4-D Objects and Disposition Ascriptions

Self-ascriptions of Beliefs

Prepared for a lecture in Bologna never delivered, unpublished 1997 " Cartesianism " in the philosophy of mind is most often understood as the view that it is of the essence of the mind that each mind has a special, privileged access to its own contents. It is is often called the view according to which there is a " first-person authority " with respect to the contents of our own mental states,...

. Propositional Attitudes . Attitude Ascriptions

Verbs like 'believes, ' 'knows, ' 'suspects, ' 'hopes, ' and 'worries'—verbs that, at the level of logical form, can take 10 clauses as their complements—are generally taken to denote intentional attitudes borne to a proposition. For this reason they are known as propositional attitude verbs. It is difficult to construct a semantics and prag-matics adequate to the features of these verbs. Any s...

Desiring , Desires , and Desire Ascriptions

Lewis on Knowledge Ascriptions

David Lewis’s primary contribution to the theory of knowledge is his account of knowledge ascription, which integrates an elegant version of relevant alternatives theory with a detailed version of contextualism. His account is prefigured in his discussion of accommodation in “Scorekeeping in a Language Game” (1979), and forms the central topic of his “Elusive Knowledge” (1996). I will review hi...

Background Default Knowledge and Causality Ascriptions

A model is defined that predicts an agent’s ascriptions of causality (and related notions of facilitation and justification) between two events in a chain, based on background knowledge about the normal course of the world. Background knowledge is represented by nonmonotonic consequence relations. This enables the model to handle situations of poor information, where background knowledge is not...