Disposition ascriptions

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Prepared for a lecture in Bologna never delivered, unpublished 1997 " Cartesianism " in the philosophy of mind is most often understood as the view that it is of the essence of the mind that each mind has a special,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,...

. 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...

Lewis on Knowledge Ascriptions

David Lewis’s primary contribution to the theory of knowledge is his account of knowledge ascription, which integrates an elegant version of relevant alternatives theory with a detailed version of contextualism. His account is prefigured in his discussion of accommodation in “Scorekeeping in a Language Game” (1979), and forms the central topic of his “Elusive Knowledge” (1996). I will review hi...

Desiring , Desires , and Desire Ascriptions

Users' Relational Ascriptions in User-Companion Interaction

In a qualitative study in the field of user-companion interaction (UCI), we figured out that users of a system, which was meant to represent a preliminary step towards future Companion-systems, tend to individually ascribe (mostly human-like) characteristics to the system in order to turn it into a potential rela‐ tional partner. Users’ intrinsic motivation to establish and maintain a relations...