Explaining Attitudes: A Practical Approach to the Mind
by Lynne Rudder Baker
Cambridge Studies in Philosophy
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Explaining Attitudes offers an 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. Lynne 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 interprets beliefs as either brain states or states of immaterial souls show more is a 'non-starter'. Practical realism takes beliefs to be states of the 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. show lessTags
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Lynne Rudder Baker is Distinguished Professor of Philosophy, University of Massachusetts Amherst. Baker has written four books on metaphysics and the philosophy of mind, and has published many articles in philosophy journals.
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- Explaining Attitudes: A Practical Approach to the Mind
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