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The assumptive attitudes theorized by Meinong are mental attitudes about states of affairs, factual or otherwise, which they qualify positively or negatively, but without implying, with regard to them, the kind of conviction characteristic of judgments and beliefs. Assumption, consideration, simulation, varieties of imagination, reflection in terms of counterfactual conditionals, presumption perhaps, or contemplation, hypothesis formation, model building, thought experiment, among other possibilities, but also certain forms of feeling, such as those involved in fictional scenes or in the motivation of desire, seem to bear a certain kinship with Meinongian assertions, if not to be instances of them. However, their relationship remains to be clarified, for it is perhaps asking too much of this type of mental act, or misunderstanding it, to consider it as a common ingredient in all these ways of thinking. Meinong certainly attributed a very broad scope to assumption, but above all, against the positions of his contemporaries (Brentano, Marty, Husserl, Russell), he asserted that it should be given a place as an authentic mental attitude, alongside representations, judgments, feelings and desires. He saw it as essential to many ordinary activities, as well as to those that are more cognitively and intellectually complex, and above all as a fundamental and decisive mode of the relationship between the mind and its various objects, ineliminable but most often misunderstood or ignored. He saw it as decisive for the theory of the apprehension of objects of thought and its articulation with psychology, the theory of knowledge and the theory of the object. We'll come back to these points and try to show how this Meinongian perspective can relate to certain contemporary debates.
