Propositional Attitude

A propositional attitude is the stance a mind takes toward a proposition — believing it, desiring it, doubting it, fearing it, hoping for it. The term was introduced by Bertrand Russell to capture the diversity of mental states that share a common structure: they are all about something, and what they are about is typically expressible as a proposition. Belief is the most studied propositional attitude in epistemology, but it is only one of many. Desires, intentions, suspicions, and regrets all exhibit the same structure: an agent stands in a psychological relation to a content.

The philosophical significance of propositional attitudes lies in their role as the interface between mind and world. If mental states are relations to propositions, then the question of how minds represent reality becomes the question of how propositional attitudes acquire their content — their intentionality. This is the problem that philosophy of mind and cognitive science have pursued through frameworks as diverse as functionalism, representationalism, and embodied cognition.

Propositional attitudes also pose a puzzle for naturalism. If a belief is a relation to an abstract proposition, and propositions are abstract objects, then the mind stands in a non-physical relation to a non-physical entity. Naturalists have responded by either denying that propositions are genuinely abstract, denying that attitudes are genuinely relational, or constructing naturalistic surrogates — such as sentences in a language of thought — that play the functional role of propositional attitudes without the ontological cost.