Blackwell Reference Online

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What are propositional attitudes? An informal answer is that they are relations -like belief, fear, hope, knowledge, understanding, assuming, and so on — between minds and propositions. A somewhat sharper answer identifies propositional attitudes with those sorts of mental states which (normally) have truth conditions (or the like) in virtue of their involving a representation of such. We can distinguish among propositional attitudes in terms of their differing connections to behavior, to perception, and to one another.A variety of objections (which for want of space we don't discuss) might be raised to this characterization. Some philosophers have wanted to reserve the term ‘propositional attitude’ for states which are “in principle accessible” to consciousness, or that are “inferentially integrated” with other propositional attitudes (see Chapter 10, holism, and Chapter 7, tacit knowledge, section 2). At issue is the status of the states ascribed to us by theories in linguistics and cognitive science. Some say that some perceptual states (seeing a lion dance, for example) satisfy our definition, but are importantly different from propositional attitudes (because they are relations to events or other concrete entities).Some of the contention and research surrounding attitudes, and sentences ascribing propositional attitudes (APAs, for short), results from their importance to epistemology, ... log in or subscribe to read full text