Abstract
The ability to attribute beliefs and desires is taken by many to be an essential component of human social cognition, enabling us to predict, explain and shape behaviour and other mental states. In this paper, I argue that there are certain basic responses to attributed attitudes which have thus far been overlooked in the study of social cognition, although they underlie many of the moves we make in our social interactions. The claim is that belief and desire attributions allow for the possibility to agree or disagree and to approve or disapprove, respectively. These evaluative responses may seem obvious but they are of considerable theoretical interest because they can’t be reduced to other roles of belief and desire attribution and are always an open possibility for attributers. What’s more, the responses of agreement/disagreement and approval/disapproval are indispensable for such attributions to be intelligible to us in the first place.
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Notes
Belief and desire are not the only types of propositional attitude, of course, but in this paper I focus solely on them. I also acknowledge that the idea of desire being a propositional attitude isn’t uncontroversial, but still simply assume that desires are propositional attitudes.
The idea that thinking about others’ beliefs and desires involves thinking about the subject matter of those attitudes is comparable to the co-cognition account of mindreading that has been developed by Jane Heal (1998, 2013). That being said, she hasn’t articulated the specific responses of the attributer as I attempt to do here.
In §4, I will provide a further reason why evaluability matters for our understanding of BD attributions.
In fact, as it becomes apparent in §3.2, I take explanations, predictions and mindshaping to constitute such independent responses.
An additional remark is called for at this point. In recent years, an accusation has been brought forth against those views that see the prediction and explanation in terms of mental states as the central element of social cognition, namely, that the latter portray the everyday social interaction as a detached endeavour, as taking a theoretical stance towards another person (Gallagher 2001; Ratcliffe 2005). I largely agree with those objections but they tend to overlook the fact that mentalizing need not actually be a detached way of making sense of other people. The responses of agreement/disagreement and approval/disapproval certainly do not express a detached stance towards other persons.
There can certainly be other interesting relations between evaluative responses and predictions, but I do not have space to discuss them here.
One might try to cash out the idea of non-contingent (or essential) effects in some other way, of course, without relying on the notion of indispensability. However, I do think that the present argument merits interest even then.
One possible reason why this idea of indispensability may sound implausible is that inducing evaluative responses presumably isn’t the function of BD attributions, and some might think that an effect of some type of activity, which isn’t the selected function of that activity, cannot be indispensable or essential for it. I cannot think of any good reason in support of this assumption, however.
Research in this paper was supported by Estonian Science Foundation Grant ETF9117.
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Tooming, U. Beliefs and Desires: from Attribution to Evaluation. Philosophia 45, 359–369 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-016-9756-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-016-9756-1