Explaining Attitudes: A Practical Approach to the MindExplaining Attitudes offers a timely and important challenge to the dominant conception of belief found in the work of such philosophers as Dretske and Fodor. According to this dominant view, beliefs, if they exist at all, are constituted by states of the brain. Rudder Baker rejects this view and replaces it with a quite different approach: practical realism. Seen from the perspective of practical realism, any argument that tries to interpret beliefs as either brain states or immaterial souls is a false dichotomy. Practical realism takes beliefs to be states of whole persons, rather like states of health. What a person believes is determined by what a person would do, say, and think in various circumstances. Thus beliefs and other attitudes are interwoven into an integrated, commonsensical conception of reality. |
Contents
Two conceptions of the attitudes | 3 |
The Standard View | 7 |
Practical Realism | 19 |
Belief explanations | 24 |
An overview | 29 |
Content and causation | 32 |
Syntax and the problem of the parameter | 33 |
The dead end of narrow content | 42 |
The autonomy of intentional explanations | 126 |
Motivation for the Standard View undermined | 136 |
the Standard View | 144 |
Conclusion | 149 |
PRACTICAL REALISM AND ITS PROSPECTS | 151 |
Belief without reification | 153 |
Can counterfactual underwrite belief? | 158 |
Contrasts with the Standard View | 171 |
Beliefs as structuring causes | 56 |
Relational properties | 63 |
Conclusion | 66 |
The myth of folk psychology | 67 |
Whats the problem? | 69 |
Assessment of arguments for folk psychology | 77 |
Metaphysical motivation for the theory view of common sense | 85 |
Conclusion | 90 |
EXPLANATION IN THEORY AND PRACTICE | 91 |
On standards of explanatory adequacy | 93 |
Proposed standards of adequacy | 94 |
Nonpsychological causal explanations | 98 |
Application of proposed standards to examples | 108 |
A verdict | 118 |
How beliefs explain | 121 |
Language and the inner life | 187 |
Conclusion | 191 |
Mind and metaphysics | 193 |
Unreified belief and scientific psychology | 209 |
Materialism | 213 |
The reality of belief | 217 |
Conclusion | 219 |
Practical Realism writ large | 220 |
The commonsense conception | 221 |
The idea of mind independence | 228 |
Objectivity | 232 |
The overall argument | 236 |
Conclusion | 238 |
| 243 | |
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Common terms and phrases
According to Practical actual world antecedent argue argument artifactual properties belief explanations belief-relevant worlds beliefs as brain brain-state tokens broad contents Cambridge carburetor causal explanation causal powers causal role causally explanatory ceteris paribus Chapter Churchland claim cognitive commonsense conception commonsense psychology connectionism constituted by brain convicted felon counterfactuals true cross-context test distinction Dretske drinkalator eliminative materialism eliminative materialists entities example explanation in terms explanatoriness of belief explanatory properties F-state fact false Fodor folk psychology identical indicating F instantiated intentional explanations intentional presuppositions intentional properties intentionality internal intrinsic properties jadeite Jaegwon Kim kind language of thought materialists meaning mechanisms medium-sized objects mental metaphysical microphysical mind mind-independent MIT/Bradford nature nonintentional nonpsychological particular brain philosophers Philosophy of Mind possible world Practical Realism proposed propositional attitudes reality relational properties relevant counterfactuals scientific theory semantic sense Smith Standard View strict law supervene suppose syntactic thesis tion truth conditions Tyler Burge U-state umbrella virtue