Explaining Attitudes: A Practical Approach to the Mind

ISBN-13: 9780521421904 / Angielski / Miękka / 1995 / 264 str.

Lynne Rudder Baker; Ernest Sosa; Jonathan Dancy

Opis

Explaining Attitudes offers a timely and important challenge to the dominant conception of belief found in the work of such philosophers as Dretske and Fodor. According to this dominant view, beliefs, if they exist at all, are constituted by states of the brain. Rudder Baker rejects this view and replaces it with a quite different approach: practical realism. Seen from the perspective of practical realism, any argument that tries to interpret beliefs as either brain states or immaterial souls is a false dichotomy. Practical realism takes beliefs to be states of whole persons, rather like states of health. What a person believes is determined by what a person would do, say, and think in various circumstances. Thus beliefs and other attitudes are interwoven into an integrated, commonsensical conception of reality.

Recenzje

"The discussions are always interesting, and at times profound and foundational. It provides a contrasting voice in an otherwise too one-sided discussion; everyone now working in the philosophy of mind should read it." Anne Jasp Jacobson, Canadian Philosophical Review

Spis treści

Part I. The Standard View and its Problems: 1. Two conceptions of the attitudes; 2. Content and causation; 3. The myth of folk psychology; Part II. Explanation in Theory and Practice: 4. On standards of explanatory adequacy; 5. How beliefs explain; Part III. Practical Realism and its Prospects: 6. Belief without reification; 7. Mind and metaphysics; 8. Practical realism writ large.