Explaining Attitudes: A Practical Approach to the Mind

by Lynne Rudder Baker

Overview

Explaining Attitudes offers a timely and important challenge to the dominant conception of belief found in the work of such philosophers as Dretske and Fodor. According to this dominant view, beliefs, if they exist at all, are constituted by states of the brain. Rudder Baker rejects this view and replaces it with a quite different approach: practical realism. Seen from the perspective of practical realism, any argument that tries to interpret beliefs as either brain states or immaterial souls is a false dichotomy. Practical realism takes beliefs to be states of whole persons, rather like states of health. What a person believes is determined by what a person would do, say, and think in various circumstances. Thus beliefs and other attitudes are interwoven into an integrated, commonsensical conception of reality.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780521421904
Publisher:	Cambridge University Press
Publication date:	01/27/1995
Series:	Cambridge Studies in Philosophy
Pages:	264
Product dimensions:	5.51(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.59(d)

About the Author

Lynne Rudder Baker is Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. She is the author of Explaining Attitudes (Cambridge University Press, 1995), Persons and Bodies (Cambridge University Press, 2000), The Metaphysics of Everyday Life (Cambridge University Press, 2007), and Saving Belief (1987).

Table of Contents

Part I. The Standard View and its Problems: 1. Two conceptions of the attitudes; 2. Content and causation; 3. The myth of folk psychology; Part II. Explanation in Theory and Practice: 4. On standards of explanatory adequacy; 5. How beliefs explain; Part III. Practical Realism and its Prospects: 6. Belief without reification; 7. Mind and metaphysics; 8. Practical realism writ large.

Editorial Reviews

"The discussions are always interesting, and at times profound and foundational. It provides a contrasting voice in an otherwise too one-sided discussion; everyone now working in the philosophy of mind should read it." Anne Jasp Jacobson, Canadian Philosophical Review

From the Publisher

Challenging the dominant conception--found in the work of such philosophers as Dretske and Fodor--that beliefs, if they exist at all, are constituted by states of the brain, Baker sets forth the approach of Practical Realism, which takes beliefs to be states of the whole person, akin to states of health. Among the topics she discusses are intentional explanations, causal explanations, the project of naturalizing intentionality, the importance of relational properties, the use of counterfactuals to underwrite belief, the nature of objectivity, the philosophical import of "mind independence," and the relation of common sense to science. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

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