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

Baker, Lynne Rudder

ISBN 10: 052142190X / ISBN 13: 9780521421904

Published by Cambridge University Press, New York, NY, 1995

About this Item

246 pp. Tightly bound. Spine not compromised. Text is free of markings. Faint tan staion side fore-edge. Note: This book is from a smoker's library.

Seller Inventory # 054276

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Explaining Attitudes: A Practical Approach to the Mind (Cambridge Studies in Philosophy)
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press, New York, NY
• Publication Date: 1995
• ISBN 10: 052142190X
• ISBN 13: 9780521421904
• Binding: Paperback
• Condition: Very Good
• Seller catalogs:
  • QQQQQQQQ

About this title

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 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).