Understanding People

Abstract

Abstract This book shows that ascriptions of beliefs and intentions are normative in that they have normative implications. Since there is no more to believing something and intending something than meeting the conditions for falling under, respectively, the concepts of so believing and of so intending, it follows that there is a normative dimension to the states of believing and intending. The idea is extended to all propositional attitudes via the assumption that attitudes with conceptual content have a normative dimension. The resulting picture is applied to issues about understanding people in terms of rationalizing explanations of what they think or do. An important concern is to explain how the fact that agents’ attitudes rationalize the performance of actions or the formation of beliefs on their part can be relevant to the explanation of what they do or believe. Along the way, there are discussions of normative commitments, differences between reasons for action and reasons for belief, practices conceived as essentially rule-governed activities, simulation theory, and the limits of mentalistic explanation.

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