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Beliefs and sentences in the head

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Abstract

It is argued thatde dicto andde re beliefs are attitudes towards syntactically structured entities (sentences) in the head. In order to identify the content of ade dicto orde re belief, we must be able to match causal relations of belief states to natural language inferences. Such match-ups provide sufficient empirical justification for regarding those causal relations as syntactic transformations, that is, inferences. But only syntactically structured entities are capable of enjoying such inferential relations. Hence,de dicto andde re beliefs must be syntactically structured. Given that beliefs are also brain states, it follows that they are sentences in the brain. The argument presented here is shown to be an improvement over similar arguments advanced by Harman and Fodor.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Philosophy, University College University of Manitoba, R3T 2N2, Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada

    Ken Warmbrōd

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  1. Ken Warmbrōd
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Thanks to George Schlesinger, Ann MacKenzie, Vic Tennant and an anonymous referee forSynthese for helpful comments on an earlier draft of this paper.

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Warmbrōd, K. Beliefs and sentences in the head. Synthese 79, 201–230 (1989). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00869624

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00869624

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