Elaboration and Explication of the Proposed Measurement‐Theoretic Account

The proposed measurement-theoretic account takes seriously — in a way that the Received View does not — the notion that propositional attitude attributions are natural language representations of certain causally efficacious internal states of their possessors. However, a number of questions about the proposed measurement-theoretic account remain. First, there is the question of the explanatory adequacy of the account, e.g., how well it explains what having a propositional attitude amounts to, how well it explains the salient properties of propositional attitudes, how well it explains why we should have evolved the sort of attitude predicates that we have, and whether the account can explain the various puzzles about propositional attitudes that have so preoccupied philosophers since Frege. Second, there is the question of what the account implies regarding the intrinsic nature of propositional attitudes. Third, there is the question of what the account entails as regards the import of propositional attitude psychology for computational cognitive scientific theorizing, specifically as regards the computational entailments of propositional attitude attributions. Finally, there is the question of the consilience of this chapter's account with certain philosophical views and projects central to contemporary philosophy of mind, e.g., intentional realism, intentional content essentialism, and propositional attitude-based semantic programmes. This chapter answers each of these questions.