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Must Beliefs be Sentences?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 February 2022

Brian Loar
Brian Loar*
Affiliation:
University of Southern California
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Extract

The language of thought hypothesis is this: central among the causes of our behavior are inner states with linguistic structure that play roughly the role we pre-scientifically ascribe to our beliefs and desires. A philosophical thesis has been proposed on the basis of that scientific hypothesis- namely, that the way to explicate commonsense notions of the content of beliefs and desires, of their intentionality, is in terms of the meaning of such internal sentences. I am going to compare this explicative strategy with a certain functionalist theory of propositional attitudes, on which propositional attitude ascriptions of the form ‘x believes (desires) that —’ are explicatively more fundamental than anything linguistic and semantic. This is a modern dress version of an old dispute; but the issue is not between the naturalistic proponent of linguistic meaning and the antinaturalistic proponent of irreducible intentionality.

Type
Part XV. Language and Thought
Information
PSA: Proceedings of the Biennial Meeting of the Philosophy of Science Association , Volume 1982 , Issue 2: Volume Two: Symposia and Invited Papers 1982 , 1982 , pp. 626 - 643
Copyright
Copyright © 1983 Philosophy of Science Association

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