Abstract
Donald Davidson has recently announced his endorsement of the ‘measurement theory’ (MT) of propositional-attitude ascription (PA-ascription). Proponents of the MT hold that “to say that a subject has a certain propositional attitude...is to attribute to that person a certain psychological state which is specified by means of its location in a measurement space, in just the way that we specify the temperature of an object by means of its location on a measurement scale.”1 The MT contrasts with the view that the attitudes are relations between cognitive agents and semantically evaluable entities that furnish the intentional objects of the attitudes. This is not to reject a relational semantics for sentences ascribing propositional attitudes. Indeed, Davidson himself has argued that only such a semantics, which treats verbs of propositional attitude as two-placed predicates taking as arguments a cognitive agent and a’content sentence’, can accommodate PA-ascriptions in a compositional theory of meaning for a language. What the measurement theorist denies is that our ascript ive p ract ices commit us to v iew i ng the att itudes themselves as relational in the foregoing sense. To say that S has a certain propositional attitude is no more to say that S stands in a causally pregnant relation to a proposition than to say that X weighs 10 grams is to say that X stands in a causally pregnant relation to the number 10, according to proponents of the MT.
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Notes
Matthews (1994), p. 1. For other formulations ofthe MT, see Churchland (1979), pp. 100–7; Field (1980), fn. 48; Dennett (1987), pp. 123–5 and 206–8; Dennett (1991); Stalnaker (1987), pp. 9ff; Davidson (1989); Crane (1990).
For a discussion of different readings of Dennett’s ‘mild realism’, see my (1995a). For further discussion of the ‘Rylean’ aspects of Dennett’s position, see my (1992).
See “Evolution, Error, and Intentionality”, in Dennett (1987), pp. 287–321, for his attack on the notion of ‘intrinsic’ or ‘original’ intentionality.
See, for example, Burge (1986) and Putnam (1988), chapter 2.
This passage, in which Davidson is responding to an argument by Burge, is somewhat puzzling in that Burge’s argument draws upon counterfactual ‘Twin Earth’ cases, where we imagine that the very same token physical state occurs in different socio-physical environments, in virtue of which we ascribe to the individual in question mental states that differ in content. Even if Davidson’s ‘conflation’ strategy shows how the token IT is compatible with EXT in standard Twin Earth cases, where we assume Oscar and Twin Oscar are molecule for molecule duplicates “in the necktie sense”, as Davidson puts it, the strategy seems inapplicable to the counterfactual cases, where we have the same token physical state but different token mental states.
See Mclaughlin (1985) for a good overview of the nature and relationships between the various elements in Davidson's philosophy of mind.
I must thank Ausonio Marras for convincing me of the correctness of this ‘minimalist’ reading of the passage. The temptation to read the passage as an endorsement of the stronger principle CX stems in part from the puzzling nature of the overall argument in which it occurs — see note 6 above.
In my (1998)
I wish to thank Frances Egan, Ausonio Marras, Robert Matthews, James McGilvray, Paul Pietroski, and members of the McGill FCAR seminar for very helpful discussions of these issues and/or critical responses to earlier versions of this paper. A slightly longer version of this paper appeared in Acta Analytica 14 (1996), pp. 37–56
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Davies, D. (1999). Davidson, Indeterminacy, and Measurement. In: Fisette, D. (eds) Consciousness and Intentionality: Models and Modalities of Attribution. The Western Ontario Series in Philosophy of Science, vol 62. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-015-9193-5_12
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