propositional attitudes

Propositional Attitudes

Timothy SchroederUniversity of Manitoba

Abstract

The propositional attitudes are attitudes such as believing and desiring, taken towardpropositions such as the proposition that snow flurries are expected, or that thePrime Minister likes poutine. Collectively, our views about the propositionalattitudes make up much of folk psychology, our everyday theory of how the mindworks.

1. Propositions and Attitudes

Consider a simple story: A little boy wishes that he had his favorite toyhorse, sees that it is on top of his dresser, and decides that he will fetch it.Believing that he is supposed to stay in bed he slips out quietly, hoping thathe will not be caught but fearing that he might.

Wishing that something were the case, seeing that it is the case, decidingthat one will make it the case, believing, hoping, fearing: these are allpropositional attitudes.

As their name suggests, there are two important parts to propositionalattitudes: the attitude, and the proposition. When a boy wishes that he hadhis favorite toy horse, he both has an attitude – wishing – and a propositionalcontent to that attitude – that he had his favorite toy horse. Different attitudescan be taken to the same proposition, and the same attitude can be takento different propositions. Thus, our boy might instead believe that he has hisfavorite toy horse, or he might imagine that he has his favorite toy horse,and he might instead wish that he were being read a story, or wish that he hadput on different pajamas.

For convenience when writing abstractly about the propositional attitudes,philosophers write of believing that P or desiring that P, where ‘P’ is left asa variable standing for any proposition. This makes the two-part structureof the propositional attitudes particularly clear.

2. Roles and Representations

Propositional attitudes can be thought of as involving two parts, but is thisreflected in the psychological nature of the attitudes themselves, or just inour descriptions of them? There are opposing schools of thought here.

© Blackwell Publishing 2006

Philosophy Compass 1/1 (2006): 65–73, 10.1111/j.1747-9991.2006.00010.x

The first is that the attitudes are best treated as dyadic. On this view,believing that P involves two psychological elements: a mental representationthat P, and the role, characteristic of belief, played by that representation.Since believing is having a mental representation in the belief role, believingis a two-place or dyadic relation. Likewise, desiring that P involves a mentalrepresentation that P and a quite distinct role, one characteristic of desiringrather than believing, played by that representation. And so on, for thevarious attitudes. Jerry Fodor has long been closely associated with this sortof view (e.g., Fodor 1975, 1985). The dyadic treatment of the attitudesraises at least two pressing questions. First, what is a mental representation?And, in particular, how does a mental representation come to represent thatP regardless of whether it plays the belief-like role or the desire-like role,or some other role altogether? Second, what exactly is the belief-like role,or the desire-like role? That is, what sort of use does one need to make ofan idea in order to count as believing its propositional content, or desiringit? The former question is a question about the nature of intentionality, atopic better treated elsewhere. But the latter question is more appropriateto the present forum, and is addressed below (section five).

The second school of thought about the possible structure of thepropositional attitudes holds that it is better to treat the attitudes as monadic.Believing that P is not a matter of having an internal representation that Pto which one then has a belief-like stance. Rather, believing that P is itselfa stance one has toward the world at large, without psychological entitiessuch as mental representations acting as intermediates. Believing that P thusinvolves the believer having the believes-that-P property, and this is aone-place or monadic relation. Often, a philosopher holding a monadicview of the propositional attitudes will also hold that to believe that P ordesire that P is to have some appropriate set of behaviors or behavioraldispositions that warrant the ascription of the attitude (see, e.g., Davidson1980, Dennett 1991,Travis 2001).

3. Basic and Complex Attitudes

Some attitudes appear to be built out of others. For instance, mostepistemologists agree that, in order to know that P, one must believe thatP. Similarly, suspecting that P seems to be simply a matter of believing thatP when one’s belief is not as confident as it might be. Because of this, andbecause of a preference for theoretical simplicity, it has been commonlythought that all propositional attitudes are built, ultimately, out someminimal, basic set of propositional attitudes, along with non-attitudinalfactors such as confidence.

The attempt to reduce the propositional attitudes to their basiccomponents has generally held that two fundamental attitudes are needed. Allpropositional attitudes either make a claim about how things are in theworld, or make a demand of the world (they have one of two directions of

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© Blackwell Publishing 2006 Philosophy Compass 1/1 (2006): 65–73, 10.1111/j.1747-9991.2006.00010.x

fit), and this distinction suggests a corresponding distinction in basic attitudes.Beliefs are the basic attitudes that make a claim, on this view, and so are usedto build up other mental states that also say how things might or might notstand (knowing, doubting, suspecting, being certain, and so on). Desires arethe basic attitudes that make a demand, and are used to build up other mentalstates that also insist that things be or not be a certain way (wishing, wanting,willing, preferring, and so on). And some attitudes are made out of both.

Work from over the last twenty years suggests that this reductive strategyis too ambitious. No doubt it is right that some attitudes are mere constructsof other, more basic attitudes, but the number of basic propositional attitudesseems to be larger than anticipated. Many philosophers continue to regardbelieving and desiring as basic, but now also include one or more ofimagining, intending, perceiving, and trying as equally basic attitudes, andquestions have also been raised about reducing emotions to belief and desire.

Imagining: recent work from the philosophy of art has converged withwork from the philosophy of mind on the view that imagining that P(equivalently, make-believing that P) is also a distinct propositional attitude(see, e.g., Walton 1990, Currie and Ravenscroft 2002, Nichols and Stich2003). According to these theorists, imagining that P is clearly not believingthat P (because we do not act as though what we imagine is real), but itinvolves holding some attitude to that P. Nor is it believing that P is possible,fictional, imaginary, or the like: this is not how it feels to imagine that P,and young children who engage in imagination may be incapable of havingand manipulating such complex beliefs. Imagining must therefore be adistinct propositional attitude.

Intending: Michael Bratman has long defended the status of intention asa distinct propositional attitude (see Bratman 1987, 15–20). Bratman’s basicargument is that it is irrational not to carry out one’s intentions (so long asthings are as one expected them to be), while it is not irrational to fail toact on a normal desire (perhaps one desires something else even more). So,if intentions involve desires, they must involve one’s predominant orstrongest desire – the one it would be irrational not to act on. Yet, whileone can have conflicting intentions, one cannot have conflicting strongestdesires: one desire or the other must be strongest. Hence intentions cannotinvolve desires at all.

Perceiving: at least since Harman (1990) and Lycan (1987), the idea hasbeen gaining ground that perceptual consciousness itself involvespropositional contents, with the states bearing these propositional contentsbeing distinct from beliefs and other attitudes. (Others endorsing the viewinclude Dretske 1995 and Tye 1995.) And clearly, if one accepts the ideathat consciousness has propositional content at all, then it is clear that thebearers of this content are not one’s beliefs, as optical illusions demonstrate:my eyes may tell me that one line of the Müller-Lyer illusion is longer thanthe other, while I refuse to believe them, since I know that it is an illusion.


Propositional Attitudes . 67

If all this is right, then perceiving that P is yet another basic propositionalattitude.

Trying: the view that trying is a distinct attitude has found a recentdefender in Al Mele’s work (Mele 1990). Mele invites us to consider aperson who is paid merely to try to do something, whether or not shesucceeds. She might, for instance, be paid to try to bench press one hundredand fifty pounds. Accepting the offer, the person might have no particulardesire to bench press the weight, but try anyway – because she desires tohave the money. Thus, she tries to bring it about that P although she doesnot have a desire that P. This seems like strong evidence that her trying isnot reducible to a desire.

The Emotions: work on the emotions by philosophers such as PaulGriffiths and Jesse Prinz has also challenged the idea that hoping that P,fearing that P, and the like can be broken down into beliefs and desires(Griffiths 1997, Prinz 2004). These philosophers point out that emotion-likeresponses to the world can be caused without the intervention of those partsof the brain thought to be crucial for believing and desiring, and this seemsto show that not all emotions involve our beliefs or desires. On bothGriffiths’s and Prinz’s views, some emotions (at least, some things we thinkof under the heading ‘emotion’) involve beliefs or desires in some fashion,but not all emotions do.

4. Realism, Instrumentalism, and Eliminativism

In a series of papers and books, Patricia S. Churchland and Paul M.Churchland have done much to question whether there really arepropositional attitudes at all (e.g., P. M. Churchland 1979, 1981, 1995, P.S. Churchland 1986). That is, they have proposed “eliminating” thepropositional attitudes from our ontology. Their argument against theexistence of propositional attitudes is, in outline, straightforward. The firstpart of the argument begins with the observation that talk about thepropositional attitudes makes up the core of what is known as folkpsychology: a set of theoretical claims that help us to understand and predictthe mental world. For example, folk psychology holds that a belief issomething that you recall when reminded of it, that then allows you to sayrelevant words if asked to say what you believe, that then fades fromconsciousness as you turn your attention elsewhere, and so on. Thesetheoretical claims seem innocuous enough. But suppose it were to turn outthat nothing satisfied all (or even most) of this description. Then it wouldturn out that there was no such thing as belief after all. By way of analogy,the scientific theory of the ether was committed to there being a very rigidmedium through which light waves propagated, relative to which the Earthwould be moving, and so on, and the discovery that nothing satisfied mostof this description was, in effect, the discovery that there was no such thingas the ether.



Suppose one accepts that folk psychology has substantial commitmentsregarding the nature of the propositional attitudes. (Not all do: see, e.g.,Jackson and Pettit 1990.) Even then, why think that the theory is false? Thisis the second part of the Churchlandian argument, and the Churchlandshave a number of points to make. They admit that folk psychology is usefulfor certain things, such as predicting, on the basis of what he says, whetheror not Frank will come to the family dinner. But they also point out thelimits to its usefulness: one cannot predict, on its basis, what one will dream,or what life experiences will drive a person to clinical depression, forexample. Furthermore, they point to its intellectual stagnation. Folkpsychology has hardly changed since Homer wrote The Illiad, so why shouldwe expect it to be any better than ancient folk physics or ancient folkbiology? Finally, they emphasize that folk psychology does not appear tomesh well with the developing sciences of the mind, especially neuroscience.If neuroscience prefers to characterize the sense of taste in terms of activationvectors, and this characterization is more fruitful than folk psychologicalphrases such as “it tastes like musty eggplant,” then perhaps neuroscience isdoing a better job than folk psychology at its own game, and it is time toretire folk psychology.

Even if one grants that folk psychology makes substantial claims aboutthe nature of the propositional attitudes, several objections can be raised tothis so-called eliminativist threat. For one example, consider scientificpsychology at the personal and social levels. At these levels, scientificpsychology relies on the same propositional attitudes that folk psychologyposits. And yet, it has pushed forward a productive research program usingthem. For instance, temperament seems to be more useful in predictingbehavior than other sorts of personality traits, according to social psychology;short-term memory holds about seven “chunks” of information, whetherthese are numbers or names or grocery items, according to cognitivepsychology; and so on. The categories of folk psychology are thus useful toa productive science. If this is the best practical test for whether or not apsychological posit is real, then the propositional attitudes might seemvindicated. Various such arguments have convinced many that thepropositional attitudes are here to stay (see, e.g., Horgan and Woodward1985).

A weaker but related critique one might make of the propositionalattitudes goes by the name of instrumentalism. According to theinstrumentalist, talk of beliefs and desires is analogous to talk, in physics, ofa resultant force (the purely notional sum of real forces acting on a rigidbody). That is, while neither propositional attitudes nor resultant forces arereal, they are instrumentally useful fictions, and talking as though they werereal is a very practical way to get certain things done. Instrumentalism remainsassociated with Dan Dennett (e.g., Dennett 1981), but Dennett’s morerecent position seems better described as a kind of interpretationism (see,



e.g., Dennett 1991), and instrumentalism has fallen from favor without hisadvocacy.

5. Theories of Particular Attitudes

Given how important the propositional attitudes are to the philosophy ofmind, it is something of an embarrassment how little work philosophers ofmind have put into understanding individual attitudes since the openingof the twentieth century. The mind-body problem, mental representation,and consciousness have received many book-length treatments, butcomparable work on propositional attitudes as such has been almostnegligible. Noteworthy exceptions include Bertrand Russell’s (1921) TheAnalysis of Mind, with full discussions of belief and desire amongst others,and John Searle’s (1983) Intentionality, which focuses more on perceptionand intention.

Regarding the particular propositional attitudes, one can take at least threedifferent theoretical positions. One, which can be called behavioraldispositionalism, holds that an attitude is constituted by certain non-consciousdispositions, paradigmatically behavioral ones, perhaps augmented by certainnon-conscious computational dispositions (if one thinks that mental processessometimes involve computation). A second, which can be called consciousdispositionalism, holds that an attitude is constituted by certain dispositionsto occurrent states of consciousness. And a third, which can be called naturalkindism, holds that an attitude is whatever natural kind plays all of the (atleast, a plurality of the important) roles, both behavioral and phenomenal,that we associate with the attitude.

Behavioral dispositionalism is the leading approach to the attitudes atpresent. If one is happy with a monadic account of the attitudes, then theeasiest way to be a behavioral dispositionalist is to be an interpretationistabout the attitudes. A fairly standard version of such a theory holds that thebeliefs and desires an individual has are those that the best interpretation ofher or his behavior would attribute, the best interpretation being one thatmaximizes such features as rationality of belief and action, desire for thegood, and belief in the true (e.g., Davidson 1980). Robert Stalnaker hasoffered a somewhat different monadic account of the propositional attitudes,holding that belief and desire should be interdefined more straightforwardly.On his view, to desire that P is to act in a way that would make it the casethat P, if one’s beliefs were true, and to believe that P is to be disposed toact in ways that would succeed, were it the case that P (Stalnaker 1984). Ifone is not happy with a monadic account of the attitudes, something likeStalnaker’s view is readily transformed into a dyadic form of behavioraldispositionalism. One simply holds that to desire that P is to contain a mentalrepresentation that P that disposes one to act so as to bring it about that P,all else being equal (less crude versions of this view are espoused in, e.g.,Harman 1973, Millikan 1984, Papineau 1987); and to believe that P is to



contain a mental representation that P that disposes one to act in such a waythat would tend to maximize one’s desire satisfaction, if only P were thecase (e.g., Harman 1973, Marcus 1990), or to contain a mental representationthat is normally caused by it being the case that P (e.g., Millikan 1984,Papineau 1987). But one need not favor this precise approach: one mightgo in quite a different direction, and hold that believing and desiring are amatter of having certain normative relations to certain verbal (not mental)representations (Brandom 1994).

Conscious dispositionalism has fewer active advocates in the philosophyof mind, but they have recently been more active than their main rivals.On the subject of belief, Eric Schwitzgebel has defended the view thatbelieving is a matter of being disposed to token phenomenal states (talkingto oneself, picturing things, consciously recalling, etc.) as well as beingdisposed to engage in appropriate behaviors (Schwitzgebel 2002). On thesubject of desire, Galen Strawson devotes a chapter of Mental Reality (1994)to defending a conscious disposition theory of that attitude, holding that itis especially dispositions to pleasure and displeasure that (partially) constitutedesire. And it is worth noting that Searle (1992) defends the view that everypropositional attitude must be available to consciousness if it is to be agenuine attitude at all.

Natural kindism also has a scattering of adherents. Griffiths (1997) andPrinz (2004) each defend natural kindism about some (Griffiths) or all (Prinz)of the things commonly called emotions. In the case of Griffiths, some ofthe so-called emotions (Griffiths doubts the term “emotion” names a unifiednatural kind) turn out to be the operations of “affect programs” describedby affective neuroscience. In the case of Prinz, emotions are held to bedetectors of “core relational themes,” such as one’s own loss or gain, threatsto oneself, and the like. There have also been a pair of natural kind theoriesof desire, found in Morillo (1990) and Schroeder (2004). Both identify thebrain’s “reward system” as the core of the brain’s realization of desire, buteach interprets the nature of desire differently, based on a differentunderstanding of the reward system.

6. Allied Fields

So far I have focused upon the treatment the propositional attitudes havebeen given in the philosophy of mind, but other philosophers have alsobeen interested in the propositional attitudes. In particular, there is an entirebranch of philosophy – action theory – situated exactly half-way betweenthe philosophy of mind and ethics, which has worked to develop a theoryof action and the attitudes (principally, intentions and tryings) most centralto action. There is also interesting work done by philosophers who are mostcentrally ethicists, but who have also developed theories of particular attitudesfor their own purposes.



Among action theorists, two works stand out, one as a starting point andthe other as a recent bookend to the literature. The starting point is ElizabethAnscombe’s (1963/2000) Intention, which, together with work by DonaldDavidson, now collected in his Essays on Actions and Events (1980), launchedaction theory. The recent bookend is Al Mele’s (2003) Motivation and Agency,a work which ranges widely across contemporary issues in the theory ofaction. The most obvious difference between the two works is in theirapproaches: Anscombe’s approach to her subject is greatly influenced byWittgenstein, while Mele argues for a view of motives as causally potentinternal structures, a position more consonant with contemporary cognitivescience than his predecessor’s.

Those interested in work on the propositional attitudes done by ethicistsshould no doubt give special attention to the work on desire by Tim Scanlon(1998), Fred Schueler (1995), and Michael Smith (1987). Scanlon works toshow that desire is rooted in both reasons and feelings of pleasure. Bycontrast, Smith holds desires to be rooted in motivation alone. Schueler isconcerned mainly to show that desires are not the sole source of motivation,for moral reasoning can also be motivating. This interest in desire on thepart of ethicists stems, not surprisingly, from interest in the nature of moralmotivation, on the one hand, and reasons to be moral, on the other.

Of course, much more has been written about the attitudes outside ofthe philosophy of mind than has even been hinted at in this section, but thisgives something of the flavor of it.

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