The Content of Propositional Attitudes

Author(s): Tyler Burge

Source: Noûs , Mar., 1980, Vol. 14, No. 1, 1980 A. P. A. Western Division Meetings (Mar.,
1980), pp. 53-58
Published by: Wiley

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/2214890

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide
range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and
facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].
Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at
https://about.jstor.org/terms

Wiley is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Noûs

This content downloaded from

5.24.46.90 on Wed, 14 Sep 2022 15:32:54 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 The Content of
Propositional Attitudes
Abstract

TYLER BURGE

THE UNVERSiTY OF CALIFORNIA AT LOS ANGELES

The bare outline of an approach to the semantics of sentences

about propositional attitudes will be presented. Here I outline
the outline.
We begin by noting some elementary features of sen-
tences about propositional attitudes. Such sentences have the
logical form of a relation (at least) between a person, or sub-
ject, and something indicated by the nominal expression fol-
lowing the propositional attitude verb. This something admits
of truth or falsity, or of being true of some entities and falseof
others; and it is in terms of these bearers of truth (or bearers of
truth-of-ness) that we commonly characterize the subject's
mental states. Further, these entities indicated by nominal
expressions-what people think, believe and so forth-are
normally in the public domain in the sense that they are
intersubjectively assessed: so assessing them is a matter of
merest routine. A final elementary feature of sentences about
propositional attitudes touches logical transformations. In
numerous contexts, exchange of co-extensive expressions oc-
curring in surface nominal expressions following
propositional-attitude verbs fails to preserve the truth value of
the whole sentence. Similarly, normal applications of existen-
tial generalization in such expressions often fail at the surface
level. On the other hand, these logical transformations, as
applied within that-clauses, or variants, intuitively succeed in
some contexts.
Frege proposed a theory which goes far toward capturing
many of these points. He took propositional attitude sen-
tences to relate a thinker and a thought. That-clauses, and

NOOS 14 (1980) 53
?1980 by Indiana University

This content downloaded from

5.24.46.90 on Wed, 14 Sep 2022 15:32:54 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 54 NOUS

variants, were terms that indicated or denoted thoughts-

abstract entities that were expressed by sentences and were
the primary bearers of truth and falsity. The theory captured
the intersubjective accessibility of thoughts by claiming that
thoughts were abstract and not peculiar to any one thinker.
Substantial philosophical problems surround this claim. But
from the viewpoint of formal semantical theory, the appeal to
abstract entities which people entertain or think in common
has great plausibility. Frege's treatment of the failures of
substitution and existential generalization in surface that-
clauses was one of the chief glories of the theory. Here the
theory was guided by a powerful method. Frege postulated
that the truth or falsity of a sentence, and the semantical value
of a complex term, was a function of the semantical values of
its parts, as those parts function in the containing expression.
Call this Frege's Principle. Using this principle, the truth value
of the sentence embedded in a that-clause can easily be shown
not to be the semantical value of the that-clause: embedded
sentences with the same truth value are not intersubstitutable.
Frege hypothesized that those sentences (or rather the terms
formed with those sentences) were denoting a thought. A
similar argument applies to existential generalization.
What counts as reference to (denotation of) same or dif-
ferent thoughts is determined in the context of the containing
sentence by the method of checking proposed exchanges
against Frege's Principle. If an exchange might yield a con-
taining sentence whose truth value is logically independent of
the original containing sentence, then the new that-clause
refers to a different thought from the old. The same method
is, of course, applied to parts of that-clauses. Frege had little to
say about contexts in which exchange of co-extensive terms in
that-clauses succeeds salva veritate. And for reasons I shall
skirt, his theory ran into trouble over such cases.1 But the basic
method remains viable even here. Where terms in surface
that-clauses occur so that exchange with co-extensive terms is
logically guaranteed, those terms have their customary
referent-the same one they would have in an identity con-
text. We may speak of a person's believing a thought content
of the referred to object. Thought contents of a suitably
idealized version of this 'believes of' locution are true of or
false of objects to which the subject bears a non-conceptual,
quasi-indexical relation. Such thought contents are indexi-

This content downloaded from

5.24.46.90 on Wed, 14 Sep 2022 15:32:54 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 PROPOSITIONAL ATTITUDES 55

cally infected counterparts of non-indexical thought contents

that are true or false simpliciter. One's explanation of these
"transparent" contexts may appeal to pragmatic or epistemic
factors. But the semantical method is independent of one's
particular pragmatic or epistemic theory of why transparently
occurring terms pick out an object without indicating how the
subject thinks about the object. My view is that the method is so
attuned to our intuitions about language and so well
grounded in powerful semantical principles that no semanti-
cal theory which flouts it will be satisfactory.
There are two proto-typical strategies for applying the
method. The first may be called the modality dominated strategy.
Obviously, where 'it is necessary' is applied to simple that-
clauses, one never needs to distinguish the semantical con-
tributions of necessarily equivalent expressions occurring in
the that-clauses if one's objective is to capture the effects of
exchange on truth value. If one thought that modality, logical
or metaphysical, were the key to understanding all intentional
or oblique contexts, one might try to extend this result to
propositional attitude sentences. Prima facie, of course, ex-
changes of necessarily equivalent expressions in that-clauses
of propositional attitude sentences can affect truth value. But
one might try to idealize or explain this appearance away.
There are detailed objections to be made to the variety of
proposals along this line. But even apart from these ob-
jections, the idealization is clearly quite severe; and its sup-
posed advantages are, in my view, unproved.
A second way of applying the method, Frege's own and
the one I favor, might be called the cognition-dominated strategy.
The idea is to take the most finely discriminated contents one
obtains by testing exchanges in that-clauses and use the sort of
contents thus individuated in explaining failures of substitu-
tion in all contexts. Less fine-grained non-extensional
equivalences-including modal equivalences-could then be
captured in terms of equivalence relations among the finest-
grained contents.
It seems unobjectionable to follow Frege in calling con-
tents thus individuated thoughts. But Frege added a pair of
further conditions that I find unacceptable. One of these,
which I shall return to later, is a metaphysical condition that
thoughts are ontologically and conceptually independent of
thinkers-in something like the way planets are independent

This content downloaded from

5.24.46.90 on Wed, 14 Sep 2022 15:32:54 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 56 NOOS

of observers. The other is that, at least in non-indexical cases,

thoughts are what an idealized speaker of the language mas-
ters qua speaker of the language. The upshot of this view is
that synonymous expressions are counted intersubstitutable
in the that-clauses of propositional attitudes.
Elsewhere I have argued that this view does not accord
with the way exchangeability really works.2 Exchange of
synonyms in that-clauses sometimes fails to preserve truth.
Such failures are a symptom of a deeper phenomenon. The
phenomenon is that quite a lot of our cognitive lives is carried
on despite an incomplete mastery of the notions we think with.
It is possible, of course, to deliberately idealize these points
away. But again, it seems to me that the supposed theoretical
advantages of doing so are quite tenuous. It would be better, I
think, to follow up common intuitive observations.
This reasoning leaves us with a view in which the semanti-
cal values of that-clauses are approximately as fine-grained as
sentences, the linguistic entities themselves. There is still room
for idealization here, and I think that considerations involving
such phenomena as indexicality and intra-linguistic ambiguity
indeed urge certain sorts of idealization. But I shall assume
for expository purposes that the semantical values of that-
clauses are symbol types, normally (though not always) sen-
tences (open or closed) in the repertoire of the reporter. The
contextually appropriate use of a relevant sentence is pro-
vided by the following convention: Uses of a propositional
attitude verb presuppose that the expressions mentioned in
the direct object of the verb (say, in the that-clause) are to be
understood as they would be if they were used as an em-
bedded sentence (rather than merely mentioned), at the time
of the use of the verb, by the person who uses the relevant
token of the containing sentence.3
This convention serves to fix the interpretation of the
sentence at least as far as it is fixed in actual usage. Its main
thrust is that the job done within the Fregean tradition by
abstraction (appeal to abstract intentional entities, such as
Gedanken) is done by context-dependent understanding (by a
person at a time) of an exemplar symbol. It is assumed, of
course, that understanding is not properly defined or
explained in terms of Fregean abstractions. On the other
hand, I need not deny that a philosophically illuminating
explication of the use and understanding of a sentence must

This content downloaded from

5.24.46.90 on Wed, 14 Sep 2022 15:32:54 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 PROPOSITIONAL ATTITUDES 57

rely, partly, on appeal to propositional attitudes. Such expli-

cation is in my view not to be seen as definitional. Sentence
understanding and propositional attitudes are interlocking
but primitive notions.
The semantical viewpoint just outlined is not an at-
tempted reduction of propositional attitude sentences to di-
rect discourse. There are substantial differences between the
two kinds of locution, signalled by the contrasting behavior of
indexicals and by the fact that the former locution does not
require that the subject understand the exemplar symbols, or
indeed any symbols at all.
The bare idea of taking symbols to be attitude contents is,
of course, not new. It dates back to Peirce, and to the early
Wittgenstein and Russell, and has been developed in different
ways by Carnap, Scheffler, Quine and Davidson. But quite
apart from special (and real) difficulties attaching to each of
these earlier versions, the general approach has been widely
seen as more of a curiosity than a contender. One reason for
this is that it has traditionally, but needlessly, been associated
with behaviorism or nominalism. Another reason is that the
literature is awash with arguments for thinking that no such
account could possibly be right: technical objections having to
do with quantification, with paradoxes, with embeddings;
intuitive objections touching ambiguity, equivalence, and cer-
tain ordinary locutions; philosophical objections regarding
inexpressibility, self-knowledge, and language learning.
Some of these objections are deep and challenging. I favor
confronting them rather than accepting them because doing
so seems to enrich a viewpoint that has two broad strengths: It
involves an application of Frege's method which remains close
to ordinary linguistic intuition, combining formal power with
empirical sustenance. And it opens a perspective-which I
shall not try to develop on this occasion-with a potential for
profound insights into our conception of the mental.
I will conclude the presentation by canvassing three of the
more interesting objections to taking symbols as attitude con-
tents. The first concerns equivalence. The objection keys on
the fact that the same attitude content may often be equally
well expressed in different symbols-say, symbols of different
languages. I shall sketch a strategy for handling such phe-
nomena by reference to the contextual element in the account
I have outlined.

This content downloaded from

5.24.46.90 on Wed, 14 Sep 2022 15:32:54 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 58 NOCS

A second objection, which concerns objectivity, takes a

variety of forms. A representative version goes as follows. If
the account I have proposed takes the content symbols to be
construed as we the reporters would use them now, then the
truth or falsity of the content depends on the existence of
English speakers. But the truth value of many contents is
independent of the existence of human agents. Answering
this sort of objection in such a way as to steer between unat-
tractive idealisms and Frege's extreme Platonism requires a
distinction among different sorts of independence. One must
safeguard the independence of truth from minds and at the
same time capture the intuition that the primary bearers of
truth, propositional attitude contents, presuppose the exis-
tence of thinkers.
A third objection features causation. The objection is that
our English sentences play no role in the mental lives of dogs
or foreigners (there is no causal interaction between subject
and alleged content); so such sentences could not be the con-
tents of their propositional attitudes. It is clear, I think, from
discourse about shared attitudes that content tokens peculiar
to the subject and with which he causally interacts are not
explicitly referred to in natural language propositional atti-
tude discourse. So the objection should be seen as urging a
metaphysical or scientific reconstruction of natural language.
While maintaining that interaction with symbol tokens is inte-
gral to our conception of propositional attitudes, I shall raise
some questions about whether causal interaction is the proper
model for even a rational reconstruction of propositional atti-
tudes, much less for an account of the form of natural lan-
guage.

NOTES

'Cf. my "Belief De Re," The Journal of Philosophy LXXIV(1977): 338-62; and

"Sinning Against Frege," The Philosophical Review LXXXVIII(1979): 398-432.
2"Belief and Synonymy," The Journal of Philosophy LXXV(1978): 119-38; "Indi-
vidualism and the Mental" Midwest Studies IV(1979): section IIc.
3This convention is formulated and discussed in "Self-Reference and Transla-
tion," in Guenthner-Reutte and Guenthner eds., Transaltion and Meaning (Duckworth
Press, 1978).

This content downloaded from

5.24.46.90 on Wed, 14 Sep 2022 15:32:54 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms