I argue that propositional faith presupposes trustworthiness, in this sense: faith that p is fitting only if the one in whom you have faith to bring it about that p is trustworthy to bring it about that p. In defence of this, I argue that propositional faith is a species of interpersonal faith and that interpersonal faith presupposes trustworthiness. I also discuss some of the consequences of my thesis for theistic propositional faith.

In a series of articles, Asbjørn Steglich-Petersen and Nick Zangwill argue that, since propositional attitude (PA) ascription judgements do not behave like normative judgements in being subject to a priori normative supervenience and the Because Constraint, PAs cannot be constitutively normative.1 I argue that, for a specific version of normativism, according to which PAs are normative commitments, these arguments fail. To this end, I argue that commitments and obligations should be distinguished. Then, I show that the intuitions allegedly governing all normative judgements do not even purport to hold for commitment-attributing judgements.

A widespread view in the philosophy of mind and action holds that intentions are propositional attitudes. Call this view ‘Propositionalism about Intention’. The key alternative holds that intentions have acts, or do-ables, as their contents. Propositionalism is typically accepted by default, rather than argued for in any detail. By appealing to a key metaphysical constraint on any account of intention, I argue that on the contrary, it is the Do-ables View which deserves the status of the default position, and Propositionalism which bears the burden of proof. I go on to show that this burden has not been met in the literature.

This paper defends the view that propositions – that is, what are picked about by complement clauses and the range of quantifiers like that in ‘Sanna believes all that Matti said’ – are states of affairs. States of affairs – and thus propositions – are not, in the primary sense, representational; what is representational and what is true or false in the first instance are mental states and sentence tokens that represent propositions. There is, it is argued, a derivative sense in which propositions are bearers of truth, but truth in that sense is a derivative, non-explanatory notion. This view is contrasted with views like the one Scott Soames develops in What is Meaning?. It’s argued that this view is superior to Soames’ in various ways.

Prior to 1651, Hobbes was agnostic about the existence of God. Hobbes argued that God’s existence could neither be demonstrated nor proved, so that those who reason about God’s existence will systematically vacillate, sometimes thinking God exists, sometimes not, which for Hobbes is to say they will doubt God’s existence. Because this vacillation or doubt is inherent to the subject, reasoners like himself will judge that settling on one belief rather than another is epistemically unjustified. Hobbes’s agnosticism becomes apparent once we attend to his distinctions between the propositional attitudes one might adopt towards theological claims, including supposing, thinking, having faith and knowing.

Folk psychology, the naive understanding of mental state concepts, requires a model of how people ascribe mental states to themselves. Competent speakers associate a distinctive memory representation (a category representation, CR) with each mentalistic word in their lexicon. A decision to ascribe such a word to oneself depends on matching to the CR an instance representation (IR) of one's current state. As in visual object recognition, evidence about a CR's content includes the IRs that are or are not available to trigger a match. This poses serious problems for functionalism, the theory-of-mind approach to the meaning of mental terms. A simple functionalist model is inadequate because (1) the relational and subjunctive (what would have happened) information it requires concerning target states is not generally available and (2) it could lead to combinatorial explosion. A modified functionalist model can appeal to qualitative (phenomenological) properties, but the earlier problems still reappear. Qualitative properties are important for sensations, propositional attitudes, and their contents, providing a model that need not refer to functional (causal-relational) properties at all. The introspectionist character of the proposed model does not imply that ascribing mental states to oneself is infallible or complete; nor is the model refuted by empirical research on introspective reports. Empirical research on “theory of mind” does not support any strict version of functionalism but only an understanding of mentalistic words that may depend on phenomenological or experiential qualities.