Explaining Attitudes: A Practical Approach to the Mind

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.

Explaining Attitudes develops a new account of propositional attitudes - practical realism.

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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)

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