Thinker statues form a fascinating, but little explored cultural theme. While we may be most familiar with Rodin’s thinker, thinker statues, both male and female, appear in many very diverse cultures. They include appearances in Roman art, the pensive bodhisattvas of Korea and China, the pensive Christ statues of Eastern Europe and Italy, the thinker statues of Kazakhstan and Africa, as well as the female thinkers of the pre-Columbian Tumaco-La Tolita culture.
What is common among all the thinker statues despite their different cultural and religious background is that they incorporate a mental attitude, thinking. At the same time the thinker statues are themselves objects. Now these two notions, attitudes and objects, of course, compose the title of my book (which also includes the Korean bodhisattva on its cover). This title targets the two facets of the topic of the book, which addresses what sorts of objects are involved in the various mental attitudes—thinking, doubting, imagining, inferring, questioning, hypothesizing—as well as their manifestations in speech, asserting, suggesting, asking, answering, and demanding.
The objects involved crucially play the role of content bearers (representing situations) or as things that can be satisfied or violated (a command can be satisfied or violated, a question can be satisfied by an answer). The standard philosophical view about mental attitudes and their linguistic manifestations (speech acts) is that they are all relations to the same sort of object, a proposition. A proposition is just the sort of thing that is taken to make up the content of a that-clause, with which verbs describing mental attitudes or speech acts generally go along: The thinker thought that life is a mystery; the speaker said that life is a mystery.
Philosophers, starting with Bolzano and Frege in the nineteenth century, took the syntactic form of attitude reports and speech act reports to wear their logical form on their sleeves: attitude verbs like “think” and speech verbs like “say” take two arguments: an agent, and the thing that makes up the content of a that-clause, a proposition. Propositions, the putative objects of attitudes and contents of attitudes and speech acts, thus are considered the content bearers involved in attitudes and speech acts. However, as objects, propositions need to be abstract and mind-independent
since they are meanings of sentences and can be shared by different agents, and that raises lots of problems—how can an abstract object be grasped by the mind and why should an abstract object be able to be true or false or represent anything in the first place? Moreover, mental attitudes and speech acts just do not seem to be relations to mere content objects: we do not think or say propositions or any objects whatsoever.
This book takes a different approach. The objects involved in mental attitudes like thinking, imagining, and questioning are the things we refer to as thoughts, imaginations, and questions. Thinking thus means “engaging in a thought,” imagining means “engaging in an imagination,” etc. Since we make explicit reference to such attitudinal objects in natural language, we can let ourselves be guided by our linguistically manifest intuitions about such objects. All those objects have truth or satisfaction conditions: a belief can be true, a hypothesis correct, a command can be complied with or violated.
Different attitudinal objects, as one can quickly see, go along with different predicates of satisfaction and these can tell us a lot about what truth and representation consist in. For example, the selection of particular predicates of satisfaction indicates that truth is a norm some attitudinal objects come with (beliefs, assertions, hypotheses) and that actions are the sorts of things that other attitudinal objects may require for their satisfaction and may even qualify as “correct” (commands, suggestions). Lots of philosophically exciting views and options can be read off the linguistic manifestation of the ontology of attitudinal objects, as well as their more abstract kin, modal objects of the sort of obligations, permissions, needs, and options.
The thinker statue is an object and her thinking is an attitude that in turn involves an object, the bearer of truth. On the view developed in this book, that object is a thought, an object extremely well-reflected in natural language.
Featured image by Avery Evans via Unsplash.
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Facts Only
* Thinker statues appear in Roman art, Korean and Chinese bodhisattvas, Christ statues in Eastern Europe and Italy, thinker statues in Kazakhstan and Africa, and female thinkers from the pre-Columbian Tumaco-La Tolita culture.
* The common element among these statues is the incorporation of a mental attitude, specifically thinking.
* The book's title targets the relationship between mental attitudes (thinking, doubting, imagining, inferring, questioning) and their manifestations in speech acts (speech, asserting, suggesting, asking, answering, demanding).
* Objects involved in mental attitudes act as content bearers or things that can be satisfied or violated by speech acts.
* The standard view holds that mental attitudes and speech acts are relations to a proposition, which is the content object shared by attitudes and speech acts.
* Philosophers treated attitude verbs and speech verbs as taking an agent and a proposition as arguments.
* Propositions are considered the content bearers involved in attitudes and speech acts, though they must be abstract and mind-independent.
* Mental attitudes and speech acts do not seem to relate to mere content objects.
* The book posits that the objects involved in mental attitudes are thoughts, imaginations, and questions, which are explicitly referenced in natural language.
* These attitudinal objects have truth or satisfaction conditions, such as a belief being true, a hypothesis being correct, or a command being complied with.
Executive Summary
Thinker statues appear across diverse cultures, including Roman art, Korean and Chinese bodhisattvas, Christ statues in Eastern Europe and Italy, thinker statues in Kazakhstan and Africa, and female thinkers from the pre-Columbian Tumaco-La Tolita culture. All these statues incorporate a mental attitude of thinking while also existing as physical objects. The book addresses the relationship between these attitudes and their manifestations in speech acts, examining what sorts of objects are involved in various mental attitudes (thinking, doubting, imagining, etc.) and how they manifest in linguistic actions (speaking, asserting, questioning).
The standard philosophical view posits that mental attitudes and speech acts relate to a shared object, a proposition. Philosophers treated attitude verbs like "think" and speech verbs like "say" as taking an agent and a proposition as arguments. However, the article questions this by arguing that mental attitudes are not mere relations to content objects but rather engagements with attitudinal objects—thoughts, imaginations, and questions. This book suggests that these attitudinal objects possess truth or satisfaction conditions, which vary depending on the predicates of satisfaction they carry, revealing different concepts of truth and representation.
Full Take
The analysis shifts the focus from propositions as the sole content bearers of mental attitudes to considering the actual "attitudinal objects" themselves—thoughts, imaginations, and questions—as the entities that bear truth and satisfaction conditions. This reframing introduces ontological depth by grounding linguistic analysis in the nature of internal mental states rather than purely abstract propositional relations. The move away from the proposition-centric model suggests a critique of traditional Western philosophy's reliance on syntactic structure to capture subjective experience.
The pattern observed is a trajectory toward interiority as the primary locus of meaning, moving from external representation (the statue) to internal mental states (thinking). This implies that understanding linguistic expression requires recognizing the qualitative structure of these attitudinal objects rather than just their propositional content. The implication for human agency is that by focusing on the nature of "thought" and "imagination," one can unlock a richer understanding of how meaning is constructed internally before it is externalized linguistically.
The core tension lies between the traditional view that seeks objective, mind-independent propositions and this book's approach that foregrounds the context-dependent truth conditions of internal cognitive states. The underlying assumption questioned here is whether linguistic analysis must always resolve to abstract mathematical or logical relations. This prompts inquiry into how subjective experience necessarily structures reality when we attempt to communicate it.
Bridge questions: If thoughts are the objects, what constitutes the shared structure that allows for the assignment of "truth" across different cognitive states? How does the variability in satisfaction predicates across attitudinal objects map onto human experience versus external objective fact? What epistemological shift occurs when focusing on the ontology of thought rather than its representation?
Sentinel — Human
This text presents a cohesive, internally consistent philosophical argument that synthesizes cultural observation with linguistic philosophy to propose a novel ontology regarding mental attitudes and their corresponding objects.