Propositional Attitudes and Cultural Scripts

Abstract

In the linguistic literature inspired by the philosophical tradition, the key concepts of analysing ‘propositional attitudes’ are ‘belief’, ‘hope’, ‘doubt’, ‘know’, among others. Yet, this distinction ignores cultural and linguistic variation in the conceptualisation of mental states that can be labelled as ‘propositional attitudes’. Moreover, this approach overlooks the fact that categorisation of mental states in general and ‘propositional attitudes’ in particular is aligned with cultural attitudes and understandings. This chapter proposes a comparative analysis of selected terms of ‘propositional attitudes’ in English and Russian (to believe vs. sčitat’ and belief vs. mnenie) in terms of universal meanings as they are identified in the Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM). The concepts central to the analysis are know and think which have been shown to have exact semantic equivalents in Russian and English as well as other languages. The chapter demonstrates that the analysed concepts differ in meaning and can be related to culture-specific cognitive styles which can be formulated as cultural scripts. The chapter demonstrates that the supremacy of logical concepts does not correlate to the architecture of mental lexicon as it is revealed in universal human concepts. It argues that NSM semantic universals can be regarded as more appropriate elements in the analysis of propositional attitudes.

Conclusion

The linguistic study of propositional attitudes reports as a window into human cognition cannot ignore the issue of their linguistic and cultural variation. Verbs expressing propositional attitudes are cultural constructs aligned with important cultural assumptions relating to ways of speaking and thinking. By accepting the English verbs like to believe as minimal semantic units in the analysis of propositional attitudes, scholars are introducing an Anglo bias into the analysis. This approach also disregards the issue of semantic complexity of the verb to believe and its equivalents in other languages. Consequently, treating to believe as a final atom of meaning in the analysis of propositional attitude reports distorts the results.

The research paradigm of the NSM offers an inventory of empirically established semantic universals which can be successfully employed in semantic and pragmatic analysis. The NSM primes in the domain of mental states, those of THINK, KNOW, and WANT, can serve as a language-neutral foundation in the analysis of propositional attitudes. NSM can be used to reveal ‘mental architecture’ of conceptualisation of mental states. It can also be further applied in cognitive cross-disciplinary research.