The explanatory role of belief ascriptions

Abstract

Some recent studies of how the content of intentional mental states is individuated in ordinary discourse have sparked much debate. These studies are striking because they imply that the contents of a person's thoughts are not determined by (do not supervene on) his or her phenomenological, functional or physiological states. The contents of a person's thoughts, it is claimed, may be affected by features of the external environment of which he or she is entirely ignorant. The line of argument which is taken to lend support to this conclusion was first described by Putnam (1975) and has been developed by Burge in a series of papers (1979, 1982a, 1982b). The argumentative strategy is to test claims about the determinants of mental content by describing thought-experiments in which physically and functionally type-identical subjects occupy different environments. It is then argued that our practice of thought attribution dictates that such subjects have propositional attitudes with different contents, since different belief ascriptions are true of them. 1 The topic of this paper is the ingenious thoughtexperiment described by Burge (1979) and the conclusion he draws from it. 2 Burge's conclusion is that the linguistic practices of the community to which a person belongs partly determine the contents of his or her intentional mental states. The thought-experiment held to support it can be described as follows. Burge invites us to consider an English-speaker -- let us call her Jane -- who misuses the word 'arthritis', applying it to rheumatoid diseases in the bones as well as in the joints. This, Burge argues, does not prevent us from reporting her beliefs using ascriptions in which the word 'arthritis' occurs in the content-clause. Suppose that Jane says to her doctor, 'I have arthritis in my thigh,' that the doctor replies 'You