Explaining Attitudes A Practical Approach to the Mind [Paperback]

Explaining Attitudes develops an account of propositional attitudes - practical realism.According to the dominant conception of belief found in the work of Dretske and Fodor, beliefs are represented by states of the brain. Rejecting the view, this work replaces it with practical realism , wherein beliefs represent states of whole persons, rather like states of health.According to the dominant conception of belief found in the work of Dretske and Fodor, beliefs are represented by states of the brain. Rejecting the view, this work replaces it with practical realism , wherein beliefs represent states of whole persons, rather like states of health.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.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. The discussions are always interesting, and at times profound and foundational. It provides a contrasting voice in an otherwise too one-sló-