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.

Concepts, Conceptions in the Psychology of the Referring Mind

Concepts function to make objects available for thinking and talking about; conceptions mediate and help guide our reasoning about those objects. Concepts unite all subjects who are capable of thinking and talking about the same thing(s)—subjects whose conceptions of that thing may differ. This distinction is integral to the picture of the psychology of the referring mind that is developed in this chapter: a picture with internalist, externalist, and “communitarian” elements. In the first part of the chapter, the concept/conception-distinction is discussed at length, and important implications of it for our understanding of coreference puzzles and propositional attitude ascriptions are drawn out. In the second part, an overall account of rational cognition and conation that fits with the recommended picture of the referring mind is sketched.

Representing Representations

This chapter champions the priority of objectual representations and reference to the world over fine-grained “inner” mental representations. The main argument rests upon demonstrating that our attitude ascriptions practices give priority to de re ascriptions of mental contents over de dicto ascriptions of mental contents. The argument thereby advances a rejection of the Fregean tradition that construes modes of presentations of objects as essential to the characterization of mental contents within attitude ascriptions. A novel argument is advanced invoking the evaluative commitments expressed with embedded referential slurring terms in argument position, showing them to reveal derogatory attitudes of the ascriber, not the ascribee, and then showing by analogy that the same obtains for existential and referential commitments: they do not typically invoke Fregean modes of presentation by which the ascribee cognizes the world. The chapter ends by reexamining substitution puzzles and the nature of de re belief.

Attributions of Attitude (May 22, 1970)

The subject of Lecture IV is attributions of attitude. In it, Davidson extends his theory of indirect quotation, which had appeared in 1968, to propositional attitude ascriptions more generally. He begins by criticizing rival accounts due to Quine, Scheffler, Church, and Frege. His positive proposal turns on the idea that the complementizer clauses embedded in ascriptions of attitude are not semantically a part of the embedding sentence. According to the paratactic account he favors, attributions of attitude involve demonstrative reference to an utterance of the speaker’s, which is claimed to stand in some relation to some utterance or attitude of the ascribee.

Propositional attitudes

Examples of propositional attitudes include the belief that snow is white, the hope that Mt Rosea is twelve miles high, the desire that there should be snow at Christmas, the intention to go to the snow tomorrow, and the fear that one shall be killed in an avalanche. As these examples show, we can distinguish the kind of attitude – belief, desire, intention, fear and so on – from the content of the attitude – that snow is white, that there will be snow at Christmas, to go to the snow, and so forth. The term ‘propositional attitudes’ comes from Bertrand Russell and derives from the fact that we can think of the content of an attitude as the proposition the attitude is towards. It can be typically captured by a sentence prefixed by ‘that’, though sometimes at the cost of a certain linguistic awkwardness: it is more natural, for example, to talk of the intention to go to the snow rather than the intention that one go to the snow. The most frequently discussed kinds of propositional attitudes are belief, desire and intention, but there are countless others: hopes, fears, wishes, regrets, and so on. Some sentences which contain the verbs of propositional attitude – believes, desires, intends, and so on – do not make ascriptions of propositional attitudes. For example: ‘Wendy believes me’, ‘John fears this dog’, and ‘He intends no harm’. However, while these sentences are not, as they stand, ascriptions of propositional attitudes, it is arguable – though not all philosophers agree – that they can always be analysed as propositional attitude ascriptions. So, for example, Wendy believes me just in case there is some p such that Wendy believes that p because I tell her that p; John fears this dog just in case there is some X such that John fears that this dog will do X and so on. Discussions of propositional attitudes typically focus on belief and desire, and, sometimes, intention, because of the central roles these attitudes play in the explanation of rational behaviour. For example: Mary’s visit to the supermarket is explained by her desire to purchase some groceries, and her belief that she can purchase groceries at the supermarket; Bill’s flicking the switch is explained by his desire to illuminate the room, and his belief that he can illuminate the room by flicking the switch; and so on. It is plausible – though not uncontroversial – to hold that rational behaviour can always be explained as the outcome of a suitable belief together with a suitable desire. Some philosophers (examples are Grice and Schiffer) have used the propositional attitudes to explain facts about meaning. They hold that the meanings of sentences somehow derive from the contents of relevantly related beliefs and intentions. Roughly, what I mean by a sentence S is captured by the content of, say, the belief that I express by saying S. One fundamental question which divides philosophers turns on the ontological status of the propositional attitudes and of their contents. It is clear that we make heavy use of propositional attitude ascriptions in explaining and interpreting the actions of ourselves and others. But should we think that in producing such ascriptions, we attempt to speak the truth – that is should we think that propositional attitude ascriptions are truth-apt – or should we see some other purpose, such as dramatic projection, in this usage? Or, even more radically, should we think that there is nothing but error and confusion – exposed by modern science and neurophysiology – in propositional attitude talk?

Content and Theme in Attitude Ascriptions

This chapter addresses a less-commonly discussed substitution failure in attitude ascriptions: a “that”-clause and its corresponding proposition description cannot in general be interchanged in the scope of psych-verbs, despite the standard view that the two forms refer to the same proposition. For example, “Holmes suspects that Moriarty has returned” and “Holmes suspects the proposition that Moriarty has returned” mean something quite different. The chapter accounts for these data in the framework of neo-Davidsonian semantics, arguing that substitution does not simply change the syntactic category of the attitude verb from clausal to transitive or vice versa, but also triggers the side-effect of changing thematic relations: when the transitive verb is used, it is the theme of the attitude-state or event that is identified, but when the clausal verb is used, it is the content of the state that is identified.