The Measure of Mind provides a sustained critique of a widely held
representationalist view of propositional attitudes and their role in
the production of thought and behaviour. On this view, having a
propositional attitude is a matter of having an explicit
representation that plays a particular causal/computational role in
the production of thought and behaviour. Robert J. Matthews argues
that this view does not enjoy the theoretical or the empirical support
that proponents claim for it; moreover, the view misconstrues the role
of propositional attitude attributions in cognitive scientific
theorizing. The Measure of Mind goes on to develop an alternative
measurement-theoretic account of propositional attitudes and the
sentences by which we attribute them. On this account, the sentences
by which we attribute propositional attitudes function semantically
like the sentences by which we attribute a quantity of some physical
magnitude (e.g., having a mass of 80 kilos). That is, in much the same
way that we specify a quantity of some physical magnitude by means of
its numerical representative on a measurement scale, we specify
propositional attitude of a given type by means of its representative
in a linguistically-defined measurement space. Propositional attitudes
turn out to be causally efficacious aptitudes for thought and
behaviour, not semantically evaluable mental particulars of some sort.
Matthews' measurement-theoretic account provides a more plausible view
of the explanatorily relevant properties of propositional attitudes,
the semantics of propositional attitude attributions, and the role of
such attributions in computational cognitive scientific theorizing.
Les mer
Propositional Attitudes and their Attribution
Produktdetaljer
ISBN
9780191615047
Publisert
2020
Utgiver
Oxford University Press Academic UK
Språk
Product language
Engelsk
Format
Product format
Digital bok
Forfatter