Attitudes Towards Objects[Note 2. Thanks are due to a number of audiences at ...]

In addition to propositional attitudes, there are non-propositional attitudes—states such as loving one’s department, liking lattice structures, fearing Freddy Krueger, and hating Sherlock Holmes. There are persuasive reasons to believe that such instances of liking, loving, fearing, and hating fail to be analyzable in terms of or otherwise reducible to propositional attitudes.2 But to learn that such attitudes aren’t propositional is to learn something that they are not. The present paper aims to say what they are. As an initial statement, non-propositional attitudes are intentional mental states that are of or about things not in virtue of relating a subject to a proposition(s) concerning those things. To the extent that the ascriptions of a successful folkpsychology serve as a guide to the mental states themselves, and, in light of ascriptions such as the following, the default position is that there are such attitudes: ‘John likes his dog’, ‘Ann loves God’, ‘John fears Freddy’, and so on.3 Just as true propositional attitude ascriptions such as ‘S believes that p’ give one reason to think that there are beliefs and that their objects are propositions, true non-propositional attitude ascriptions such as ‘S fears o’ give one reason to think that there are mental states with non-propositional objects. Given the prevalence of such ascriptions, it is surprising that the states to which these ascriptions answer have received so little attention in contemporary philosophy.4 A bit more contrast may be helpful. Belief has been a central case in much of the philosophy of mind and language. In fact, this might partially explain why non-propositional attitudes have received so little attention, for certain distinctions get lost. ‘John believes that running with the bulls will get him killed’ is a canonical ascription of a propositional attitude. It features an attitude verb flanked by a subject term and a ‘that’-cause. But our ordinary mentalistic discourse also allows one to ascribe the very same state to John using a noun-phrase complement: ‘John believes the proposition that running with the bulls will get him killed’. And our belief ascriptions are more flexible still, for one can ascribe a propositional attitude with a simple noun-phrase complement such as a name (in this case, a name