ABSTRACT
A central problem of philosophy of mind is the nature of mental states, or the truth-conditions for the ascription of such states. Especially problematic are the propositional attitudes: beliefs, desires, and so forth. One popular strategy for attacking these problems is to examine the practice of speakers in ascribing these states, especially to others. What principles or procedures guide or underlie the ascriber’s activity? In identifying such principles or procedures, one hopes to glean the criteria or satisfaction conditions of the mentalistic predicates (or something like this). Now the ascription of the attitudes involves the assignment of some sort of ‘content’ or ‘meaning’ to the mind, which can be seen as a kind of ‘interpretation’ of the agent or his behavior. (It is also related, on many theories, to the interpretation of the agent’s utterances.) Thus, ascription of mental states, especially the attitudes, can be thought of as a matter of interpretation; and the strategy of studying the interpreter, in order to extract the conditions of mentality, or propositional attitudehood, may be called the interpretation strategy. I do not assume here that this strategy will or can succeed. Nonetheless, its popularity, if nothing else, makes it worthy of investigation.
