ENGLISH

Explaining Attitudes: A Practical Approach to the Mind

By Lynne Rudder Baker

Book information

Publisher
Cambridge University Press
Year
1995
ISBN
052142190X, 9780521421904
LCC
BD418.3 .B35 1995
Language
english
Format
DJVU
Filesize
2 MB (1629181 bytes)
Series
Cambridge Studies in Philosophy
Edition
1
Pages
248\248
Topic
Education
DPI
400
Orientation
no
Scanned
yes
Time added
2011-06-04 13:46:07

Description

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.

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