propositional attitude

1. Introduction

In contemporary analytic philosophy, a propositional attitude is typically understood as a mental state—such as believing, hoping, fearing, or intending—that is directed toward a proposition or proposition-like content. These states are often characterized by the way they can be reported in natural language using that-clauses, as in “Alice believes that snow is white” or “Bob hopes that it will rain.”

Two features are central to the notion:

1. Attitudinal type: the kind of stance taken (belief, desire, intention, doubt, etc.).
2. Content: what the attitude is about, usually modeled as a proposition that can be true or false.

The term crystallized in early and mid-20th-century analytic philosophy, where it became a key interface between the philosophy of mind, philosophy of language, and logic. It is now standard in discussions of:

• Mental representation and intentionality (how thoughts are “about” things)
• Rational explanation of action (how reasons involving beliefs and desires explain behavior)
• Semantics of attitude reports (how language encodes mental states)
• Epistemology (justification, knowledge, and doxastic states)

Different theoretical traditions diverge on several questions: what propositions are (if they exist at all), whether all cognition is propositional in structure, whether propositional attitudes play a genuine causal role in behavior, and whether they will survive in a mature cognitive science.

The sections that follow trace the historical emergence of the term, its formal and linguistic characterization, its connections to neighboring concepts such as intentionality and representation, challenges from alternative models of mind, and its applications and legacy within analytic philosophy.

2. Etymology and Linguistic Origins

The expression “propositional attitude” combines two strands of technical vocabulary: logical and psychological.

“Propositional”

Propositional derives from Medieval Latin propositionalis, built on propositio (“a setting forth, assertion”). In logic and grammar, proposition came to denote an abstract, truth-evaluable content capable of being asserted, denied, or questioned. By the 19th century, logicians such as Boole and Schröder were already using “proposition” in a near-modern sense, paving the way for the idea of mental states standing in relations to propositions.

“Attitude”

Attitude entered English via French attitude and Italian attitudine, originally referring to physical posture. From the 18th and 19th centuries onward, it developed a figurative sense of a person’s stance, orientation, or disposition (for example, a “hostile attitude”). In psychology and social science, “attitude” became a term for relatively stable evaluative orientations toward objects or states of affairs.

When analytic philosophers adopted the word, they adapted this figurative usage to designate mental stances toward contents—belief, desire, hope, etc.—while largely stripping it of its earlier bodily and evaluative connotations.

Emergence of the Compound

The compound phrase “propositional attitude” appears in the early 20th century in the orbit of analytic philosophy, becoming widespread by mid-century in English-language work on mind and language. It was used to:

• Mark a uniform class of mental phenomena (beliefs, desires, intentions, etc.)
• Emphasize their relational structure: subject–attitude–proposition
• Connect psychological discourse with formal semantics and logic

Because the term imports a logical notion of proposition into psychological vocabulary, it foregrounds the idea that certain mental states are individuated partly by logical content. This hybrid origin also underlies later debates about whether propositions are the right kind of objects for such states, and how far the logical vocabulary can be mapped onto ordinary or scientific psychology.

3. Pre-Philosophical and Early Conceptual Precursors

Long before the explicit notion of propositional attitudes emerged, philosophers and theologians analyzed mental states that later came to be grouped under that heading. These analyses typically employed the framework of faculties (intellect, will, sensibility) and acts (assent, dissent, wishing), rather than a unified category of “attitudes toward propositions.”

Classical Greek and Hellenistic Traditions

Ancient Greek philosophy distinguished cognitive from conative and affective phenomena:

Stoic theories of assent to impressions in particular anticipate later views of attitudes as commitments to content.

Medieval Scholastic Thought

Medieval philosophers preserved and systematized notions of thought and volition using Latin terminology:

• Intellectus (intellect) and voluntas (will) as distinct faculties.
• Assensus, dissentio, and consensus as acts of accepting, rejecting, or endorsing what is presented by the intellect.
• Intentio and species intelligibilis as technical terms for representational contents.

These frameworks effectively distinguished something like attitudinal stance (assent, refusal, command) from content (the proposition-like dictum or complexe significabile), though the terminology and metaphysics differed significantly from modern propositional talk.

Early Modern Philosophy and Theology

Early modern thinkers developed more explicit analyses of judgment, belief, and volition:

• Descartes, Locke, and Hume discussed belief as a kind of assent to ideas, and passions and desires as motivating tendencies.
• Theological debates about faith as assent (e.g., in Aquinas, later in the Reformation) treated belief as a mental act directed at doctrinal contents.

While these accounts still did not treat attitudes uniformly as relations to abstract propositions, they articulated many of the structural elements—distinguishing act from content and linking belief-like states to truth, desire-like states to value—that would later be unified under the label “propositional attitude.”

4. Crystallization in Early Analytic Philosophy

The explicit category of propositional attitudes coalesced in the work of late 19th- and early 20th-century analytic philosophers who introduced precise notions of propositions, thoughts, and their role in logic and semantics.

Logical and Semantic Background

Frege and Russell, reacting against psychologism in logic, emphasized the distinction between:

• Objective contents (thoughts, propositions) suitable for logical analysis, and
• Subjective episodes (thinking, judging, believing) that bear a relation to those contents.

This separation allowed mental states to be systematically connected to the emerging formal study of sentential logic and truth conditions.

Emergence of a Unified Class

As logicians and philosophers confronted puzzles about indirect discourse, belief reports, and modal contexts, they began to group together a wide range of mental verbs under a single heading:

By mid-century, the expression “propositional attitude” was used to capture this shared relational and content-involving structure.

Motivations for the Category

Several pressures drove this crystallization:

• Logical semantics: handling contexts where substitution of co-referential terms fails, as in belief reports.
• Metaphysics of mind: articulating the intentionality of mental states in formally tractable terms.
• Philosophy of language: explaining how reports like “S believes that p” function in natural language.

This created a conceptual space in which different philosophers—most notably Frege and Russell—could debate what the objects of such attitudes are and how the logical form of attitude ascriptions should be understood, setting the stage for later refinements and controversies.

5. Frege, Russell, and the Object of Attitudes

The question of what propositional attitudes are about—their objects—was framed in distinctive ways by Gottlob Frege and Bertrand Russell, whose views became foundational reference points.

Frege: Thoughts (Gedanken) as Objects of Attitudes

For Frege, the primary objects of attitudes such as belief and judgment are thoughts (Gedanken): objective, shareable contents corresponding roughly to propositions.

• In “Der Gedanke” (“The Thought”), Frege characterizes thoughts as the senses of complete sentences, capable of being true or false.
• Mental stances like judging, believing, and doubting are different “forces” directed at the same thought.
• He distinguishes sharply between:
  • Sense (Sinn): the mode of presentation, which determines the thought.
  • Reference (Bedeutung): typically the truth-value in the case of complete sentences.

Frege’s treatment of indirect speech and attitude reports holds that in such contexts expressions refer not to their ordinary referents, but to their senses, so that what is embedded in “that”-clauses is a thought.

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“In thinking we do not create the thought, but grasp it.”

— Frege, Der Gedanke (1918)

Russell: Propositions and Multiple Relations

Russell also posits propositions, but gives them a different structure and metaphysical status over the course of his work:

• In his early “multiple relation” theory of judgment, a subject stands in a complex relation to the constituents of a proposition (objects, properties, relations), rather than to a single unified entity.
• Propositions are, in effect, structured complexes mirroring the logical form of sentences.

On this view, an attitude like belief relates a thinker directly to objects and universals arranged in a certain way. This underwrites Russell’s project of analyzing mental and linguistic phenomena within a common logical framework.

Comparative Overview

Subsequent debates about propositional attitudes frequently return to these Fregean and Russellian models—either adopting, revising, or rejecting their respective accounts of the objects and structure of attitudes.

6. Propositional Attitudes in Mid-20th-Century Analytic Thought

In the mid-20th century, propositional attitudes became a focal point in debates about intentionality, semantics, and the scientific status of mentalistic explanation. Several interlocking strands can be distinguished.

Chisholm and Intentionality

Roderick Chisholm explicitly used the language of propositional attitudes to characterize intentional mental states:

• Attitudes like believing, fearing, and hoping were described as paradigmatic cases of intentionality—the directedness of mind toward objects or contents.
• Chisholm emphasized individuation by both attitudinal type and propositional content, aligning with the now-standard attitude–content framework.
• He used these attitudes to formulate criteria distinguishing the mental from the physical.

Carnap and Logical Reconstruction

Rudolf Carnap approached attitude ascriptions through logical analysis and semantic systems:

• In works such as Meaning and Necessity, Carnap treated belief and other attitudes via intensional semantics, assigning them systematically related intensions.
• He sought to formalize talk of propositional attitudes within a regimented language, although often in an idealized or “reconstructed” form that did not mirror ordinary discourse in all respects.

Quine’s Reservations (Without Full Critique)

W. V. O. Quine, while frequently engaging with propositional attitude contexts, expressed doubts about their place in a regimented, scientific language:

• He highlighted the difficulties of substitution failure and referential opacity in belief reports.
• He regarded these features as problematic for the ideal of a fully extensional, scientifically respectable idiom.

Quine’s concerns set up later, more explicit challenges to propositional attitudes as theoretical posits.

Consolidation in Analytic Practice

By the late 1950s and 1960s:

• The term “propositional attitude” was widely used in discussions of epistemic and conative states.
• Attitude ascriptions formed a standard test case for intensional logic and philosophy of language.
• Philosophers of mind increasingly treated these attitudes as central to explaining rational behavior, paving the way for theories such as Davidson’s radical interpretation and Fodor’s representational theory of mind.

7. Davidson, Fodor, and the Role in Mind and Action

Donald Davidson and Jerry Fodor offered influential and contrasting roles for propositional attitudes within theories of mind, language, and action.

Davidson: Attitudes in Radical Interpretation and Action Explanation

For Davidson, propositional attitudes—especially beliefs, desires, and intentions—are indispensable for interpreting agents and explaining their behavior:

• In “Actions, Reasons, and Causes,” he argued that citing an agent’s pro-attitudes (e.g., desires) and beliefs provides genuine causal explanations of actions.
• Attitudes are ascribed holistically under the constraints of rationality: an interpreter must find a pattern of beliefs and desires that render the agent’s utterances and actions largely reasonable.
• In “Radical Interpretation,” Davidson links the assignment of truth-conditions to sentences with attributions of propositional attitudes, forming an interconnected network of meaning and mind.

On this view, propositional attitudes are not hidden inner entities with fixed boundaries, but elements in a normative and interpretive framework used to make sense of agents.

Fodor: Attitudes in the Language of Thought and Cognitive Science

Jerry Fodor integrated propositional attitudes into a cognitive-scientific picture:

• In The Language of Thought, he proposed that propositional attitudes are relations between thinkers and internal symbolic representations in a mental “language.”
• These representations have a combinatorial syntax and semantics, allowing for productivity and systematicity in thought.
• Attitudes like believing or desiring that p are identified with computationally realized states involving a mental representation with the content that p.

For Fodor, propositional attitudes are causally efficacious internal states, suitable for inclusion in scientific explanations of cognition and behavior, particularly within a computational theory of mind.

Comparative Emphases

Despite differences, both treat propositional attitudes as central to understanding rational agents and their actions, reinforcing the importance of the concept in late 20th-century analytic philosophy.

8. Formal Characterization: Attitude–Content Structures

A standard way to formalize propositional attitudes is to represent them as binary relations between agents and propositions or proposition-like entities.

Basic Relational Schema

The core schema can be expressed as:

• A φ’s that p

where:

• A is an agent,
• φ is an attitudinal verb (believes, desires, hopes, fears, intends, etc.),
• p is a proposition (or other content).

Formally, this is often modeled as a relation:

• Rφ(A, p)

For example, belief that snow is white might be represented as Bel(Alice, p), where p is the proposition that snow is white.

Attitude–Content Distinction

The attitude–content distinction separates:

1. Attitudinal mode: the type of stance (belief, desire, hope, fear).
2. Content: what is believed, desired, etc., typically taken as a truth-evaluable proposition.

This allows for:

• Different attitudes toward the same content (e.g., believing and fearing that it will rain).
• The same attitude type applied to different contents.

Some semantic frameworks refine this further, distinguishing:

• Force (e.g., assertoric, interrogative, optative) from
• Content (the shared proposition across different forces).

Formal Semantics and Modal Logic

In modal and intensional logic, propositional attitudes are often modeled using:

• Accessibility relations on sets of possible worlds (e.g., “worlds compatible with A’s beliefs”).
• Neighborhood or selection function semantics for non-normal attitudes.

For instance:

• Bel(A, p) is true at a world w if p holds in all worlds compatible with A’s beliefs at w.
• Des(A, p) might be true if p holds in all worlds that optimally satisfy A’s desires.

Such frameworks permit systematic treatment of:

• Closure properties (e.g., logical consequences of beliefs).
• Interaction between different attitudes (e.g., belief–desire explanations of action).

Variants and Challenges

Alternative formalisms sometimes:

• Treat contents as structured propositions, Russellian propositions, or Fregean senses.
• Use hyperintensional approaches, where logically equivalent propositions can still be distinguished as attitude contents.

Debates concern whether these formal structures adequately capture phenomena such as misrepresentation, indexicality, and first-personal attitudes, but the relational attitude–content paradigm remains widely used as a starting point.

9. Linguistic Markers: That-Clauses and Intensional Contexts

Propositional attitudes have prominent linguistic correlates, especially in the syntax and semantics of attitude reports.

That-Clauses as Markers of Attitude Content

In many languages, including English, the content of an attitude is expressed via that-clauses:

• “Alice believes that snow is white.”
• “Bob hopes that it will rain.”

Here:

• The matrix verb (believes, hopes) indicates the attitude type.
• The embedded that-clause indicates the propositional content.

The that-clause often behaves syntactically like a noun phrase, functioning as the object of the verb, even though its internal structure is clausal.

Intensional Contexts and Substitution Failure

Attitude reports introduce intensional contexts in which substitution of co-referential terms can change truth-value:

• “Lois believes that Superman can fly” may be true, while
• “Lois believes that Clark Kent can fly” may be false, even if Superman is Clark Kent.

This substitution failure indicates:

• The report is sensitive not only to reference but also to mode of presentation or sense.
• Simple extensional semantics is insufficient; an intensional or hyperintensional treatment is needed.

These features made attitude reports central test cases for theories of sense and reference, possible worlds, and structured propositions.

Other Linguistic Constructions

Different languages and constructions offer further insight:

• Some languages use complementizers analogous to “that,” others employ infinitival clauses or nominalizations (e.g., “his belief that p”).
• Verbs of saying, thinking, and perceiving interact with evidentiality and mood (indicative vs. subjunctive), which can mark nuances of commitment, doubt, or desire.

Interface with Formal Semantics

Formal semanticists often treat that-clauses as denoting propositions or intensions, feeding into models such as:

• Montague grammar, where clause-embedding verbs are assigned intensional types.
• Hintikka-style semantics, where attitude verbs quantify over accessible worlds determined by the agent’s epistemic or doxastic state.

These analyses use syntactic and semantic behavior of that-clauses and intensional contexts to motivate and constrain theories of propositional content and the structure of attitudes.

10. Related Concepts: Intentionality, Representation, and Thought

The notion of propositional attitudes intersects with several broader concepts in philosophy of mind and language.

Intentionality

Intentionality is often described as the aboutness or directedness of mental states. Propositional attitudes are standard examples:

• A belief that p is about the situation described by p.
• A desire that p is directed toward the realization of p.

Some authors, following Brentano, treat intentionality as the mark of the mental, with propositional attitudes providing central cases. Others broaden intentionality to include non-propositional forms (e.g., perception, bodily awareness) and regard propositional attitudes as one species within a larger genus.

Mental Representation

Propositional attitudes are frequently analyzed as involving mental representations:

• On representational theories of mind (e.g., Fodor), attitudes are relations to internal symbols bearing semantic properties (reference, truth-conditions).
• Other approaches (e.g., teleosemantics, informational semantics) attempt to ground representational content in causal, biological, or informational relations.

Discussions focus on whether propositional contents can be reduced to, or must be distinguished from, more basic forms of representation (such as maps, images, or sensorimotor patterns).

Thought and Cognitive States

The term thought is used in various ways:

• As a generic term for episodes of thinking, some of which are propositional.
• In a Fregean sense, as an objective content (Gedanke) that can be the object of propositional attitudes.
• In cognitive science, as computational processes operating over structured representations.

Propositional attitudes are often treated as basic cognitive states underlying reasoning and inference, though some theorists argue that much cognition is subpersonal and not naturally couched in propositional terms.

Comparative Overview

These connections frame many of the central questions about how propositional attitudes fit into a general theory of mind and meaning.

11. Translation and Cross-Linguistic Challenges

The term “propositional attitude” and its associated framework raise several issues in translation and cross-linguistic application.

Terminological Calques and Paraphrases

Many languages lack a direct, idiomatic equivalent of “propositional attitude.” Translators typically adopt one of two strategies:

Difficulties arise because:

• The notion of proposition may not map straightforwardly onto local logical or semantic traditions.
• The everyday term corresponding to attitude often emphasizes emotion or posture, not neutral mental orientation.

Grammatical and Typological Variation

Languages differ in how they express attitude reports:

• Some, like English, rely heavily on that-clauses (complementizers).
• Others use infinitival constructions, nominalizations, or evidential markers.
• Some languages blur boundaries between propositional and non-propositional complements (e.g., mixing clausal and nominal objects of mental verbs).

These variations complicate the application of a uniform propositional-attitude framework across languages, especially in typologically diverse contexts.

Conceptual Mismatches

Philosophical traditions outside the Anglophone analytic sphere may employ alternative basic categories:

• Phenomenological approaches might emphasize intentional acts and noemata rather than propositions and attitudes.
• East Asian philosophical traditions may frame cognition and affect through different conceptual oppositions, without a clear analogue of “propositional content.”

This can lead to partial translation where:

• The logical dimension of propositions is foregrounded, risking neglect of phenomenological nuance.
• Or the experiential and practical aspects are emphasized, potentially underplaying formal structure.

Implications for Comparative Work

These challenges have implications for:

• Comparative philosophy of mind, where care is needed not to project the propositional-attitude framework uncritically onto other traditions.
• Formal semantics, which must accommodate language-specific patterns of clausal complementation and evidentiality.
• Cognitive science, where cross-linguistic data may suggest that the prominence of propositional attitudes in one linguistic culture does not guarantee their universality as psychological primitives.

As a result, discussions of propositional attitudes often require explicit clarification of how key terms and structures are being mapped across languages and traditions.

12. Propositional vs. Non-Propositional Mental Content

Debates about propositional attitudes intersect with questions about whether all mental content is propositional, or whether there are importantly non-propositional forms of cognition.

Propositional Content

Propositional content is typically:

• Truth-evaluable (can be true or false).
• Structurally articulated, often mirroring sentence structure.
• The canonical target of attitudes like belief, judgment, and assertion.

Many traditional accounts treat cognitive states relevant to reasoning and rational action as propositional in this sense.

Candidates for Non-Propositional Content

Several kinds of mental phenomena are proposed as non-propositional:

• Perceptual experiences (e.g., visual fields, auditory scenes) that seem more analog or map-like than sentence-like.
• Imagistic and spatial representations, such as mental rotation or navigation.
• Motor and skill-based know-how, where bodily skills appear to guide behavior without explicit propositional mediation.
• Emotional states, which may have evaluative structure not easily captured by propositions.

The issue is whether these can be fully reduced to, or encoded by, sets of propositions, or whether their representational format is fundamentally different.

Positions in the Debate

Relevance to Attitude Theory

These debates affect:

• How broadly the label “propositional attitude” should be applied.
• Whether explanations of perception, skillful action, and emotion must be recast in propositional terms, or whether a more pluralistic account of mental representation is required.
• The extent to which the traditional belief–desire model captures the full range of psychological explanation.

While no consensus has emerged, the distinction between propositional and non-propositional content is widely recognized as central to contemporary theories of mind.

13. Critiques from Quine, Eliminativists, and Embodied Cognition

The framework of propositional attitudes has been questioned from several influential directions.

Quine’s Extensionalist Concerns

W. V. O. Quine expressed reservations about propositional attitudes within a regimented scientific language:

• He emphasized the referential opacity of belief reports and similar constructions, which resist straightforward extensional treatment.
• For Quine, the intractability of substitution and quantification in such contexts suggested that propositional attitudes belong to a less regimented, more indeterminate part of language.
• He accordingly questioned whether they should play a central role in a fully naturalized epistemology and ontology, even if they remain practically indispensable.

Eliminative Materialism

Eliminative materialists, such as Paul and Patricia Churchland, argue that:

• Folk psychology, framed largely in terms of beliefs and desires as propositional attitudes, may be a false theory.
• Future neuroscience might eliminate rather than vindicate propositional-attitude constructs, replacing them with more fine-grained neurocomputational descriptions.
• Apparent explanatory successes of belief–desire explanations are compared to pre-scientific explanatory schemes (e.g., phlogiston), which were later discarded.

From this perspective, propositional attitudes are seen as heuristic posits that may not find a place in mature scientific accounts of cognition.

Embodied and Enactive Critiques

Embodied, enactive, and dynamical systems approaches challenge the centrality of propositional attitudes by emphasizing:

• The role of sensorimotor coupling, bodily skills, and environmental scaffolding in cognition.
• The prevalence of online, action-guiding processes that may not involve discrete, sentence-like states.
• A view of cognition as world-involving activity rather than internal representation of propositions.

Proponents argue that many everyday cognitive tasks—navigation, object manipulation, social interaction—are better modeled in terms of continuous dynamics and affordances than in terms of stored beliefs and desires.

Scope and Target of Critiques

These critiques differ in scope:

Together, they motivate ongoing scrutiny of how, and to what extent, propositional attitudes should figure in philosophical and scientific theories of mind.

14. Applications in Epistemology and Philosophy of Action

The concept of propositional attitudes is deeply embedded in epistemology and philosophy of action, where it structures core questions and frameworks.

Epistemology: Belief, Justification, and Knowledge

In epistemology, belief—a paradigmatic propositional attitude—is central:

• Knowledge is often analyzed as a species of justified true belief (with various refinements), directly invoking propositional attitudes.
• Theories of justification (foundationalism, coherentism, reliabilism, evidentialism) specify conditions under which an agent’s beliefs that p are epistemically warranted.
• Higher-order epistemology examines attitudes about attitudes, such as beliefs about one’s own beliefs (metabelief), or attitudes like accepting or suspending judgment that p.

Epistemic logics formalize relations among propositional attitudes like knowledge (K) and belief (B), exploring properties such as closure, positive/negative introspection, and logical omniscience.

Philosophy of Action: Belief–Desire Explanations and Intentions

In philosophy of action, propositional attitudes underpin explanations of intentional action:

• A common model explains actions by citing an agent’s beliefs and desires: the agent desires that p and believes that doing A will help bring about p, thereby *intending to do A.
• Intention itself is treated as a propositional attitude—intending that p—which coordinates planning and execution over time.

Approaches influenced by Davidson treat reason explanations—appealing to an agent’s beliefs and pro-attitudes—as both rationalizing and causal, integrating propositional attitudes into the metaphysics of action.

Practical Reasoning and Normativity

Propositional attitudes also structure accounts of:

• Practical reasoning, often modeled as transitions among propositional attitudes (e.g., from desires and beliefs to intentions).
• Norms of rationality, such as coherence requirements on an agent’s beliefs and intentions (e.g., not both intending that p and believing that p is impossible).

In both epistemology and action theory, debates continue over:

• Whether all relevant mental states are best modeled as propositional attitudes, or whether, for example, perceptual justification and skillful action require non-propositional resources.
• How far formal models of belief and intention capture the complexity and context-sensitivity of real human reasoning and behavior.

Nonetheless, propositional attitudes remain central organizing concepts in these domains.

15. Legacy and Historical Significance

The concept of propositional attitude has left a substantial imprint on 20th- and 21st-century analytic philosophy, functioning as a bridge between logic, language, and mind.

Consolidation of a Shared Framework

By providing a unified way to talk about:

• Beliefs, desires, hopes, fears, and intentions,
• Their truth-evaluable contents, and
• Their role in reasoning and action,

the propositional-attitude framework helped consolidate a common vocabulary for philosophers of mind, language, and action. It facilitated cross-fertilization between:

• Formal semantics (through the analysis of attitude reports),
• Epistemology (through accounts of belief and knowledge),
• Action theory (through belief–desire–intention explanations).

Influence on Logic and Semantics

Propositional attitudes have shaped:

• The development of intensional and modal logics, particularly epistemic and doxastic systems.
• The refinement of semantic theories of sense, reference, and possible worlds.
• The recognition of opacity and hyperintensionality as central semantic phenomena.

They have served as standard test cases for theories of meaning and logical form.

Role in Theories of Mind and Cognitive Science

In philosophy of mind, propositional attitudes have:

• Anchored representational and computational theories of cognition.
• Framed discussions of mental causation, rationality, and folk psychology.
• Provided a template for integrating psychology with neuroscience, even as some approaches have questioned or revised the centrality of propositional states.

Continuing Debates and Reassessment

Although challenged by:

• Extensionalist and eliminativist critiques,
• Embodied, enactive, and non-propositional models of cognition,

the notion of propositional attitudes continues to serve as a central point of reference. Many newer approaches define themselves partly in relation to this framework—either by extending, reconceiving, or rejecting it.

In historical perspective, the rise of propositional attitudes marks a key phase in the logical and linguistic turn of analytic philosophy, shaping how philosophers conceptualize mental life, language use, and rational agency.