Title: Talk about beliefs /
Authors: Crimmins, Mark
Publisher: MIT Press,
Year: 1992
Subjects: Belief and doubt.; Semantics (Philosophy)
Abstract: Talk About Beliefs presents a new account of beliefs and of practices of reporting them that yields solutions to foundational problems in the philosophies of language and mind. Crimmins connects issues in mental representation with semantic issues in language for talking about cognition to provide a theoretically fruitful account of belief and belief reports that is logically consistent with intuitive judgments of such notorious problems as Frege's puzzles about substitution and cognitive significance, Quine's puzzle about de re, Castaneda and Perry's puzzle about indexical beliefs, and other more complicated variations. Crimmins's account relies on, and to some extent vindicates, the traditions of representationalism in the philosophy of mind and of structured propositional semantics. In reporting a person's beliefs, Crimmins argues, we systematically make claims not only about the propositional content of the beliefs but also about cognitive representations. He elaborates and defends this proposal by providing a careful assessment of pragmatic and semantic contributions to the claims expressed in belief reports. Crimmins's thesis forms a promising framework within which to approach issues in the philosophy of mind such as tacit belief (do you believe that pencils do not eat?), criteria for having concepts (do blind persons have the concept of red?), and restrictions of acquaintance on objects of thought (can you believe something about the first person born in the next century?).
Contents: 1. Naive Semantics. 1.1. The Issue. 1.2. Support from Above. 1.2.1. Compositionality. 1.2.2. Full Articulation. 1.2.3. Direct Reference. 1.2.4. Deriving the Naive Analysis. 1.2.5. How the Theoretical Support Goes Wrong. 1.3. Implicature and Cancelability. 1.4. Translation. 1.5. Richard's Steamroller. 1.6. Persisting Beliefs and Platitudes -- 2. Instances of Believing. 2.1. Belief States. 2.2. Cognitive Particulars. 2.3. Tacit Belief -- 3. Ideational Belief. 3.1. Ideas and Notions. 3.2. Representations as Particulars. 3.3. Contents of Notions. 3.4. Contents of Ideas -- 4. Structure, Propositions, and Beliefs. 4.1. Overview. 4.2. Constituent Structure. 4.2.1. Basic Structural Concepts. 4.2.2. Axioms for Constituent Structure. 4.3. A Simple Theory of Propositions. 4.3.1. Basic Logical Concepts. 4.3.2. Axioms for Structured Propositions. 4.3.3. Roles and Pedigrees. 4.3.4. Truth and Holding. 4.3.5. Logical Relations. 4.4. Structured Beliefs and Thought Maps. 4.4.1. Depiction of Actual Representations.