"ascription" is a correct and usable word in written English.
You can use it to refer to the act of assigning something or someone to a particular cause, agent, or source. For example, "The successful outcome of the project was an ascription to the team's hard work."
As Strawson puts it, the criteria we employ for psychological ascription to others must be 'logically adequate'.
In Individuals he talked of the satisfaction of certain conditions as being criterial for the ascription of some disputed claims, and justified that by transcendental arguments.
Aristotle's careful distinctions between Plato and fifth-century Pythagoreanism, which make excellent sense in terms of the general development of Greek philosophy, are largely ignored in the later tradition in favor of the more sensational ascription of mature Platonism to Pythagoras.
Still, the initial assumption remains an ascription of responsibility and each individual case requires close scrutiny: one is responsible and accountable unless there is an adequate reason for being considered otherwise.
Yet the resulting utterance, were it construed as an ascription, would generally be a true one.
For a critical analysis of the issue of ascription of the Physics commentary to Richard Rufus, see Silvia Donati, "The Anonymous Commentary On The Physics in Erfurt, Cod.
According to realist positions, however, it is far from obvious whether or not this is justified, because it is far from obvious whether or not artificial systems have internal states that ground the ascription of representational mental states.
Sometimes it is rather difficult to decide whether or not the best explanation of an agent's behavior requires the ascription of representational mental states.
Priority of self- or other-ascription.
Accurate self-ascription through self-expression: I learn to say "I'm in pain!" instead of "ow!" as an automatic, unreflective response to painful stimuli.
Transparency approaches to self-knowledge, like Evans', emphasize cases in which it seems that one arrives at an accurate self-ascription not by means of attending to, or thinking about, one's own mental states, but rather by means of attending to or thinking about the external states of the world that the target mental states are about.
