John Perry: Three Theories of the Attitudes
This year’s Gottlob Frege Lectures in Theoretical Philosophy will be delivered by John Perry. The exact dates are not fixed yet, but it will probably be in the last week of June. These are the topics John will cover:
I. Folk-psychology as an amazing Intellectual Accomplishment
- How our lives depend on our “theory” of mind
- Basic categories: Feelings, cognitions, ideas
- The “Propositional Attitudes”
- Properties of the PAs
- Causal
- Phenomenological
- How we report and describe them
II. Three theories of the attitudes
- Frege’s Picture of the attitudes: agents, times, relations, propositions (The Simple Content Picture).
- Fodor’s Picture of the attitudes: agents, times, and mental representations. (The Simple Representational Picture)
- Representations and contents
- The Complex Picture (Cognitions with Contents)
III. Self-Locating Belief
- Names, Descriptions and Roles
- Role based-”modes of presentation”.
- Roles and Frege’s picture
- Roles and Fodor’s picture
- Roles and the Complex Picture
IV. Beliefs about the Self
- Primitive self-belief
- Beliefs about the Self
- Self-notions
- Self-notions, buffers, detached notions
- Lewis’s concept of “self-attribution of properties” confuses primitive self-belief and having beliefs about oneself.
V. The general theory of Content (Reflexive/Referential Theory)
- Indexical content
- Referential Content
- Network Content and empty names
VI. Reporting Attitudes
- Traditional Problems
- The Crimmins-Perry Theory
- The Thread Theory
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