Date of Award

12-2021

Degree Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Arts (MA)

Department

Philosophy

First Advisor

Dr. Dan Weiskopf

Second Advisor

Dr. Neil Van Leeuwen

Abstract

Propositionalism is the widely held view that intentional attitudes are fundamentally and predicatively propositional. In contrast, objectualism is the view that a particular class of intentional attitudes—for example, love, fear, like, and hate—bears no relation to a proposition or state of affairs nor does their content make reference to objects by predicating something of them. This paper challenges the objectualist view. While I do not deny that non-propositional attitudes are real mental states, I do deny that they are metaphysically independent from propositional ones. To that end, I proffer an account whereby non-propositional attitudes supervene on possible disjunctive complexes of propositional attitudes, and I defend its merits over objectualism. I argue that my propositional account provides an intuitive framework to index polysemous attitudes and explain a variety of intentional behaviors whereas objectualism does not.

DOI

https://doi.org/10.57709/24315863

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