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.
Author(s): Lynne Rudder Baker
Series: Cambridge Studies in Philosophy
Edition: 1
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Year: 1995
Language: English
Pages: 248
Contents......Page 2
Preface page......Page 4
Part I: The Standard View and its Problems......Page 7
1 Two conceptions of the attitudes......Page 8
The Standard View......Page 12
An alternative conception: Practical Realism......Page 24
Belief explanations......Page 29
An overview......Page 34
2 Content and causation......Page 37
Syntax and the problem of the parameter......Page 38
The dead end of narrow content......Page 47
Beliefs as structuring causes......Page 61
Relational properties......Page 68
Conclusion......Page 71
3 The myth of folk psychology......Page 72
What's the problem?......Page 74
Assessment of arguments for "folk psychology"......Page 82
Metaphysical motivation for the "theory" view of common sense......Page 90
Conclusion......Page 95
Part II: Explanation in Theory and Practice......Page 96
4 On standards of explanatory adequacy......Page 97
Proposed standards of adequacy......Page 98
Nonpsychological causal explanations .......Page 102
Application of proposed standards to examples......Page 112
A verdict......Page 122
A test for explanatory adequacy......Page 125
The autonomy of intentional explanations......Page 130
Motivation for the Standard View undermined......Page 140
How beliefs do not explain: the Standard View......Page 148
Conclusion......Page 153
Part III: Practical Realism and its Prospects......Page 155
What are beliefs?......Page 156
Can counterfactuals underwrite belief?......Page 161
Contrasts with the Standard View......Page 174
Language and the inner life......Page 190
Conclusion......Page 194
Need intentionality be "naturalized"?......Page 196
Unreified belief and scientific psychology......Page 212
Materialism......Page 216
The reality of belief......Page 220
Conclusion......Page 222
8 Practical Realism writ large......Page 223
The commonsense conception......Page 224
The idea of mind independence......Page 231
Objectivity......Page 235
The overall argument......Page 239
Conclusion......Page 241
Index......Page 245
