Abstract

Propositionalism is the widely held view that intentional attitudes are fundamentally and predicatively propositional. In contrast, objectualism is the view that a particular class of intentional attitudes—for example, love, fear, like, and hate—bears no relation to a proposition or state of affairs nor does their content make reference to objects by predicating something of them. This paper challenges the objectualist view. While I do not deny that non-propositional attitudes are real mental states, I do deny that they are metaphysically independent from propositional ones. To that end, I proffer an account whereby non-propositional attitudes supervene on possible disjunctive complexes of propositional attitudes, and I defend its merits over objectualism. I argue that my propositional account provides an intuitive framework to index polysemous attitudes and explain a variety of intentional behaviors whereas objectualism does not.