Propositional Attitudes

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)

Throughout the text, fundamental questions concerning the nature of visual perception are addressed.

On Crimmins and Perry’s account of propositional attitude ascription (1989), beliefs are concrete cognitive structures—particulars ("things in the head") that belong to an agent and that have a lifetime. They are related to the world and to other cognitive structures and abilities, allowing one to classify the latter by propositional content. Containing ideas and notions as constituents, beliefs are structured entities. The difference between notions and ideas is the difference between an agent’s ways of thinking about individuals vs. properties.

The problems that arise for analyses of belief ascriptions pose one of the greatest impediments to an adequate semantic theory. My dissertation offers a novel solution to these well-known problems. What I have developed is a version of the believed-world approach to the semantics of propositional attitude ascriptions. Believed-world theories make use of the notion of a person's associated believed world, or a set of worlds compatible with what a person believes, in their semantic theories. Typically, semantic content of ascription (...) 'that'-clauses is determined by the reference or denotation of complement sentence expressions in the believed worlds associated with the believer in question, according to such theories. The first half of my dissertation presents an argument in support of the believed world approach to the semantics of propositional attitude ascriptions. I argue that any adequate semantic theory must imply that the semantic content of ascription 'that'-clauses is a function of who belief is ascribed to. This conclusion undermines many of the linguistic theories that have been defended in the literature. Moreover, I argue that linguistic theories which can accommodate this result, such as the view recently defended by Crimmins, run into serious modal difficulties. The second half of my dissertation presents a novel version of the believed world approach to semantics, which, I argue, is superior to competing believed world theories. The advantage of my theory lies in the account I give of the nature of believed worlds and my explanation of how actual token occurrences of expressions can have referents in believed worlds. On my view, objects in believed worlds can share spatio-temporal parts with actual objects. Moreover, if we suppose, as I do, that reference to an object is achieved by means of a causal relation between a spatio-temporal part of the object and a referring expression, reference to objects in believed worlds becomes manageable. It can proceed by means of causal relations between referring expressions and those spatio-temporal parts common to actual objects and objects in believed worlds. (shrink)

A Linguistic Analysis of Prior, Quine, and Searle on Propositional Attitudes, Martinich on Fictional Reference, Taglicht on the Active/Passive Mood Distinction in English, etc.

Explaining Attitudes was not intended to be hostile to science. Its target is what I called the Standard View, a conception of the attitudes that is held almost universally. The heart of the Standard View is the thesis that beliefs (and other..

This dissertation examines the relationship between a set of folk concepts of the mind and the scientific study of non-human psychologies. Specifically, I examine the role played in scientific psychology by folk-psychological concepts of belief, desire, and "aboutness", and the quasi-technical concept of mental representation. ;I argue that the concepts of belief and desire are poorly suited to the project of understanding non-human minds, and that despite that fact they play a significant role in guiding scientific research. Unlike eliminativists, whose (...) position is superficially similar, I do not think folk-psychological concepts have determinate semantic content; rather, they are template concepts whose content varies according to the context and aims of attribution. Despite this, their use tends to enable standard patterns of inference that are not helpful in understanding non-human minds. This is because those inferences are good ones only when a collection of distinct cognitive features coincide, as they often do in the human case but typically do not among non-humans. Similarly, I argue that the folk concept of aboutness encourages users to blur the distinction between different sorts of relations between mind and world. ;This prepares the ground for my appraisal of the concept of representation. I argue that, like its folk forebears, the concept of representation is somewhat schizophrenic. It does not occupy a well-defined theoretical niche, but instead is used to pick out a range of distinct properties of internal psychological complexity, and a range of distinct mind-world connection properties. This multiplicity of uses can cause trouble, as even individual theorists can use the concept in inconsistent ways. Finally, I assess the scientific utility of a body of philosophical literature on "naturalizing representation"---seeking to understand representational mind-world connections in naturalistic terms. I argue that the philosophical literature focuses on features that do not play an obvious role in the science. Those features concern the capacity to misrepresent. The philosophers in question think those features significant because of their significance in a strand of folk theory. I argue that representation, so conceived, may not have any genuine scientific work to do. (shrink)

We show that several theorems on ordinal bounds in different parts of logic are simple consequences of a basic result in the theory of global inductive definitions.

This essay develops the thesis that Frege’s notion of grasping does not refer to some special psychological relation between a subject and a proposition. Instead, the verb “to grasp” is a contextually defined technical term that, taken by itself, has no meaning. If that is right, then not only Frege’s resentment to the idea of grasping singular propositions is unfounded. The view that intentionality without representations is possible, championed by some advocates of the New Theory of Reference, is groundless as (...) well. (shrink)

Arguments are given against the thesis that properties and propositional functions are identical. The first shows that the familiar extensional treatment of propositional functions -- that, for all x, if f(x) = g(x), then f = g -- must be abandoned. Second, given the usual assumptions of propositional-function semantics, various propositional functions (e.g., constant functions) are shown not to be properties. Third, novel examples are given to show that, if properties were identified with propositional functions, crucial fine-grained intensional distinctions would (...) be lost. (shrink)

In this article, the attempts by David Lewis and Brian Loar to make perspicuous the logical form of sentences ascribing propositional attitudes to individuals are set out and criticized. Both work within the assumption of the truth of 'type' physicalism, and require that logically perspicuous attitude ascriptions be compatible with the demands of such a doctrine. It is argued that neither carry out this task successfully - Lewis's perspicuous ascriptions have counter-intuitive implications, while Loar's avoidance of these undermines type physicalism (...) itself. (shrink)

The thesis of Ineffability has it that no proposition can be fully expressed by a sentence, this meaning that no sentence-type, or even sentence-token whose indexicality and ambiguities have been resolved, can fully encode a proposition. The thesis of the propositionality of thoughts has it that thoughts are propositional. An implication of the joint endorsement of these two theses is that thoughts are ineffable. The aim of this paper is to argue that this is not the case: there are effable (...) thoughts, and we can even safely say that, generally, thoughts are effable. In order to defend this insight, I first counter the thesis of the propositionality of thought by bringing some counterexamples to it, which amount to cases of non-fully propositional thought. I then argue that, if thoughts can be and often are non-fully propositional, they can be expressed by sentences that fail to fully express a proposition. I also show that the propositional thoughts that we can entertain are after all effable (in a suitable, relevant sense) and resist some alleged examples of insurmountable ineffability. (shrink)

The Effability thesis has it that all propositions can be encoded by a sentence. By contrast, the Ineffability thesis has it that no proposition can be encoded by a sentence. In this article, I undermine an important motivation for the Ineffability thesis and advance a proposal concerning what is effable and what is not. My strategy will be as follows: First, I'll note that the Ineffability thesis assumes that propositions/thoughts are determinate. I'll point out that propositions/thoughts qua the things we (...) believe and mean by our utterances may in fact be indeterminate with regard to, for instance, mental predication and mental reference. I'll then propose a “Gradable Effability”: propositions/thoughts are more or less determinate according to the aims, interests, available information of thinkers, and sentences too encode propositions depending on the aims, interests, available information in the speakers' conversational setting. (shrink)

In Direct Belief I argue 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, I use Grice’s theory of conversational implicature to provide a detailed pragmatic account of substitution failure in belief ascriptions and go 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)

This paper explains what an infinite regress argument is. Part 1 contains some examples of infinite regress arguments. Part 2 presents a schema for all such arguments an defines an infinite regress argument as one that approximates to the schema. Part 3 tests the schema on the examples. Part 4 contrasts my account of infinite regress arguments with that given by Passmore and shows that Passmore's theory succumbs to objections. Part 5 distinguishes an infinite regress argument from an infinite regress (...) and defines an infinite regress. Part 6 explains the dyslogistic force of 'infinite regress'. (shrink)

The Substitution Anomaly is the failure of intuitively coreferential expressions of the corresponding forms “that S” and “the proposition that S” to be intersubstitutable salva veritate under certain ‘selective’ attitudinal verbs that grammatically accept both sorts of terms as complements. The Substitution Anomaly poses a direct threat to the basic assumptions of Millianism, which predict the interchangeability of “that S” and “the proposition that S”. Jeffrey King has argued persuasively that the most plausible Millian solution is to treat the selective (...) attitudinal verbs as lexically ambiguous , having distinct meanings associated with the different sorts of complement terms. In opposition this approach, I argue that there are independent reasons for maintaining the univocality of these verbs and that this can be done while accommodating the Substitution Anomaly and without sacrificing the transparency of the relevant attitude ascriptions. In particular, I show how, by employing an extended version of Edward Zalta’s system of intensional logic for abstract objects, one can construct for a regimented fragment ℜ of English containing the relevant vocabulary a semantical theory ℑ which (a) treats ℜ’s selective attitudinal verbs as univocal, (b) regards genuine terms as occurring transparently under such verbs in sentences of ℜ, and yet (c) predicts the occurrence of the Substitution Anomaly in ℜ. (shrink)

An exploration of why and how the human competence for predication came to be.