Explaining Attitudes: A Practical Approach to the Mind (Cambridge Studies in Philosophy) - Softcover

Baker, Lynne Rudder

Softcover

ISBN 10: 052142190X ISBN 13: 9780521421904

Publisher: Cambridge University Press, 1995

Synopsis

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.

About this title

Book Description

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.

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).

Edition details

• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Publication date: 1995
• ISBN 10: 052142190X
• ISBN 13: 9780521421904
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 264