Thoughts and Belief Ascriptions

Abstract

There is, I believe, an emerging consensus among philosophers of mind and cognitive scientists as to the existence of two broad classes of mental representational states (or kinds of mental representations): on the one hand it is assumed by common sense and by cognitive psychology as well that intentional mental states such as thoughts and beliefs have the semantic capacity to mentally represent facts and events in the world. On the other hand it is widely assumed by cognitive scientists (particularly linguists) that any plausible model of the processing of utterances must ascribe to the speaker-hearer of a natural language non-intentional mental representations of the phonological, syntactic and semantic properties of the sentences processed (either in production or in comprehension). A unified picture of the human mind sensitive of the collaborative concerns of common sense and cognitive science alike will thus incorporate lower modular subdoxastic mental states along with higher central cognitive states.1 In the present paper I will be concerned with the latter.