A predictive architecture for the attitudes
Alex B. Kiefer, Jakob Hohwy · 2025
We provide a general account of propositional attitudes from the point of view of the predictiveprocessing (PP) framework. We first specify functional roles for conative and cognitive attitudetypes, in terms of the distinction between agent-driven and stimulus-driven control over internalstates. This accounts for the motivational role of conative attitudes as well as the rationalityconstraints characteristic of cognitive attitudes such as belief and perception. We then examinebelief and desire in more detail, and develop a broader taxonomy of attitude types, castinginstances of counterfactual exploration, such as supposition and imagination, as second-orderpropositional attitudes in which a cognitive attitude is the object of a conative one. Finally, weaddress worries about the suitability of PP’s representations—probabilistic graphical models—for implementing the attitudes.