A Dispositional Approach to the Attitudes: Thinking Outside of the Belief Box

in N. Nottelmann, ed., New Essays on Belief (Palgrave, 2013).

Abstract: I argue that to have an attitude is, primarily, (1.) to have a dispositional profile that matches, to an appropriate degree and in appropriate respects, a stereotype for that attitude, typically grounded in folk psychology, and secondarily, (2.) in some cases also to meet further stereotypical attitude-specific conditions. To have an attitude, on the account I will recommend here, is mainly a matter of being apt to interact with the world in patterns that ordinary people would regard as characteristic of having that attitude.  I contrast this view with alternative views that treat having an attitude as a matter of possessing some particular internally stored representational content or some other "deep" structural feature.

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