A thinker and her thought

Thinker statues form a fascinating, but little explored cultural theme. While we may be most familiar with Rodin’s thinker, thinker statues, both male and female, appear in many very diverse cultures. They include appearances in Roman art, the pensive bodhisattvas of Korea and China, the pensive Christ statues of Eastern Europe and Italy, the thinker statues of Kazakhstan and Africa, as well as the female thinkers of the pre-Columbian Tumaco-La Tolita culture. 

What is common among all the thinker statues despite their different cultural and religious background is that they incorporate a mental attitude, thinking. At the same time the thinker statues are themselves objects. Now these two notions, attitudes and objects, of course, compose the title of my book (which also includes the Korean bodhisattva on its cover). This title targets the two facets of the topic of the book, which addresses what sorts of objects are involved in the various mental attitudes—thinking, doubting, imagining, inferring, questioning, hypothesizing—as well as their manifestations in speech, asserting, suggesting, asking, answering, and demanding.

The objects involved crucially play the role of content bearers (representing situations) or as things that can be satisfied or violated (a command can be satisfied or violated, a question can be satisfied by an answer). The standard philosophical view about mental attitudes and their linguistic manifestations (speech acts) is that they are all relations to the same sort of object, a proposition. A proposition is just the sort of thing that is taken to make up the content of a that-clause, with which verbs describing mental attitudes or speech acts generally go along: The thinker thought that life is a mystery; the speaker said that life is a mystery.

Philosophers, starting with Bolzano and Frege in the nineteenth century, took the syntactic form of attitude reports and speech act reports to wear their logical form on their sleeves: attitude verbs like “think” and speech verbs like “say” take two arguments: an agent, and the thing that makes up the content of a that-clause, a proposition. Propositions, the putative objects of attitudes and contents of attitudes and speech acts, thus are considered the content bearers involved in attitudes and speech acts. However, as objects, propositions need to be abstract and mind-independent
since they are meanings of sentences and can be shared by different agents, and that raises lots of problems—how can an abstract object be grasped by the mind and why should an abstract object be able to be true or false or represent anything in the first place? Moreover, mental attitudes and speech acts just do not seem to be relations to mere content objects: we do not think or say propositions or any objects whatsoever.

This book takes a different approach. The objects involved in mental attitudes like thinking, imagining, and questioning are the things we refer to as thoughts, imaginations, and questions. Thinking thus means “engaging in a thought,” imagining means “engaging in an imagination,” etc. Since we make explicit reference to such attitudinal objects in natural language, we can let ourselves be guided by our linguistically manifest intuitions about such objects. All those objects have truth or satisfaction conditions: a belief can be true, a hypothesis correct, a command can be complied with or violated.

Different attitudinal objects, as one can quickly see, go along with different predicates of satisfaction and these can tell us a lot about what truth and representation consist in. For example, the selection of particular predicates of satisfaction indicates that truth is a norm some attitudinal objects come with (beliefs, assertions, hypotheses) and that actions are the sorts of things that other attitudinal objects may require for their satisfaction and may even qualify as “correct” (commands, suggestions). Lots of philosophically exciting views and options can be read off the linguistic manifestation of the ontology of attitudinal objects, as well as their more abstract kin, modal objects of the sort of obligations, permissions, needs, and options.

The thinker statue is an object and her thinking is an attitude that in turn involves an object, the bearer of truth. On the view developed in this book, that object is a thought, an object extremely well-reflected in natural language.

_{Featured image by Avery Evans via Unsplash.}