Thought-Contents (eBook)

On the Ontology of Belief and the Semantics of Belief Attribution

Steven E. Boër (Autor)

eBook Download: PDF

2006
380 Seiten
Springer Netherland (Verlag)
978-1-4020-5085-5 (ISBN)

Infos

According to our commonsense view of the matter, beliefs, desires, intentions and the like are special kinds of internal states the possession of which by a given cr- ture potentially explains its behavior and otherwise renders the creature intelligible to us. So-called folk psychology provides us with a rough-and-ready network of counterfactuals delimiting the role supposedly played by these internal states v- à-vis perceptual input, inference, and behavioral output in a normal member of our species. The exact empirical details of this network do not matter here, for we are not undertaking further re nement or systematization of the relevant counterfac- als. Instead, our topic is the ontological analysis of the internal states that occupy the nodes of this complex network and the bearing of that analysis on the truth conditions of the sentences we use to ascribe beliefs and related states. The relevant counterfactuals canonically describe particular belief-, desire-, and intention-states as states of believing, desiring, and intending that such-a- such. The use of in nitival clauses to describe desires and intentions is not really an exception, for desiring or intending to do A (or to be F) is just having a self-regarding desire or intention that oneself does A (or that oneself is F). By the lights of our commonsense psychology, then, to be in a particular belief-, desire-, or intention-state is to bear the corresponding attitudinal relation— believing, desiring, or intending—to a certain content.

Inhalt

CONTENTS 7
PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS 11
INTRODUCTION 13
PART I PRELIMINARIES 20
CHAPTER 1 TERMS OF THE ART 21
CHAPTER 2 ADEQUACY CONDITIONS AND FAILED THEORIES 57
PART II ONTOLOGY 98
CHAPTER 3 LOGICAL FORMS AND MENTAL REPRESENTATIONS: THE LESSON OF RUSSELL’S MULTIPLE RELATION THEORY OF JUDGMENT 99
CHAPTER 4 THOUGHT-CONTENTS, SENSES, AND THE BELIEF RELATION: THE PROTO-THEORY 139
CHAPTER 5 THOUGHT-CONTENTS, SENSES, AND THE BELIEF RELATION: THE FULL THEORY 187
PART III SEMANTICS 221
CHAPTER 6 BELIEF REPORTS AND COMPOSITIONAL SEMANTICS 223
CHAPTER 7 MEETING THE SEMANTICAL ADEQUACY CONDITIONS 253
CHAPTER 8 OBJECTIONS AND REPLIES 283
PART IV REAR-GUARD ACTION 313
CHAPTER 9 THE CASE FOR OBJECT-DEPENDENT THOUGHTS 315
CHAPTER 10 A CRITIQUE OF RIVAL ACCOUNTS OF SINGULAR THOUGHTS 347
REFERENCES 375
INDEX 381

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Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 23.11.2006
• Reihe/Serie: Philosophical Studies Series
• Reihe/Serie: Philosophical Studies Series
• Zusatzinfo: XVIII, 380 p.
• Verlagsort: Dordrecht
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Geisteswissenschaften ► Philosophie ► Allgemeines / Lexika
• Themenwelt: Geisteswissenschaften ► Philosophie ► Erkenntnistheorie / Wissenschaftstheorie
• Themenwelt: Geisteswissenschaften ► Philosophie ► Metaphysik / Ontologie
• Themenwelt: Geisteswissenschaften ► Philosophie ► Sprachphilosophie
• Themenwelt: Geisteswissenschaften ► Sprach- / Literaturwissenschaft ► Literaturwissenschaft
• Themenwelt: Sozialwissenschaften
• Schlagworte: Belief • Belief-ascription • Bertrand Russell • Knowledge • language • Ontology • opacity • Semantic • Semantics
• ISBN-10: 1-4020-5085-2 / 1402050852
• ISBN-13: 978-1-4020-5085-5 / 9781402050855