Attitudes, conditional and general

Linguistics and Philosophy · 2025-01-25 · 1 citations

:<i>The Epistemology of Desire and the Problem of Nihilism</i>

Ethics · 2025-06-16

Some attitudes we usually do not have

Philosophy and Phenomenological Research · 2025-06-22

Abstract I present a new attitude puzzle involving disjunction. Specifically, though it can sound strange to ascribe the belief that or when and are about very different subject‐matters, we can assure ourselves that the strangeness is merely pragmatic because of the alethic properties of disjunction. But frustration‐ and other non‐doxastic attitude‐ascriptions also sound very strange. Are the corresponding frustratingness, etc. properties of disjunction the same as with truth? I will argue that they are not: frustratingness and desirability, and likely the other non‐doxastic analogues (e.g., for sadness, fear, regret, etc.) do not work at all like truth does for belief. That means there is no obvious route to make sense of the strangeness of the relevant frustration‐ and desire‐ascriptions with disjunctive contents with very unrelated disjuncts. I argue that frustratingness's and desirability's behavior in this respect, while not to my knowledge noticed before, seems to arise from natural and general structural features of that kind of property: roughly, frustratingness requires that each property essential to the given state of affairs said to be frustrating contribute to the frustratingness of the state of affairs. This suggests that we just do not have these attitudes, not just that the ascriptions sound strange.

Attitudes as positions

Inquiry · 2024-03-04

In these comments on David Hunter’s insightful new book On Believing, I consider Hunter’s account of believing that p as being in a position to act in light of the fact (or apparent fact) that p. After investigating how this kind of view is supposed to work, I raise a challenge for it: the account is unlikely to generalize to other attitudes like hoping and fearing that p. I then argue that this really is an objection to the account of believing, since all the attitudes have so many fundamental features in common that there should be a common core to the accounts of all the different attitudes. Since hoping and fearing that p in no way even commit the speaker to the belief that p, they can’t allow the agent to act in light of the (apparent) fact that p. Thus, I conclude, believing isn’t a matter of being in such a position, and neither is the having of any other type of attitude.

Three matrix factorizations from the steps of elimination

Analysis and Applications · 2022

• Computer Science
• Mathematics
• Combinatorics

Every real [Formula: see text] matrix [Formula: see text] can be factored in three ways that arise from the steps of elimination: a lower triangular/upper triangular factorization [Formula: see text], a column-row factorization [Formula: see text], and a triple factorization [Formula: see text]. The column-row factorization provides both a constructive proof that the row rank [Formula: see text] of [Formula: see text] equals the column rank, and a formula for the pseudoinverse [Formula: see text] not based on the singular value decomposition. In the triple factorization, [Formula: see text] and [Formula: see text] contain the first [Formula: see text] independent columns of [Formula: see text] and the first [Formula: see text] independent rows of [Formula: see text]; [Formula: see text] is the invertible submatrix of [Formula: see text] where [Formula: see text] meets [Formula: see text]. An alternative to the traditional elimination method, using slide steps in place of the usual swap steps, identifies the first [Formula: see text] independent rows of [Formula: see text].

Reasoning beyond belief acquisition

Noûs · 2021 · 37 citations

• Political Science
• Epistemology
• Psychology

Abstract I argue that we can reason not only to new beliefs but to basically any change in attitude we can think of, including the abandonment of belief (contra John Broome), the acquisition of non‐belief attitudes like relief and admiration, and the elimination of the same. To argue for this position, which I call generalism, I defend a sufficient condition on reasoning, roughly that we can reason to any change in attitude that is expressed by the conclusion of an argument we can be convinced by. I then produce examples of such arguments, and argue that they are indeed arguments. To produce examples of the elimination of non‐doxastic attitudes, I develop the idea of a state of attitudinal constraint acceptance, and show how it is useful for solving this problem, and useful in other parts of philosophy as well.

Changes in attitude^*

Philosophical Perspectives · 2021-10-06

While it's hard to judge proportions here, I'd say most epistemic requirements philosophers propose relate doxastic attitudes of the same given type.Here are two picked somewhat at random (note that I don't necessarily endorse them).Modus Ponens Requirement.Rationality requires of N that, if N believes at t that p, and N believes at t that if p then q, and if N cares at t whether q, then N believes at t that q. 1 Diachronic Conditionalization (narrow scope).If you have a credence function c at t 0 , and between t 0 and t 1 you learn E and nothing more, then at t 1 you should adopt c(-|E) as your credence function. 2 My question is: are all genuine (i.e., correct) epistemic norms like that?Or are there requirements that take us from one type of doxastic attitude to another type?I'll explore the following answer: Conservation of Attitudes.No one is epistemically required to have a doxastic attitude of type D merely because they have tokens of a different type of doxastic attitude D'.What this says should be pretty intuitively clear: I can't, e.g., be epistemically required to have a credence of .89 that it'll rain today because I believe the sky is dark.Something else must be involved in the explanation of why I am so required, if I am, for example some other credences I might have.Beyond being interesting in its own right-focusing on an under-appreciated dimension of potential epistemic requirements-it would also have important consequences for some prominent debates, among which whether we ought to have credences or even imprecise credences.Still, a number of parts of this principle need explaining.Start with 'doxastic'.I'll say that a type of attitude is doxastic if tokens of that type can be evaluated positively or negatively as accurate

The Attitudes We Can Have

The Philosophical Review · 2020 · 13 citations

• Epistemology
• Psychology
• Philosophy

This article investigates when one can (rationally) have attitudes, and when one cannot. It argues that a comprehensive theory must explain three phenomena. First, being related by descriptions or names to a proposition one has strong reason to believe is true does not guarantee that one can rationally believe that proposition. Second, such descriptions, and so on, do enable individuals to rationally have various non-doxastic attitudes, such as hope and admiration. And third, even for non-doxastic attitudes like that, not just any description will allow it. The article argues that one should think of attitude formation like one does (practical) choices among options. The article motivates this view linguistically, extending “relevant alternatives” theories of the attitudes to both belief and to the other, non-doxastic attitudes. Given a natural principle governing choice, and some important differences between doxastic and non-doxastic “choices,” one can explain these puzzling phenomena.

A Rightness-Based Theory of Communicative Propriety

Australasian Journal of Philosophy · 2018-02-06

We express and communicate many attitudes beyond belief, such as amusement, joy, admiration, hatred, and desire. I consider whether there are any general norms that would cover all of these cases. The most obvious generalisation of the most popular norms for assertion, fittingness-based theories, fail in part because it is sometimes an intrinsic good to have certain kinds of mental states (amusement, say). I develop an alternative, rightness-based, approach, according to which it is appropriate to communicate a mental state to an interlocutor when it is right to make the interlocutor have that mental state because of the speech act. This view arises naturally from conversational participants’ common interests, and it helps to make sense of linguistic phenomena like expressives.

Policy Externalism

Philosophy and Phenomenological Research · 2017-06-29 · 14 citations

I develop and argue for a kind of externalism about certain kinds of non‐doxastic attitudes that I call policy externalism. Policy externalism about a given type of attitude is the view that all the reasonable policies for having attitudes of that type will not involve the agent's beliefs that some relevant conditions obtain. My defense primarily involves attitudes like hatred, regret, and admiration, and has two parts: a direct deductive argument and an indirect linguistic argument, an inference to the best explanation of some strange ways we use certain conditionals. The main thought throughout is that attitudes we reason with, like belief, are very different from attitudes we don't reason with, in a way that constrains the former but not the latter. Finally, I investigate some consequences of policy externalism, including that it secures the possibility of genuine conditional apologies.