Belief

What are beliefs?

A non-exhaustive not-mutually-exclusive list of the things that we might mean/point at:

  • Beliefs as the thing that's combined with v-stuff to produce (willful?) actions.
  • Beliefs as the representational content with the mind-to-world direction of fit (to contrast it with the world-to-mind direction of fit, characteristic of v-stuff).
  • Beliefs as subjective summaries of (dispositionalism1).
  • Beliefs as what turns into knowledge when true and justified.
  • Beliefs as probabilistic referential/intentional contents of cognition that refer to something «outside» of themselves.
    • How does that relating/intending work?
  • Beliefs as potentially defective knowledge.
  • Beliefs as the things in a mind that change in response to adequate evidence/reasons/information.
  • Beliefs as mental thingies with some yet-to-be-specified normativity condition?

How do we talk about beliefs?

A minimal and noncommittal analysis would put belief on a footing similar and complementary to v, i.e. just as a good predictive instrument; a latent variable useful for modeling about certain phenomena. The defect of this take is that it doesn't address why certain phenomena are well-modelable using beliefs/V-stuff.

Alief is belief minus (the requirement for) awareness/consciousness/lucidity. If one behaves as if believing X, one can be said to alieve X. Schwitzgebel prefers to extend the concept of "belief" to also cover the territory of "alief" and use the word "judgment" for situations when one speaks/asserts as though one believed X but does not necessarily believe X (in Schwitzgebel's sense).1

One argument employed by dispositionalists/pragmatists is that if we encounter an alien mind behaving that is very well-modeled as having specific beliefs (intentional stance-like), then this would warrant ascribing beliefs to the mind, even if all our "interpretability" methods failed miserably. My first objection to this is the same as my standard objection to the intentional stance: it assumes away what it is about the Thing that makes it well-modelable as having beliefs. Moreover, the example of an alien Rudolfo used by Schwitzgebel, additionally presumes that the (xeno-)neural implementation of the alien's "beliefs" would be nothing like ours, which IMO is an unjustified presumption.

Current best guess

My current best guess is that beliefs are intentional aspects of cognition subject to certain normativity conditions. These normativity conditions include (i.a.?) responsiveness to evidence/observations/inferences enabling/causing adequate reference maintenance. This is very weak so far. I expect that beliefs and v-stuff are coupled together and that we are confused about their "nature" for similar reasons, so that once we make meaningful progress on one, the other will follow relatively easily.

Footnotes

  1. The Pragmatic Metaphysics of Belief by Eric Schwitzgebel. ↩ ↩2