What are Attitudinal Properties? 39

On the traditional picture, being a belief or desire are functional properties of mental states16. Beliefs and desires are those things that play a certain role in inference and the production of behaviour. For example, a belief that P is thought to be that thing which, for example: tends to be caused by a perception that P; tends to be extinguished by a perception that not P; tends to cause, when combined with a belief that P > Q, a belief that Q; tends to cause one to assert that P, and so on. A desire that P, on the other hand, is thought to be that thing which, for example: tends to cause one to act as to make it the case that P; tends to cause, when combined with a belief that O leads to P, one to O; tends to cause one to assert that one wants P, and so on.

16 _{The traditional picture can be found in many works, either explicitly or implicitly. For example, Fodor (1987)} defends the view that a belief that P is a representation that P in the “belief-box”, mutatis mutandis for the other attitudes. Dretske (1988) understands beliefs and desires in terms of the causal roles that they play in the production of behaviour. Cummins (1996) distinguishes between beliefs and desires according to their “cognitive function”.

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Let the above conditions for belief be denoted by ‘belief-role’, and the above conditions for desire be denoted by ‘desire-role’. The thought is, then, that a belief that P is a representation that P which plays the belief-role, while a desire that P is a representation that P which plays the desire-role.

On this view, whether a given mental state counts as a belief or a desire is not simply a matter of its intrinsic nature. One could have two intrinsically identical mental states that both represent P, but one would be a belief and the other a desire in virtue of how these states are disposed to behave17. Notice that the criteria that make up the belief and desire roles are all qualified by “tends to.” This is because a mental state counts as a belief or a desire only if it exhibits the criterial behaviour under certain circumstances, given appropriate background conditions. Thus, a belief that P only results in an assertion that P when one does not wish to deceive. A perception that P might not cause one to believe that P because one has further reason to think that their perceptual faculties are misleading them (such as when a stick partially submerged in water appears to be bent). Likewise, a desire that P will only cause one to make it the case that P in the absence of any conflicting motivations or anything that might prevent one from being able to make it the case that P.

These issues speak to the difficulties of specifying exactly what the dispositions relevant to a state playing the belief- or desire-role are. But they also make it clear just how complex

attitudinal relations are on the traditional view. One might be counted as believing that P even if one is in a state which never actually does anything belief-like. It is enough that one is in a state that would do belief-like things if the background circumstances allowed it.

Already there is cause to be concerned. We saw in the previous section that while it is plausible that we have privileged access to certain properties of our perceptual experiences — for

example, their representational properties — it is quite implausible that we have privileged

17 _{It is important to distinguish this view from the view according to which beliefs and desires themselves are} dispositional properties. On this latter view, the property of believing that P — a property of agents — is identical to being disposed to behave in certain ways, for example. However, the traditional picture understands beliefs — at least occurrent beliefs — to be non-dispositional properties of an agent. What is dispositional is the property of

being a belief, which is a property that mental states have.An occurrent mental state counts as a belief if it has certain dispositional properties.

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access to many of their dispositional properties. For example, we found it to be implausible that we have privileged access to my perceptual experience of a cup of coffee being disposed to cause me to go get another cup of coffee. We also found it implausible to suppose that we have

privileged access even to my perceptual experience now causing me to want a cup of coffee. We saw that there is very good empirical evidence that we are very poor judges of what the causes of our mental states are. In general, we do not have privileged access to the causal relations between our mental states.

But it seems that this is just the way that the traditional picture understands attitudinal properties. The attitude that we bear to P is a matter, among other things, of the causal dispositions of the state that represents P. But if we are in general poor judges of the causal relations between our mental states, then it seems like we cannot have privileged access to attitudinal properties. For how could I have privileged access to my now believing that P, if my believing that P was partly a matter of its dispositional causal relations to other mental goings on?

In the remainder of this paper, I hope to flesh out this intuitive tension. I begin by exploring a similar issue: the apparent impossibility of privileged access to broad contents. I show that similar issues can be raised for attitudinal properties. Worse, I show that the sorts of replies that can be given on behalf of the possibility of privileged to broad contents do not transfer to the case of attitudinal properties.