Explaining Attitudes

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. Lynne 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 interprets beliefs as either brain states or states of immaterial souls is a ‘non-starter’. Practical realism takes beliefs to be states of the 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.

• This book challenges the dominant physicalism of contemporary philosophy of mind and replaces it with integrated, common-sense view that has much greater explanatory power • Broad interdisciplinary appeal across philosophy, psychology and cognitive science • Lynne Rudder Baker is a much published philosopher of mind. Her book, Saving Belief was published by Princeton in 1987

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.