Attitude Ascriptions and Acceptable Translations

. Propositional Attitudes . Attitude Ascriptions

Verbs like 'believes, ' 'knows, ' 'suspects, ' 'hopes, ' and 'worries'—verbs that, at the level of logical form, can take 10 clauses as their complements—are generally taken to denote intentional attitudes borne to a proposition. For this reason they are known as propositional attitude verbs. It is difficult to construct a semantics and prag-matics adequate to the features of these verbs. Any s...

Propositions and Attitude Ascriptions: A Fregean Account

When I say ‘Hesperus is Phosphorus’, I seem to express a proposition. And when I say ‘Joan believes that Hesperus is Phosphorus’, I seem to ascribe to Joan an attitude to the same proposition. But what are propositions? And what is involved in ascribing propositional attitudes? Frege held distinctive views on both of these questions. He held that when one says ‘Hesperus is Phosphorus’, one expr...

Cognitive Significance, Attitude Ascriptions, and Ways of Believing Propositions

Please consider the platitudes presented in (1). (1) Some Platitudes We use names to talk about objects. We use predicates to talk about properties and relations. We use sentences to attribute properties and relations to objects. We say things when we utter sentences, often things we believe. Nearly all semantic theories are consistent with these platitudes. But it seems to me that the theory g...

Self-ascriptions of Beliefs

Prepared for a lecture in Bologna never delivered, unpublished 1997 " Cartesianism " in the philosophy of mind is most often understood as the view that it is of the essence of the mind that each mind has a special, privileged access to its own contents. It is is often called the view according to which there is a " first-person authority " with respect to the contents of our own mental states,...

Desiring , Desires , and Desire Ascriptions