Talk About Beliefs

This account of beliefs and practices of reporting them, aims to yield solutions to foundational problems in the philosophies of language and mind. The author offers a framework within which to approach such issues as tacit belief and restrictions of acquaintance on objects of thought.

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"Talk about Beliefs" presents an account of beliefs and of practices of reporting them that yields solutions to foundational problems in the philosophies of language and mind. Crimmins connects issues in mental representation with semantic issues in language for talking about cognition to provide a theoretically fruitful account of belief and belief reports that is logically consistent with intuitive judgements of such notorious problems as Frege's puzzles about substitution and cognitive significance, Quine's puzzle about "de re", Castaneda and Perry's puzzle about indexical beliefs, and other more complicated variations. Crimmins's account relies on, and to some extent vindicates, the traditions of representationalism in the philosophy of mind and of structured propositional semantics. In reporting a person's beliefs, Crimmins argues, we systematically make claims not only about the propositional content of the beliefs but also about cognitive representations. He elaborates and defends this proposal by providing a careful assessment of pragmatic and semantic contributions to the claims expressed in belief reports.
Crimmins's thesis forms a promising framework within which to approach such issues in the philosophy of mind as tacit belief (do you believe that pencils do not eat?), criteria for having concepts (do blind persons have the concept of red?), and restrictions of acquaintance on objects of thought (can you believe something about the first person born in the next century?).