Editing Propositional attitude (section)

==Overview==

Bertrand Russell introduced the idea of handling propositions like this:<ref name="Russell 1918 p227"/>

{{blockquote|What sort of name shall we give to verbs like 'believe' and 'wish' and so forth?  I should be inclined to call them 'propositional verbs'.  This is merely a suggested name for convenience, because they are verbs which have the ''form'' of relating an object to a proposition.  As I have been explaining, that is not what they really do, but it is convenient to call them propositional verbs.  Of course you might call them 'attitudes', but I should not like that because it is a psychological term, and although all the instances in our experience are psychological, there is no reason to suppose that all the verbs I am talking of are psychological.  There is never any reason to suppose that sort of thing.<ref name="Russell 1918 p227">Russell 1918, 227</ref>}}

How one feels about or regards a proposition is different than what a proposition is – they can be accepted, asserted, believed, commanded, contested, declared, denied, doubted, enjoined, exclaimed, or expected, for example.  Different attitudes toward propositions are called ''propositional attitudes''; they are also discussed under the headings of ''[[intentionality]]'' and ''[[linguistic modality]]''.

Many problematic situations in real life arise from the circumstance that many different propositions in many different modalities are in the air at once.  In order to compare propositions of different colours and flavours, as it were, there is no basis for comparison but to examine the underlying propositions themselves, returning to matters of language and logic.  Despite the name, propositional attitudes are not regarded as psychological attitudes proper, since the formal disciplines of linguistics and logic are concerned with nothing more concrete than what can be said in general about their formal properties and their patterns of interaction.