Søren Klausen

Propositional attitudes are often classified as non-phenomenal mental states. I argue that there is no good reason for doing so. The unwillingness to view propositional attitudes as being essentially phenomenal stems from a biased notion of phenomenality, from not paying sufficient attention to the idioms in which propositional attitudes are usually reported, from overlooking the considerable degree to which different intentional modes can be said to be phenomenologically continuous, and from not considering the possibility that propositional attitudes may be transparent, just like sensations and emotions are commonly held to be: there may be no appropriate way of describing their phenomenal character apart from describing the properties and objects they represent.

The epistemology of abstract objects is a somewhat neglected topic in contemporary philosophy. I argue that a satisfactory account of our capacity for knowing abstract objects must consist in more than formal requirements. It must also comprise an investigation of the nature of the relevant processes of belief formation, notably the mental process known as intuition. A promising approach is what I call “constructionism” (not to be confused with antirealist forms of constructivism), the main ideas of which can be found in Kant, Peirce, Husserl and contemporary cognitive scientists like Laird-Johnson and Kosslyn. According to constructionism, we come to know complex abstract objects by carrying out processes of mental construction or performing mental experiments on the contents of lower-order mental acts. I discuss the strengths and limitations of the theory and suggest some possible further developments.