Brandom and Quine on Perspectivally Hybrid De Re Attitude Ascription: A Solution to a Problem in the Explanation of Action

In Making it Explicit Robert Brandom claims that perspectivally hybrid de re attitude ascriptions explain what an agent actually did, from the point of view of the ascriber, whether or not that was what the agent intended to do. There is a well-known problem, however, first brought to attention by Quine, but curiously ignored by Brandom, that threatens to undermine the role of de re ascriptions in the explanation of action, a problem that stems directly from the fact that, unlike de dicto ascriptions, they permit the attribution of inconsistent attitudes to agents. I propose a solution to the problem which I believe is consistent with Brandom’s approach to the nature of intentionality and the explanation of action.

Meaning, Thought, and Thought Ascription

This chapter continues the discussion of propositions and propositional attitudes begun in Chapters 3 and 4. Section 1 sketches a view of attitudes and attitude ascription. Section 2 addresses how truth conditions and linguistic meaning do and do not help to individuate ‘the objects of the attitudes’. Section 3 returns to the last chapter’s discussion of how the reference of another’s words or concepts bears on the truth of an ascription of saying or thought to her.

Ironic Utterances

Irony is a compelling pragmatic phenomenon to investigate experimentally because a) it clearly exposes how an utterance’s meaning can change as a function of context; b) it invites investigations of the cognitive functions that go beyond mere linguistic decoding and, specifically; c) it allows one to have a clearer understanding of the role played by attitude ascription, which we show is central. This chapter will review how attitude ascription became a central topic in the theoretical debate on irony in the 1980s, how it almost disappeared from the experimental literature for about twenty years and how it deserves a place both as a hallmark of irony processing and as a hallway that connects various subfields of cognitive science, including neuroscience.

De se marking, logophoricity, and ziji

This chapter addresses the assumed connection between de se attitude ascription and logophoricity in the case of Chinese ziji. It is widely believed that logophors are among the paradigm cases of de se marking, and that long-distance ziji is logophoric. Drawing on a critical examination of a variety of analyses, this chapter argues that long-distance anaphora, de se interpretation, and logophoric marking are overlapping but distinct phenomena. Even if ziji is logophoric, it does not automatically trigger de se requirement. A de se-neutral analysis of ziji is consistent with pragmatic derivations of interpretations that emphasize the self. The findings point to a new approach to long-distance binding, and identify the blocking effect as the key issue for further research.

Mental State Attribution for Interactionism

Interactionists about folk psychology argue that embodied interactions constitute the primary way we understand one another and thus oppose more standard accounts according to which the understanding is mostly achieved through belief and desire attributions. However, also interactionists need to explain why people sometimes still resort to attitude ascription. In this paper, it is argued that this explanatory demand presents a genuine challenge for interactionism and that a popular proposal which claims that belief and desire attributions are needed to make sense of counternormative behavior is problematic. Instead, the most promising conception of belief and desire ascriptions is the communicative conception which locates them in the context of declarative and imperative communication, respectively. Such a communication can take both verbal and non-verbal form.