PROPOSITIONAL ATTITUDE

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PROPOSITIONAL ATTITUDE

            A propositional attitude is referred to be a mental state. It is actually the one held by an agent and tends towards a proposition. It can also be said to be a relation between a person and a proposition, such as beliefs, desire, and intention. Propositional attitudes are considered or regarded to be the fundamental units of thought, which they can either be true or false. It is important to note that someone may have different propositional attitudes towards the same proposition. Example of this can be ‘ Okon is anxious that the house is unclean’ and ‘ Okon knows that the house is unclean’.
Propositional attitude feedback shows the cognitive relations which people bear to propositions. We typically make such reports by uttering propositional attitude reporting sentences like ‘Okon believes that Uduak broke his plate’, employing a propositional attitude verb like ‘believes’ ‘hopes’, and ‘knows’, followed by a clause that includes a full sentence expressing a proposition a that clause.[1]
In considering Frege’ theory of propositional attitude, it shows that the way that individuals are represented by the agent can be considered as a propositional attitude. He added that an occurrence of a referential expression within the scope of a propositional attitude verb refers to a way of representing an object rather than to the expression’s ordinary referent.
            It should however be noted that the “that-clause” in belief reports pose semantic problem because their content has to be evaluated in the intentional propositional attitude context and not extensional. In such contexts, substituting a co-referential term in the embedded clause may lead to a change of truth value.[2]

[1]Cf. Michael Nelson, “Propositional Attitudes Reports”, (Published Feb. 16th, 2000; Revised Oct. 5th, 2010 https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/prop-attitude-reports/  Accessed 09/12/2016,  1:59pm).
[2] Cf. Propositional Attitude, http://people.ds.cam.ac.uk/kmj21/PropositionalAttitudes.Enc.pdf (Accessed 09/12/2016, 2:34pm).

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