What was i thinking? dennett’s content and consciousness and the reality of propositional attitudes

Abstract

Back in the 1980s and 1990s there was a lively debate in the philosophy of mind between realists and anti-realists about propositional attitudes. However, as I argue in this paper, both sides of this debate agreed on a basic assumption: That the truth (or falsehood) of our ascription of propositional attitudes has direct ontological implications four our theories about their nature. In the current paper I argue that such an assumption is false, and that Dennett had hinted at its falsehood in the first part of Content and Consciousness. In an exercise of “counterfactual exegesis“, I suggest that, had this point been acknowledged then, this longstanding debate - which still survives to this date - could have probably been avoided.