Some attitudes we usually do not have

Abstract

I present a new attitude puzzle involving disjunction. Specifically, though it can sound strange to ascribe the belief that or when and are about very different subject‐matters, we can assure ourselves that the strangeness is merely pragmatic because of the alethic properties of disjunction. But frustration‐ and other non‐doxastic attitude‐ascriptions also sound very strange. Are the corresponding frustratingness, etc. properties of disjunction the same as with truth? I will argue that they are not: frustratingness and desirability, and likely the other non‐doxastic analogues (e.g., for sadness, fear, regret, etc.) do not work at all like truth does for belief. That means there is no obvious route to make sense of the strangeness of the relevant frustration‐ and desire‐ascriptions with disjunctive contents with very unrelated disjuncts. I argue that frustratingness's and desirability's behavior in this respect, while not to my knowledge noticed before, seems to arise from natural and general structural features of that kind of property: roughly, frustratingness requires that each property essential to the given state of affairs said to be frustrating contribute to the frustratingness of the state of affairs. This suggests that we just do not have these attitudes, not just that the ascriptions sound strange.