XI—Propositional Attitudes?

According to the standard lore on propositions, there are many propositional attitudes, including belief, fear and desire. The standard lore is partly correct: belief is a propositional attitude. But, so this paper argues, fear and desire are never propositional attitudes, not even when the content of the relevant fear or desire can be fully expressed by using a that-clause.     

The role of the counterfactually satisfied desire in the lag between false‐belief and false‐emotion attributions in children aged 4–7

A robust lag was evidenced between the attribution to an individual of a false belief about the world and the attribution of the false emotion associated with this false belief (Bradmetz & Schneider, 1999). This lag was unexpected in the frame of current theories of mind which consider that emotion has a rational cognitive basis. The present paper refers to the theory of appraisal which links emotion to the belief about desire satisfaction rather than the belief concerning the state of the world. The authors claim that, even if counterfactual belief is understood, the associated emotion and belief about counterfactual satisfaction of desire are not automatically understood because they depend on the success of an action. Two experiments conducted on happiness, fear, and anger confirmed this view: Attributing false belief about counterfactual desire satisfaction is much more difficult than attributing false belief about a current state of affairs, and the emotion attributed to the individual is more closely linked to a belief about desire than to a belief about the world. A four‐step developmental sequence is proposed, and the link between action and realist bias is discussed.     

Exploring the Stability of Belief: Resiliency and Temptation

Abstract

Belief allows us to coordinate our thought with our action. As Ramsey famously puts it, belief is a map by which we steer. For belief to play its role, on the one hand it must be stable under certain kinds of informational change; on the other hand it must be sensitive to changing evidence. Keeping belief stability in mind, we can ask about the norms that govern belief change in circumstances where there is epistemic pressure on us to change our belief. One such circumstance involves interpersonal conflict—in cases of disagreement with others. Another such circumstance involves intrapersonal conflict—the case of epistemic temptation. In this paper, I focus on a particular epistemic temptation case to explore what is rationally permitted and what is rationally required for us to do in the name of stability of belief.     

Adolescents' implicit theories predict desire for vengeance after peer conflicts: correlational and experimental evidence

Why do some adolescents respond to interpersonal conflicts vengefully, whereas others seek more positive solutions? Three studies investigated the role of implicit theories of personality in predicting violent or vengeful responses to peer conflicts among adolescents in Grades 9 and 10. They showed that a greater belief that traits are fixed (an entity theory) predicted a stronger desire for revenge after a variety of recalled peer conflicts (Study 1) and after a hypothetical conflict that specifically involved bullying (Study 2). Study 3 experimentally induced a belief in the potential for change (an incremental theory), which resulted in a reduced desire to seek revenge. This effect was mediated by changes in bad-person attributions about the perpetrators, feelings of shame and hatred, and the belief that vengeful ideation is an effective emotion-regulation strategy. Together, the findings illuminate the social-cognitive processes underlying reactions to conflict and suggest potential avenues for reducing violent retaliation in adolescents.     

Explaining the Paradox of Hedonism

The paradox of hedonism is the idea that making pleasure the only thing that we desire for its own sake can be self-defeating. Why would this be true? In this paper, I survey two prominent explanations, then develop a third possible explanation, inspired by Joseph Butler's classic discussion of the paradox. The existing accounts claim that the paradox arises because we are systematically incompetent at predicting what will make us happy, or because the greatest pleasures for human beings are found in certain special goods which hedonists cannot enjoy. On the account that I develop, the paradox is a consequence of a theory about the nature of pleasure, together with a view about the requirements of rational belief. Which of these explanations is correct, I argue, bears on central questions about how to understand the nature and extent of the paradox.     

LITERATURE, KNOWLEDGE, AND THE AESTHETIC ATTITUDE

An attitude which hopes to derive aesthetic pleasure from an object is often thought to be in tension with an attitude which hopes to derive knowledge from it. The current article argues that this alleged conflict only makes sense when the aesthetic attitude and knowledge are construed unnaturally narrowly, and that when both are correctly understood there is no tension between them. To do this, the article first proposes a broad and satisfying account of the aesthetic attitude, and then considers and rejects twelve reasons for thinking that deriving knowledge from something is incompatible with maintaining an aesthetic attitude towards it. Two main conclusions are drawn. 1) That the representational arts are often in a good position to communicate non-propositional knowledge about human beings. 2) That while our desire to obtain pleasure from a work's manifest properties, and our desire to obtain knowledge from it, are not the same motive, the formal similarities between them are sufficiently impressive to warrant both being seen as elements of the aesthetic attitude.     

Suspending is believing

A good account of the agnostic attitude of Suspending Judgement should explain how it can be rendered more or less rational/justified according to the state of one’s evidence—and one’s relation to that evidence. I argue that the attitude of suspending judgement whether p constitutively involves having a belief; roughly, a belief that one cannot yet tell whether or not p. I show that a theory of suspending that treats it as a sui generis attitude, wholly distinct from belief, struggles to account for how suspension of judgement can be rendered more or less rational (or irrational) by one’s evidence. I also criticise the related idea that suspension essentially requires an ‘Inquiring Attitude’. I show how a belief-based theory, in contrast, neatly accounts for the rational and epistemic features of suspending and so neatly accounts for why an agnostic has a genuine neutral opinion concerning the question whether p, as opposed to simply having no opinion.

     

Rationality, Justification, and the Internalism/Externalism Debate

In this paper, I argue that what underlies internalism about justification is a rationalist conception of justification, not a deontological conception of justification, and I argue for the plausibility of this rationalist conception of justification. The rationalist conception of justification is the view that a justified belief is a belief that is held in a rational way; since we exercise our rationality through conscious deliberation, the rationalist conception holds that a belief is justified iff a relevant possible instance of conscious deliberation would endorse the belief. The importance of conscious deliberation stems from its role in guiding us in acquiring true beliefs: whereas the externalist holds that if we wish to acquire true beliefs, we have to begin by assuming that some of our usual methods of belief formation generally provide us with true beliefs, the internalist holds that if we form beliefs by conscious deliberation, we can be conscious of reasons for thinking that our beliefs are true. Conscious deliberation can make us conscious of reasons because it proceeds via rational intuitions. I argue that despite the fallibility of rational intuition, rational intuitions do enable us to become conscious of reasons for belief.

The act of rejecting reduces the desire to reconnect: Evidence for a cognitive dissonance account

Through three experiments we examined whether the act of rejecting reduces the desire to reconnect with others. In Experiment 1, female participants who had just rejected a job applicant were less motivated to make new friends than the controls. In Experiment 2, female participants who had insufficient justifications to reject a paper were more reluctant to work with others than those who had sufficient justifications to reject. In Experiment 3, high-choice female participants showed more reduction in reconnecting desire than low-choice female participants. Furthermore, female participants who could misattribute their discomfort away showed less reduction in reconnecting desire. However, in all three experiments, male participants showed less reduction in reconnection desire than females. A follow-up survey showed that males and females differed in their senses of social connectedness and their different discomfort level at rejecting others. Overall, results supported the cognitive dissonance account which posits that, because the act of rejecting is in conflict with the fundamental motive to affiliate, such conflict may compel the mind to modify the existing attitude. Thus rejecting reduces the desire to forge new social connections.     

On the Emotional Character of Trust

Trustful interaction serves the interests of those involved. Thus, one could reason that trust itself may be analyzed as part of rational, goaloriented action. In contrast, common sense tells us that trust is an emotion and is, therefore, independent of rational deliberation to some extent. I will argue that we are right in trusting our common sense. My argument is conceptual in nature, referring to the common distinction between trust and pure reliance. An emotional attitude may be understood as some general pattern in the way the world or some part of the world is perceived by an individual. Trust may be characterized by such a pattern. I shall focus on two central features of a trusting attitude. First, trust involves a participant attitude (Strawson) toward the person being trusted. Second, a situation of trust is perceived by a trusting person as one in which shared values or norms motivate both his own actions as well as those of the person being trusted. As an emotional attitude, trust is, to some extent, independent of objective information. It determines what a trusting person will believe and how various outcomes are evaluated. Hence, trust is quite different from rational belief and the problem with trust is not adequately met in minimizing risk by supplying extensive information or some mechanism of sanctioning. Trust is an attitude that enables us to cope with risk in a certain way. If we want to promote trustful interaction, we must form our institutions in ways that allow individuals to experience their interest and values as shared and, thus, to develop a trusting attitude.     

Where to look first for children's knowledge of false beliefs

Recent research has shown that, although young children have a substantial knowledge of beliefs as internal mental states, they have considerable difficulty in understanding how a false belief can lead to an outcome which is in conflict with a desire. However, this evidence has come from tasks which assume that children follow an experimenter's "implicatures" in conversation and interpret the question "Where will a person (with the false belief) look for the object?" to mean "Where will the person look first?" rather than "Where will the person have to look (or go to look) to find the object?" In our investigation, even 3-year-olds often responded correctly when asked to predict the initial behavior of a story character with a false belief. We discuss these results in terms of the conversational worlds of children and adults.     

Reasons and Promotion

A number of philosophers accept promotionalism, the view that whether there is a normative reason for an agent to perform an action or have an attitude depends on whether her doing so promotes a value, desire, interest, goal, or end. I show that promotionalism faces a prima facie problem when it comes to reasons for belief: it looks extensionally inadequate. I then articulate two general strategies promotionalists can (and have) used to solve this problem and argue that, even if one of these two strategies can successfully solve the problem with reasons for belief, promotionalists face a symmetrical problem in a range of structurally similar cases. As I'll argue, the problem is that promotionalism cannot account for reasons grounded in the ‘fit’ between an attitude and its object. I offer an alternative to promotionalism and explain how adopting this alternative solves the problems with promotionalism while preserving much of what made promotionalism attractive in the first place.     

Belief in discourse representation theory

Conclusion I hope I have convinced the reader that DR theory offers at least some exciting potential when applied to the semantics of belief reports. It differs considerably from other approaches, and it makes intuitively acceptable predictions that other theories do not. The theory also provides a novel approach to the semantics of other propsitional attitude reports. Further, DR theory enables one to approach the topic of anaphora within belief and other propositional attitude contexts in a novel way, thus combining the semantics developed here with one of the theory's original motivations (Kamp, 1981a). However, these are unfortunately topics that I must reserve for another time.I am grateful to Dan Bonevac, Irene Heim, Richard Larson, Stan Peters, Rich Thomason and especially Hans Kamp and an anonymous reviewer for the Journal of Philosophical Logic for comments on previous drafts of this paper, as well as to The Center for Cognitive Science for research support.     

Three indications for the existence of God in causal metaphysics

With the emergence of modern physics a conflict became apparent between the Principle of Sufficient Cause and the Principle of Physical Causal Closure. Though these principles are not logically incompatible, they could no longer be considered to be both true; one of them had to be false. The present paper makes use of this seldom noticed conflict to argue on the basis of considerations of comparative rationality for the truth of causal statements that have at least some degree of philosophico-theological relevance and can be taken to indicate (not prove) the existence of God. The paper’s comparatively modest aim is to establish belief in the existence of God as a rational metaphysical option, not as a rational obligation. In its final section, enriched causal considerations lead to an indication (not proof) of God as that which guarantees the unified continuance of the physical world.     

5～8岁儿童二级信念-愿望推理能力的发展

该研究依据信念(正确-错误)和愿望(接近-回避)对儿童的二级信念-愿望推理能力进行了细分,并据此设计了四个二级信念-愿望任务,探讨了480名5～8岁儿童在四个任务上的表现。结果发现,对儿童而言,不同的二级信念-愿望任务的难度不同,由易到难的顺序依次为:二级真实信念接近愿望、二级错误信念接近愿望、二级真实信念回避愿望、二级错误信念回避愿望。     

Filial belief and parent-child conflict

This study examines the relation between filial belief and the frequency, origins, and solutions to parent‐child conflict using an indigenous Chinese perspective. The Dual Filial Piety model is employed to categorize the four types of filial belief: nonfilial, authoritarian, reciprocal, and absolute. Questionnaires were completed by 773 junior and senior high school students from around Taiwan for the study. Results provided support for the indigenous Chinese notion that a child's filial beliefs relate to the level of parent‐child conflict. The results go beyond this common conception to highlight that filial beliefs may have a particular role in decreasing self‐centred but not inappropriate conflict between parents and children, and that reciprocal filial beliefs may have a more important role in decreasing conflict than authoritarian filial beliefs. Clear differences were identified in the reported origins of conflict (Demands Conflict with Desire. Unreasonable Behaviour, Demand Exceeds Ability, Role Conflict, Interparental Dispute. Immoral Demands) and solutions to conflict (self‐sacrifice, compromise, refraining, ego‐centred, escape) among the four filial types. Parent demands conflicting with the child's desire was the greatest source of conflict for each of the four filial types. Nonfilial types reported significantly more conflict than absolute types for four of the six origins of conflict examined. Low incidence of conflict may explain why the filial types did not differ for the remaining two origins. Overall, the four filial types reported self‐sacrifice as their least used solution to parent‐child conflict, and nonfilials reported significantly less use of this solution than the other three filial types. Absolutes and reciprocals reported significantly more use of refraining than the other two filial types. Results of this study provide the first empirical support for the Dual Filial Piety model and constitute a foundation for continued indigenous research on parent‐child relations in Chinese culture. It is expected that an indigenous theory of parent‐child relations incorporating the Dual Filial Piety model can eventually be integrated into a global psychology.     

Inhibitory processing in the false belief task: Two conjectures

Although it is well established that four-year-olds outperform three-year-olds on predicting behavior from false beliefs, this is only true when the false belief is coupled with a positive desire. Four-year-olds perform poorly in an otherwise standard false belief task when the protagonist's desire is to avoid rather than to approach a target. We account for this by assuming that the attribution of a false belief involves inhibitory processing. We present two versions of an inhibition model of successful belief-desire reasoning.     

The Modal Logic of Discrepancy

Discrepancies between an agents goals and beliefs play an important, if implicit, role in determining what a rational agent is motivated to do. This is most obvious in cases where an agent achieves a complex goal incrementally and must deliberate anew as each milestone is reached. In such cases the concept of goal/belief discrepancy defines an appropriate space to which a degree-of-achievement yardstick can be applied. This paper presents soundness and completeness results concerning a logic for reasoning about goal/belief discrepancy, and it is suggested that a certain species of goal/belief discrepancy captures the concept of desire.