionalattitudes areattitudes such as believing and desiring, taken toward propositions such as the proposition that snow flurries are expected, or that the Prime Minister likes poutine. Collectively, our views about thepropositionalattitudes make up much of folk psychology, our everyday theory of how the mind works.

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I present an argument thatpropositionalattitudes are not mental states. In a nutshell, the argument is that ifpropositionalattitudes are mental states, then only minded beings could have them; but there are reasons to think that some non-minded beings could bearpropositionalattitudes. To illustrate this, I appeal to cases of genuine group intentionality. I argue that these are cases in which some group entities bearpropositionalattitudes, but they are (...) not subjects of mental states. Althoughpropositionalattitudes are not mental states, I propose that they are typically co-instantiated with mental states. In an attempt to explain this co-instantiation, I suggest thatpropositionalattitudes of minded beings are typically realized by mental states. (shrink)

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How can thepropositionalattitudes of several individuals be aggregated into overall collectivepropositionalattitudes? Although there are large bodies of work on the aggregation of various special kinds ofpropositionalattitudes, such as preferences, judgments, probabilities and utilities, the aggregation ofpropositionalattitudes is seldom studied in full generality. In this paper, we seek to contribute to filling this gap in the literature. We sketch the ingredients of a general theory of (...)propositional attitude aggregation and prove two new theorems. Our first theorem simultaneously characterizes some prominent aggregation rules in the cases of probability, judgment and preference aggregation, including linear opinion pooling and Arrovian dictatorships. Our second theorem abstracts even further from the specific kinds ofattitudes in question and describes the properties of a large class of aggrega tion rules applicable to a variety of belief-likeattitudes. Our approach integrates some previously disconnected areas of investigation. (shrink)

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Finland is internationally known as one of the leading centers of twentieth century analytic philosophy. This volume offers for the first time an overall survey of the Finnish analytic school. The rise of this trend is illustrated by original articles of Edward Westermarck, Eino Kaila, Georg Henrik von Wright, and Jaakko Hintikka. Contributions of Finnish philosophers are then systematically discussed in the fields of logic, philosophy of language, philosophy of science, history of philosophy, ethics and social philosophy. Metaphilosophical reflections on (...) the nature of philosophy are highlighted by the Finnish dialogue between analytic philosophy, phenomenology, pragmatism, and critical theory. (shrink)

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Eliminative materialism is the thesis that our common-sense conception of psychological phenomena constitutes a radically false theory, a theory so fundamentally defective that both the principles and the ontology of that theory will eventually be displaced, rather than smoothly reduced, by completed neuroscience. Our mutual understanding and even our introspection may then be reconstituted within the conceptual framework of completed neuroscience, a theory we may expect to be more powerful by far than the common-sense psychology it displaces, and more substantially (...) integrated within physical science generally. My purpose in this paper is to explore these projections, especially as they bear on (1) the principal elements of common-sense psychology: thepropositionalattitudes (beliefs, desires, etc.), and (2) the conception of rationality in which these elements figure. (shrink)

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Propositionalism in the philosophy of action is the popular view that intentional actions are bodily movements caused and rationalized by certain ‘internal’propositional attitude states that constitute the agent's perspective. I attack propositionalism's background claim that the genuinely mental/cognitive dimension of human action resides solely in some range of ‘internal’ agency-conferring representational states that causally trigger, and thus are always conceptually disentangle-able from, bodily activity itself. My opposing claim, following Ryle, Wittgenstein, and others, is that mentality and intentionality can (...) be constitutively implicated in bodily actions themselves, as exercises of a distinctive form of embodied practical understanding. I attempt to show this by attending to the fine-grained contours of various skillful actions. (shrink)

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

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This chapter argues that some have wanted to reserve the term 'propositional attitude' for states which are 'in principle accessible' to consciousness, or that are 'inferentially integrated' with otherpropositionalattitudes. Some of the contention and research surroundingpropositionalattitudes and sentences ascribing them results from their importance to epistemology, philosophy of mind, and action theory. Perhaps the primary reason is the view thatpropositionalattitudes are relations to propositions. On many views, propositions (...) both are closely related to meanings and are what is in the first instance true or false. The chapter talks about two most significant alternatives to relational accounts of attitude ascription: Relationism and Descriptivism. It concludes by reviews of Lewis's example and topic of belief de se, which involves a distinctive way of ascribing a property. All believers can self‐ascribe properties, and all properties are open to self‐ascription. (shrink)

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According to relationism, for Alice to believe that some rabbits can speak is for Alice to stand in a relation to a further entity, some rabbits can speak. But what could this further entity possibly be? Higher-order metaphysics seems to offer a simple, natural answer. On this view (roughly put), expressions in different syntactic categories (for instance: names, predicates, sentences) in general denote entities in correspondingly different ontological categories. Alice's belief can thus be understood to relate her to a sui (...) generis entity denoted by "some rabbits can speak", belonging to a different ontological category than Alice herself. This straightforward account of theattitudes has historically been deemed so attractive that it was seen as providing an important motivation for higher-order metaphysics itself (Prior [1971]). But I argue that it is not as straightforward as it might seem, and in fact thatpropositionalattitudes present a foundational challenge for higher-order metaphysics. (shrink)

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PropositionalAttitudes Sentences such as “Galileo believes that the earth moves” and “Pia hopes that it will rain” are used to report what philosophers, psychologists, and other cognitive scientists callpropositionalattitudes—for example, the belief that the earth moves and the hope that it will rain. Just whatpropositionalattitudes are is a matter of … Continue readingPropositionalAttitudes →.

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Peter Hanks and Scott Soames have recently developed similar views ofpropositionalattitudes 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 primitivepropositional act: one the performance of which is part of the performance of any otherpropositional 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)

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A prospective introduction -- The received view -- Troubles with the received view -- Arepropositionalattitudes relations? -- Foundations of a measurement-theoretic account of theattitudes -- The basic measurement-theoretic account -- Elaboration and explication of the proposed measurement-theoretic account.

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Philosophers of the modern period are often presented as having made an elementary error: that of confounding the attitude one adopts toward a proposition with its content. By examining the works of Locke and the Port-Royalians, I show that this accusation is ill-founded and that Locke, in particular, has the resources to construct a theory ofpropositionalattitudes.

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The deflationary aim of this book, which occupies Part I, is to show that a widely held view has little to be said for it. The constructive aim, pursued in Part II, is to make plausible a measure-theoretic account ofpropositionalattitudes. The discussion is throughout instructive, illuminating and sensitive to the many intricacies surrounding attitude ascriptions and how they can carry information about a subject's psychology. There is close engagement with cognitive science. The book should be read (...) by anyone seriously engaged with issues aboutpropositionalattitudes.According to the widely held view, which Matthews calls the Received View, the attitude of Φing that p is a matter of standing in a computational/functional relation to an explicit Representation that expresses the proposition that p, and thinking is ‘an inferential computational process defined over one or more of these Representations that eventuates in the production of either another Representation or a behavior’. The representations are understood to be sentences in a language of thought and thus to have a compositional syntax and semantics. The theory that Matthews aims to make plausible has it that ascriptions ofpropositionalattitudes in the form ‘X Φs that p’, ascribe a state to a person by relating that person to an abstract object that is the representative of the state in roughly the way that numbers on a scale are the measure-theoretic representations of certain physical magnitudes. We are to think of the role of ‘Jones believes that interest rates will fall’ by analogy with that of ‘Jones weighs 150lbs’. The latter depends on there being arithmetical relations defined over numbers that enable its particular assignment of a number to Jones's weight to represent physical properties that Jones has in virtue …. (shrink)

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RÉSUMÉ: Les philosophes de la période moderne sont souvent présentés comme ayant commis une erreur élémentaire: celle de confondre la force propositionnelle avec le contenu propositionnel. Par l'examen de deux cas saillants, à savoir les philosophes de Port-Royal et John Locke, je montre que l'accusation n'est pas fondée, et que Locke en particulier a les ressources requises pour construire une théorie desattitudes propositionnelles.

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Traditionally conceived, rational action is action founded on reasons. Reasons involve thepropositionalattitudes — beliefs, desires, intentions, and the like. What are we to make of thepropositionalattitudes? One possibility, a possibility endorsed by Donald Davidson, is that an agent’s possession ofpropositionalattitudes is a matter of that agent’s being interpretable in a particular way. Such a view accounts for thepropositional content of theattitudes, but threatens to undercut (...) their causal and explanatory roles. I examine Davidson’s view and the suggestion that the explanatory value of appeals topropositionalattitudes is best understood on analogy with measurement systems, and argue that, appearances to the contrary, this conception of thepropositionalattitudes can be reconciled with the idea that reasons are causes. (shrink)

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This paper critiques the view, widely held by philosophers of mind and cognitive scientists, that psychological explanation is a matter of ascribingpropositionalattitudes (such as beliefs and desires) towards language-like propositions in the mind, and that cognitive mental states consist in intentionalattitudes towards propositions of a linguistic quasi-linguistic nature. On this view, thought is structured very much like a language. Denial thatpropositional attitude psychology is an adequate account of mind is therefore, on this (...) view, is tantamount to eliminative materialism, the denial that human beings are thinking beings. -/- I dispute this on the basis of recent work in cognitive psychology and artificial intelligence. Mental models theory, on which thought is better understood as nonpropositional intentional psychology, accords better with the evidence and offers an alternative view topropositional attitude psychology -- one that means that the denial that that ispropositional is not eliminative. However, I argue thatpropositional attitude psychology is a useful idealization, as classical mechanics is of relativity theory, strictly but not radically false, and useful for prediction and indeed, as long as its idealized character is born in mind, for explanation of behavior. (shrink)

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Having briefly sketched the aims of our paper, namely, to logically analyse the ascription ofpropositionalattitudes to somebody else in terms, not of Fregean senses or of intensions-with-s, but of the intentional object of the person spoken about, say, the believer or intender (Section 1), we try to introduce the concept of an intentional object as simply as possible, to wit, as coming into view whenever two (or more) subjective belief-worlds strikingly diverge (Section 2). Then, we assess (...) the pros and cons of Frege’s view that the indirect reference of an expression is nothing but its customary sense (Sections 3–4), and call the reader’s attention to the fact that in belief ascriptions de re we take it for granted that the believer’s intentional object is at the same time a ‘citizen’ of the belief ascriber’s subjective world (or, for that matter, the real word), and that the idea of such a ‘dual citizenship’ is even more obviously presupposed in the cases of true belief andpropositional knowledge (Section 5). Then, we try to argue that it is more fertile to take the belief ascriber’s intentional object to be, not the whole state of affairs the believer has in mind and thinks to exist, but the latter’s intentional object as such, that is, as being his intentional object (Section 6). Finally, we discuss the intricate and mostly neglected question of whether an intentional object’s inhabiting two or more subjective belief-worlds should be considered to be sort of a ‘transmundane identity’ in the numerical sense or rather in some deviant sense of the term, which can be specified as a momentous subcase of a ‘categorial difference’ (Section 7). (shrink)

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How can thepropositionalattitudes of several individuals be aggregated into overall collectivepropositionalattitudes? Although there are large bodies of work on the aggregation of various special kinds ofpropositionalattitudes, such as preferences, judgments, probabilities and utilities, the aggregation ofpropositionalattitudes is seldom studied in full generality. In this paper, we seek to contribute to filling this gap in the literature. We sketch the ingredients of a general theory of (...)propositional attitude aggregation and prove two new theorems. Our first theorem simultaneously characterizes some prominent aggregation rules in the cases of probability, judgment and preference aggregation, including linear opinion pooling and Arrovian dictatorships. Our second theorem abstracts even further from the specific kinds ofattitudes in question and describes the properties of a large class of aggregation rules applicable to a variety of belief-likeattitudes. Our approach integrates some previously disconnected areas of investigation. (shrink)

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The folk Psychology framespropositionalattitudes 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 thepropositional 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 thepropositionalattitudes. Jerry Fodor says that now, the proper prediction of the psychology of common sense, can not be questioned and that thepropositionalattitudes represent the most effective way to describe our behavior. What Fodor says, however, is thatpropositionalattitudes 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 forpropositionalattitudes, 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 thepropositionalattitudes. 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 thepropositional 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 ofpropositionalattitudes. Who defends the russellian’s paradigm argues that thepropositional content are made by the objects and properties on whichpropositionalattitudes 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 forpropositional 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 ofpropositionalattitudes. (shrink)

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The most common account of attitude reports is the relational analysis according towhich an attitude verb taking that-clause complements expresses a two-placerelation between agents and propositions and the that-clause acts as an expressionwhose function is to provide thepropositional argument. I will argue that a closerexamination of a broader range of linguistic facts raises serious problems for thisanalysis and instead favours a Russellian `multiple relations analysis' (which hasgenerally been discarded because of its apparent obvious linguistic implausibility).The resulting account can (...) be given independent philosophical motivations within anintentionalist view of truth and predication. (shrink)

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Two arguments are discussed which have been advanced in support of eliminative materialism: the argument from reductionism and the argument from functionalism. It is contended that neither of these arguments is effective if "non-scientific realism" is adopted with regard to commonsensepropositional attitude psychology and its embedded notions. "Non-scientific realism," the position that commonsensepropositional attitude psychology is an independently legitimate descriptive/explanatory framework, neither in competition with science nor vulnerable to being shown false by science, is defended.

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In the appendix to Psychosemantics, entitled ‘Why There Still has to be a Language of Thought,’ Jerry Fodor offers several arguments for the language of thought thesis. The LOT, as articulated by Fodor, is a thesis aboutpropositionalattitudes. It comprises the following two claims:propositionalattitudes are relations to meaning-bearing tokens — for example, to believe that P is to bear a certain relation to a token of a symbol which means that P; and the (...) representational tokens in question are quasi-linguistic — in particular, they have the constituent structure appropriate to a language. (shrink)

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This paper develops — within an axiomatic theory of properties, relations, and propositions which accords them well-defined existence and identity conditions — a sententialist-functionalist account of belief as a symbolically mediated relation to a special kind ofpropositional entity, theproxy-encoding abstract proposition. It is then shown how, in terms of this account, the truth conditions of English belief reports may be captured in a formally precise and empirically adequate way that accords genuinely semantic status to familiar opacity data.

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Theories that seek to explain the status of psychological states experienced in fictional contexts either claim that those states are specialpropositionalattitudes specific to fictional contexts (make-believeattitudes), or else define them as normalpropositionalattitudes by stretching the concept of apropositional attitude to include ‘objectless’ states that do not imply constraints such as truth or satisfaction. I argue that the first theory is either vacuous or false, and that the second, by (...) defining the reality of the states in question only nominally, risks having a result similar to the first. Then I put forward an explanation of howpropositionalattitudes function in fictional contexts which meets the following requirements: (i) does not postulate the existence ofattitudes specific to or definitive of fictionality; (ii) does not imply that we transgress our knowledge of the ontological claims of fictions for someattitudes (for example, fear) but not others (belief); (iii) explains how we can adopt normalpropositionalattitudes towards fictions; (iv) allows explanation of howattitudes adopted during fictional response connect or are relevant to our broader systems of belief and volition. (shrink)

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