Belief

Russell prétend qu’un examen des croyances est indispensable pour définir nos raisonnements quotidiens et comprendre ce que les philosophes entendent par la notion de vérité. Cela étant, l’auteur considère qu’une étude de ces croyances n’a aucun rapport avec la logique, laquelle concerne uniquement le vrai et le faux. En d’autres termes, Russell associe croyance et psychologie tout en réservant le domaine de la logique au thème de la proposition, vraie ou fausse par définition. Une certaine théorie de la vérité sous-tend (...) son rejet primordial d’une logique épistémique ; si la croyance a un intérêt philosophique, c’est parce que Russell se sert de son examen pour discerner la théorie de la vérité que défendent plusieurs philosophes : la théorie de la vérité-cohérence est une cible principale du Britannique, qui défend pour sa part une théorie de la vérité-correspondance en caractérisant la proposition par sa relation de correspondance ou de non-correspondance avec un fait. (shrink)

It is argued that to believe is to believe true. That is, when one believes a proposition one thereby believes the proposition to be true. This is a point about what it is to believe rather than about the aim of belief or the standard of correctness for belief. The point that to believe is to believe true appears to be an analytic truth about the concept of belief. It also appears to be essential to the state of belief that (...) to believe is to believe true. This is not just a contingent fact about our ordinary psychology, since even a non-ordinary believer must believe a proposition that they believe to be true. Nor is the idea that one may accept a theory as empirically adequate rather than as true a counter-example, since such acceptance combines belief in the truth of the observational claims of a theory with suspension of belief with respect to the non-observational claims of a theory. Nor is the fact that to believe is to believe true to be explained in terms of an inference governed by the T-scheme from the belief that P to the belief that P is true, since there is no inference from the former to the latter. To believe that P just is to believe that P is true. (shrink)

One job for theories of mental representation is to distinguish between different kinds of mental representation: beliefs, desires, intentions, perceptual states, etc. What makes a mental state a belief that p rather than a desire that p or a visual representation that p? Functionalism is a leading approach for doing so: for individuating mental states. Functionalism is designed to allow that psychological states can be multiply realized. Mark Sprevak has argued that, for a functionalist account of psychological states to apply (...) to creatures that are organised in a very different way to humans (call them Martians), the way a psychological state is functionally individuated has to be relatively coarse-grained (Sprevak 2009). Psychological research might show that human beliefs are directly available to consciousness, that they are formed as the result of deliberate judgement, and so on, but theorists would be precluded from including these roles in their account of belief, if Sprevak is right. The argument for coarse-grained individuation fails if we distinguish functionalism about what it takes to be a psychological state in general from functionalism about a particular state type such as belief. Functionalism individuates a psychological state like believing that p partly by reference to its relations to other psychological states: desiring that p, perceiving that p, intending that p, etc. Functionalist motivations do indeed suggest that Martians with a functional organisation and physical substrate quite unlike humans could have psychological states, but not that they should have states with the interrelated collection of functional roles to count as beliefs, desires, intentions, etc. Thus, theorists are not precluded from including functional relations to consciousness or deliberate judgement in their account of (human) belief, consistent with allowing that Martians would have their own collection of functionally interrelated psychological states. Sprevak’s coarse-grained functionalism implies an implausibly liberal form of extended cognition. The point about functional interrelations allows us to avoid that conclusion without jettisoning functionalism (as Sprevak suggests we should): records in a human notebook may not enter into the right interrelations with other human psychological states to count as beliefs; nor do they enter into any interrelations with Martian psychological states. Functionalism can therefore allow that Martians have psychological states while holding that few if any of the beliefs we humans have are, as a matter of fact, extended. (shrink)

Credit theories of knowledge have to explain the conditions under which beliefs are attributable to cognitive agents. The most promising way to explain these conditions is to offer an account of cognitive agency that is a plausible development of the uncontroversial notion that we are believing subjects. This article develops and defends a Structuralist model of cognitive agency.

Widespread reliance on representationalist understandings commit social scientists to either partially or totally decouple belief from reality, limiting the domain of phenomena that can be treated by belief as an analytic concept. Developing the contrastive notion of practical belief, we introduce the hysteresis effect as a situational phenomenon involving the systematic production of agent-environment mismatches and argue for its placement as a central problem for the theory of action. Revealing the dynamic, embodied conservation of belief in the temporality of practice, (...) hysteresis appears when environmental contexts change in a way that leaves actors without an ontologically complicit relationship to institutions as scaffolds of action. Under these circumstances, a past-inflected reflexiveness replaces a forward-inflecting practical belief in the actor's temporal relation to the world. Drawing from a variety of historical case studies, we locate hysteresis in routine disjunctures between the temporality of practice and the temporality of environments. Our analysis reveals four distinct types of reflexiveness produced the hysteresis effect, each with a unique dispositional impact on actors and extensions to group-level phenomena. We conclude the article by emphasizing the non-eliminativist relationship between belief as disposition and belief as representation. (shrink)

This paper tries to say in what sense truth is a norm, a thesis that Donald Davidson, whose view are examined, denies. After skteching his conception of rationality, it is argued that truth is a norm in only the sense that we ought to believe what we believe is true, not that we all to believe everything which is true. This minimal norm of truth is isolated and defended.

This paper examines the status of delusive beliefs as beliefs. I argue that there is no reason not to call them beliefs, and suggest some strategies to cope with them.

I begin by contrasting two facets of belief: that belief is a response to a sufficiency of evidence and that belief plays a role in one’s representation of reality. I claim that these conceptions of belief are in tension because whilst the latter – Representationalism – requires Logical Coherence of belief the former – Thresholdism – conflicts with Logical Coherence. Thus we need to choose between conceptions. Many have argued that the Preface Paradox supports Thresholdism. In contrast I argue that (...) Representationalism has a more plausible response to the paradox. (shrink)

Plausibility models are Kripke models that agents use to reason about knowledge and belief, both of themselves and of each other. Such models are used to interpret the notions of conditional belief, degrees of belief, and safe belief. The logic of conditional belief contains that modality and also the knowledge modality, and similarly for the logic of degrees of belief and the logic of safe belief. With respect to these logics, plausibility models may contain too much information. A proper notion (...) of bisimulation is required that characterises them. We define that notion of bisimulation and prove the required characterisations: on the class of image-finite and preimage-finite models, two pointed Kripke models are modally equivalent in either of the three logics, if and only if they are bisimilar. As a result, the information content of such a model can be similarly expressed in the logic of conditional belief, or the logic of degrees of belief, or that of safe belief. This, we found a surprising result. Still, that does not mean that the logics are equally expressive: the logics of conditional and degrees of belief are incomparable, the logics of degrees of belief and safe belief are incomparable, while the logic of safe belief is more expressive than the logic of conditional belief. In view of the result on bisimulation characterisation, this is an equally surprising result. We hope our insights may contribute to the growing community of formal epistemology and on the relation between qualitative and quantitative modelling. (shrink)

One of the standard principles of rationality guiding traditional accounts of belief change is the principle of minimal change: a reasoner's belief corpus should be modified in a minimal fashion when assimilating new information. This rationality principle has stood belief change in good stead. However, it does not deal properly with all belief change scenarios. We introduce a novel account of belief change motivated by one of Grice's maxims of conversational implicature: the reasoner's belief corpus is modified in a minimal (...) fashion to assimilate exactly the new information. In this form of belief change, when the reasoner revises by new information p ∨ q their belief corpus is modified so that p∨q is believed but stronger propositions like p∧q are not, no matter what beliefs are in the reasoner's initial corpus. We term this conservative belief change since the revised belief corpus is a conservative extension of the original belief corpus given the new information. (shrink)

I review but don’t endorse Marcus’ arguments that impossible beliefs are impossible. I defend her claim that belief’s objects are, in some important sense, not the bearers of truth and falsity, discuss her dispositionalism about belief, and argue it’s a good fit with the idea that belief’s objects are Russellian states of affairs. Reviso, pero no suscribo, los argumentos de Marcus a favor de que las creencias imposibles son imposibles. Defiendo su tesis de que los objetos de las creencias no (...) son, en algún sentido importante, los soportes de la verdad y la falsedad; discuto su disposicionalismo acerca de las creencias y argumento que encaja bien con la idea de que los objetos de las creencias son estados de cosas russellianos. (shrink)

Ascriptions of belief and other doxastic propositional attitudes are commonly interpreted as quantifying over a set of possible worlds constituting doxastic alternatives for the belief experiencer. Katz has argued that belief predicates and other stative attitude predicates, along with stative predicates generally, lack a Davidsonian event argument and therefore do not report on any eventuality . Hacquard , in contrast, assumes that all attitude ascriptions describe an event corresponding to the mental state of the attitude experiencer. The present investigation suggests (...) that the strengths of doxastic predicates can be modeled by generalized quantifiers over the doxastic alternative set, permitting us to formulate and test predictions based on standard interactions of these quantifiers with negation when these ascriptions are negated. This provides a middle ground between Katz and Hacquard, whereby some belief ascriptions are interpreted as nothing more than a quantified condition over a doxastic alternative set, while others attribute a Davidsonian belief state to the experiencer. In the latter case, the condition involving quantification over doxastic alternatives is an essential content condition which serves to individuate the eventuality described by the belief report, and to identify it across possible worlds. (shrink)

Knowledge-based programs (KBPs) are a powerful notion for expressing action policies in which branching conditions refer to implicit knowledge and call for a deliberation task at execution time. However, branching conditions in KBPs cannot refer to possibly erroneous beliefs or to graded belief, such as “if my belief that φ holds is high then do some action α else perform some sensing action β”.

This book is an interdisciplinary study of the forms and uses of doubt in works by Homer, Sophocles, Aristophanes, Cicero, Machiavelli, Shakespeare and Montaigne. Based on close analysis of literary and philosophical texts by these important authors, Michelle Zerba argues that doubt is a defining experience in antiquity and the Renaissance, one that constantly challenges the limits of thought and representation. The wide-ranging discussion considers issues that run the gamut from tragic loss to comic bombast, from psychological collapse to skeptical (...) dexterity and from solitary reflection to political improvisation in civic contexts and puts Greek and Roman treatments of doubt into dialogue not only with sixteenth-century texts but with contemporary works as well. Using the past to engage questions of vital concern to our time, Zerba demonstrates that although doubt sometimes has destructive consequences, it can also be conducive to tolerance, discovery and conversation across sociopolitical boundaries. (shrink)

Explaining Attitudes offers an important challenge to the dominant conception of belief found in the work of such philosophers as Dretske and Fodor. According to this dominant view beliefs, if they exist at all, are constituted by states of the brain. Lynne Rudder Baker rejects this view and replaces it with a quite different approach - practical realism. Seen from the perspective of practical realism, any argument that interprets beliefs as either brain states or states of immaterial souls is a (...) 'non-starter'. Practical realism takes beliefs to be states of the whole persons, rather like states of health. What a person believes is determined by what a person would do, say and think in various circumstances. Thus beliefs and other attitudes are interwoven into an integrated, commonsensical conception of reality. (shrink)

Isaac Levi's new book is concerned with how one can justify changing one's beliefs. The discussion is deeply informed by the belief-doubt model advocated by C. S. Peirce and John Dewey, of which the book provides a substantial analysis. Professor Levi then addresses the conceptual framework of potential changes available to an inquirer. A structural approach to propositional attitudes is proposed, which rejects the conventional view that a propositional attitude involves a relation between an agent and either a linguistic entity (...) or some other intentional object such as a proposition or set of possible worlds. The last two chapters offer an account of change in states of full belief understood as changes in commitments rather than changes in performance; one chapter deals with adding new information to a belief state, the other with giving up information. The book builds upon topics discussed in some of Levi's earlier work. It will be of particular interest to discussion theorists, epistemologists, philosophers of science, computer scientists, and cognitive psychologists. (shrink)

In this original and incisive book, one of Britain's most eminent philosophers contends that those who analyse the concept of knowledge do not distinguish adequately between voluntary belief and involuntary acceptance. The distinction, elucidated by the author, turns out to be vital for understanding many important issues in epistemology, philosophy of mind, and cognitive science.

The Price of Doubt is an important contribution to the problem of scepticism. It offers a new standard for the appraisal of philosophical arguments. Nicholas Nathan confronts the sceptic. He questions the value of his argument and the knowledge it contains and provides a potential remedy to the frustrations of anti-sceptical epistemology.

What is the basis of belief in an era when globalization, multiculturalism and big business are the new religion? Slavoj Zizek, renowned philosopher and irrepressible cultural critic takes on all comers in this compelling and breathless new book. From 'cyberspace reason' to the paradox that is 'Western Buddhism', _On Belief_ gets behind the contours of the way we normally think about belief, in particular Judaism and Christianity. Holding up the so-called authenticity of religious belief to critical light, Zizek draws on (...) psychoanalysis, film and philosophy to reveal in startling fashion that nothing could be worse for believers than their beliefs turning out to be true. (shrink)

A great many philosophers suggest that we exercise epistemic agency – a kind of agency that is distinctly epistemic in character and which allows us directly to exercise agency over our beliefs. In this thesis I will question the intelligibility of this suggestion. In order to do so, I will consider and argue against the four common views that are supposed to locate and explain epistemic agency. The first view suggests that we exercise epistemic agency because believing itself is a (...) species of act or action, in the ordinary sense or in the rational sense. The second view suggests that we exercise epistemic agency because belief formation can be directly controlled, either voluntarily or evaluatively. The third view suggests that we exercise epistemic agency when we reflect upon and make judgments about what to believe. The fourth view suggests that we exercise epistemic agency because we are responsive to reasons. I will contend that these views either fail to intelligibly locate and explain epistemic agency or they do not offer the right explanation of it. This gives grounds to doubt the intelligibility of the very idea of epistemic agency. (shrink)