Propositional Attitudes and Consciousness

Abstract

This paper begins with an unargued-for assumption that I feel obligated to avow, viz., that believing' is a relation between an organism and a propositional content, a relation that obtains through the organism's being related to (having) a mental representation which represents that content. I make this assumption partly because I lean toward believing it and partly because of expository convenience. I am primarily interested in the question of introspection or consciousness of one's own beliefs. What I conclude, while put in terms of the assumption, could, with suitable alterations in the arguments, be concluded on behalf of any position that takes beliefs as psychologically real relations. If this assumption about believing is correct, then believing is a three-place relation and there are four elements in any case of believing: the organism, what is believed (the propositional content), the representation, and the relationship (the propositional attitude) which holds between the organism and the represented proposition.' In ordinary English we use the word belief sometimes to