Uskumuste ja soovide kommunikatiivne tähtsus

Kui me mõtleme, mida teised usuvad või tahavad, läheb see meile enamasti korda. Kui ma olen teadlik teise inimese mingist uskumusest, saan ma sellega nõustuda või mitte. Kui ma arvan, et teine tahab midagi, siis on mul võimalik seda soovi kas heaks kiita või halvaks panna. Selliste esmaste reaktsioonide olulisusest uskumuste ja soovide omistamise juures on senini vaimufilosoofias suuresti üle vaadatud. Tähelepanu all on ennekõike olnud hoiakute omistamise ennustav ja seletav roll. Väitekirja esmaseks eesmärgiks on täita see lünk ning avada nende mainitud reaktsioonide – nõustumise ja mittenõustumise, heakskiidu ja halvakspanu – asendamatu tähtsus sotsiaalses tunnetuses. Selle käigus näitan ühtlasi, et nendest reaktsioonidest lähtuvad ka juba edasised võimalikud käigud inimestevahelises suhtluses: manipuleerimine, läbirääkimine või isegi omistatud hoiaku omaksvõtt. Teiseks väitekirja eesmärgiks on selgitada, mis uskumustest ja soovidest mõtlemise juures teeb just sellised reaktsioonid võimalikuks. Kuna nõustumine või mittenõustumine on kohased reaktsioonid nii uskumuste kui ka väidete suhtes ning heakskiit või halvakspanu nii soovide kui ka käskluste suhtes, siis argumenteerin, et uskumuste ja soovide omistamist tuleb mõista vastavalt väidete ja käskluste kaudu. Kui me mõtleme, mida keegi usub ja tahab, on ta meie vestluspartner, kuna me kohtleme tema uskumusi kui teatavat tüüpi väiteid ja soove kui käsklusi. See kehtib isegi siis, kui ta vastavat väidet või käsklust ise pole sooritanud. Ühesõnaga, neil hoiakutel on kommunikatiivne roll. Kui me seda silmas peame, on edasiseks küsimuseks, millele uskumuste ja soovide omistused tuginema peaksid, et nad oma eriomast rolli sotsiaalses elus mängida saaks. Väidan, et nad peavad arvesse võtma tõsiasju isikute käitumise ja heaolu kohta ning nendes tõsiasjades seisneb ka uskumuste ja soovide loomus.When we think about what others believe and want, we are usually affected by what we know about their attitudes. If I’m aware that another person believes something, I have an opportunity to agree or disagree with it. If I think that another person wants something, I can endorse or disapprove of her desire. The importance of such reactions to attributed beliefs and desires has thus far been overlooked in philosophy of mind where the focus has been on explanatory and predictive roles of attitude attribution. The primary goal of this thesis is to fill this lacuna and to articulate the indispensability of such reactions – agreement/disagreement and endorsement/disapproval – for social cognition. In the process of doing it I also show how these initial reactions ground certain further possible responses in intersubjective communication: manipulation, negotiation and adoption of attributed attitudes. The second aim of this thesis is to explicate what is it about belief and desire attributions that makes the responses I’ve described possible. Because one can agree or disagree both with beliefs and assertions and endorse or disapprove both desires and requests, I argue that we should understand belief attributions in terms of assertions and desire attributions in terms of requests. When we think what someone believes and wants, we treat her as a conversation partner because her attitudes call for the same responses as speech acts do, even if she hasn’t made any explicit assertion or request herself. In short, beliefs and desires have communicative significance. Given such significance, we can also see what one needs to take into consideration when attributing these attitudes to another. My answer in the thesis is that belief and desire attributions have to be grounded in facts about the behaviour and well-being of attributees and that these facts also constitute the nature of beliefs and desires

Mental State Attribution for Interactionism

Interactionists about folk psychology argue that embodied interactions constitute the primary way we understand one another and thus oppose more standard accounts according to which the understanding is mostly achieved through belief and desire attributions. However, also interactionists need to explain why people sometimes still resort to attitude ascription. In this paper, it is argued that this explanatory demand presents a genuine challenge for interactionism and that a popular proposal which claims that belief and desire attributions are needed to make sense of counternormative behavior is problematic. Instead, the most promising conception of belief and desire ascriptions is the communicative conception which locates them in the context of declarative and imperative communication, respectively. Such a communication can take both verbal and non-verbal form

Chapter 6 On the Putative Epistemic Generativity of Memory and Imagination

This book explores the structure and function of memory and imagination, as well as the relation and interaction between the two states. It is the first book to offer an integrative approach to these two emerging areas of philosophical research. The essays in this volume deal with a variety of forms of imagining and remembering. The contributors come from a range of methodological backgrounds: empirically minded philosophers, analytic philosophers engaging mainly in conceptual analysis, and philosophers informed by the phenomenological tradition. Part 1 consists of novel contributions to ontological issues regarding the nature of memory and imagination and their respective structural features. Part 2 focuses on questions of justification and perspective regarding both states. The chapters in Part 3 discuss issues regarding memory and imagination as skills or abilities. Finally, Part 4 focuses on the relation between memory, imagination, and emotion. Philosophical Perspectives on Memory and Imagination will be of interest to scholars and advanced students working in philosophy of memory, philosophy of imagination, philosophy of mind, and epistemology

Desire's Own Reasons

This paper asks if there are reasons that count in favor of having a desire in virtue of its attitudinal nature. Let us call those considerations Desire’s Own Reasons (DOR). I argue that DOR are considerations that explain why a desire meets its constitutive standard of correctness and that it meets this standard when its satisfaction would also be satisfactory to the subject who has it. Reasons that bear on subjective satisfaction are fit to directly and accessibly regulate desires through experience and imagination because desires are naturally sensitive to them. I will also analyze the limits of application that such reasons have and how DOR relate to other kinds of reasons

Chapter 6 On the Putative Epistemic Generativity of Memory and Imagination

This book explores the structure and function of memory and imagination, as well as the relation and interaction between the two states. It is the first book to offer an integrative approach to these two emerging areas of philosophical research. The essays in this volume deal with a variety of forms of imagining and remembering. The contributors come from a range of methodological backgrounds: empirically minded philosophers, analytic philosophers engaging mainly in conceptual analysis, and philosophers informed by the phenomenological tradition. Part 1 consists of novel contributions to ontological issues regarding the nature of memory and imagination and their respective structural features. Part 2 focuses on questions of justification and perspective regarding both states. The chapters in Part 3 discuss issues regarding memory and imagination as skills or abilities. Finally, Part 4 focuses on the relation between memory, imagination, and emotion. Philosophical Perspectives on Memory and Imagination will be of interest to scholars and advanced students working in philosophy of memory, philosophy of imagination, philosophy of mind, and epistemology

Sentimental Perceptualism and Affective Imagination

According to sentimental perceptualism, affect grounds evaluative or normative knowledge in a similar way to the way perception grounds much of descriptive knowledge. In this paper, we present a novel challenge to sentimental perceptualism. At the centre of the challenge is the assumption that if affect is to ground knowledge in the same way as perception does, it should have a function to accurately represent evaluative properties, and if it has that function, it should also have it in its future-directed imaginative use. As the data on affective forecasting errors indicates, however, the affect system does not have that function. As a result, it is doubtful if affect can do the kind of knowledge-grounding work that sentimental perceptualism assumes it does

The Communicative Significance of Beliefs and Desires

When we think about what others believe and want, we are usually affected by what we know about their attitudes. If I’m aware that another person believes something, I have an opportunity to agree or disagree with it. If I think that another person wants something, I can endorse or disapprove of her desire. The importance of such reactions to attributed beliefs and desires has thus far been overlooked in philosophy of mind where the focus has been on explanatory and predictive roles of attitude attribution. The primary goal of this thesis is to fill this lacuna and to articulate the indispensability of such reactions – agreement/disagreement and endorsement/disapproval – for social cognition. In the process of doing it I also show how these initial reactions ground certain further possible responses in intersubjective communication: manipulation, negotiation or adoption of attributed attitudes. The second aim of this thesis is to explicate what is it about belief and desire attributions that makes the responses I’ve described possible. Because one can agree or disagree both with beliefs and assertions and endorse or disapprove both desires and requests, I argue that we should understand belief attributions in terms of assertions and desire attributions in terms of requests. When we think what someone believes and wants, we treat her as a conversation partner because her attitudes call for the same responses as speech acts do, even if she hasn’t made any explicit assertion or request herself. In short, beliefs and desires have communicative significance. Given such significance, we can also see what one needs to take into consideration when attributing these attitudes to another. My answer in the thesis is that belief and desire attributions have to be grounded in facts about the behaviour and well-being of attributees and that these facts also constitute the nature of beliefs and desires

Aesthetic Disagreement with Oneself as Another

Can disagreement with my past self about aesthetic matters give a reason to reconsider my present aesthetic verdict and if it does, under what conditions? In other words, can such a disagreement be a sign of my failing in my present aesthetic judgement? In this paper, I argue that revising one’s judgement in response to disagreeing with one’s former self is appropriate but only when the former and the present self share the same aesthetic personality. The possibility of failure in one’s aesthetic judgement is therefore bound up, among other things, with facts about one’s aesthetic identity over time. The resulting view has implications for our understanding of the scope of the autonomy in aesthetics and is consistent with empirical evidence regarding the way in which people evaluate aesthetic judgments.14516

Affective Forecasting and Substantial Self-Knowledge

This chapter argues that our self-knowledge is often mediated by our affective self-knowledge. In other words, we often know about ourselves by knowing our own emotions. More precisely, what Cassam has called “substantial self-knowledge” (SSK), such as self-knowledge of one's character, one's values, or one's aptitudes, is mediated by affective forecasting, which is the process of predicting one's emotional responses to possible situations. For instance, a person comes to know that she is courageous by predicting her own emotional reactions to possible risks and dangers. This hypothesis explains why attaining substantive self-knowledge tends to be difficult. Attaining substantive self-knowledge is difficult because, first, SSK is mediated by affective forecasting and, second, we tend to be wrong about predicting the intensity and duration of our own emotional reactions. As a result, we can identify what is common to central cases of SSK: such cases require knowledge about complex dispositions whose manifestations involve affective responses that one is not sufficiently familiar with. One thus needs to resort to the highly fallible method of affective forecasting

Politics of Folk Psychology : Believing what Others Believe

In this paper, I argue that by attributing beliefs the attributer is pushed toward taking a stand on the content of those beliefs and that what stand they take partially depends on the relationship between the attributer and the attributee. In particular, if the attributee enjoys a higher social standing than the attributer, the latter is disposed to adopt the attributed belief, as long as certain other conditions are met. I will call this view the Adoption-by-Attribution model. Because of the non-epistemic influence that derives from the relation of inequality, belief attribution can reinforce the existing unequal power relations and contribute to epistemic injustice