Why believe in contentless beliefs?

Daniel Hutto

pp. 55-74

in: Nikolaj Nottelmann (ed), New essays on belief, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2013

Abstract

This chapter motivates the idea that the most basic kind of believing is a contentless attitude. It gives reasons for thinking that the most basic sort of belief — the sort that both we and other animals adopt toward situations — does not represent those situations in truth-evaluable ways. I call such attitudes pure intentional attitudes. They are not propositional attitudes, which I take to be linguistically mediated intentional attitudes.