Abstract
The aim of this paper is to present a challenge to the received view in folk psychology. According to this challenge, the semantic assumption behind the received view, which considers that propositional attitude ascriptions are descriptions of the internal causally efficacious states underlying behavior, cannot account for the main function of reasons in terms of mental states. Keywords: folk psychology, propositional attitudes ascriptions, reasons, expressivism, descriptivism.
Highlights
Humans spend the majority of their time engaged in social situations carrying out cooperative projects and interacting with each other
The received view about social cognition, claims that the ability of human beings to navigate the social world relies on their capacity to ascribe mental states for the purpose of understanding, explaining and predicting behavior
We say that Mary ran away because the building was on fire, or that Anthony went out to have a real espresso. These reasons do not appeal to mental states, they introduce the evaluative component specified before; we evaluate a person by introducing a fact that plays a role in the justification of the behavior
Summary
Humans spend the majority of their time engaged in social situations carrying out cooperative projects and interacting with each other. I maintain that propositional attitude ascriptions possess an evaluative character; ascribing beliefs and desires is to ascribe different grades of responsibilities to a particular reason to exculpate or condemn the attributee’s behavior or speech acts. This evaluative function, I hold, is incompatible with the descriptive assumption behind the received view. Those arguments, I conclude, point to an alternative semantic approach to mental ascriptions: Expressivism According to this view, propositional attitude verbs have an expressive meaning, that is, they function to regulate social agents’ actions by expressing different attitudes (responsibility, merit, conviction) to a particular content. I advance other possible virtues of expressivism for solving two classic problems in philosophy of mind
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