BELIEF AS A DISPOSITION TO ACT VARIATIONS ON A PRAGMATIST THEME (original) (raw)
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Exploring the idea of a more practical relationship between the agent and his own mental life leaves room for reconsidering the relevance of the familiar analogy between reasons for belief and reasons for action. Even if their difference is usually admitted, they are also treated as equivalent, in the sense that the connection between reasons to believe and the arising belief would be analogous to the connection between reasons for action and the arising action. If such an analogy might be relevant to a certain extent in the frame of a theoretical stance towards oneself, I'll argue that it cannot be maintained once we have put the agent at the heart of self-knowledge.
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This paper provides a new theory of belief. Belief is judgment hypostasized. Its essential feature is its privileged relationship to judgment about what is so, which no other mental state has. The state of belief serves to mark what the believer judges, has judged, or would, in certain relevant circumstances, judge to be true. The new view neatly explains some of the state's distinctive epistemic features, a virtue that its closest cousin, the dispositionalist view of belief, struggles to duplicate in a principled way. It accords with intuitions about who believes what and when. It properly distinguishes belief from 'near-belief' phenomena, like mere preintentional 'stances' (Searle 1983), traditionally difficult for similar views to distinguish from beliefs, and 'aliefs', automatic attitude-like states that involve belief-like dispositions (Gendler 2008a & b). It also provides a straightforward, satisfying answer to Kripke's "puzzle about belief" (1979) that makes sense of contradictory beliefs more generally.
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This paper claims that the standard characterization of the motivational role of belief should be supplemented. Beliefs do not only, jointly with desires, cause and rationalize actions that will satisfy the desires, if the beliefs are true; beliefs are also the practical ground of other cognitive attitudes, like imagining, which means beliefs determine whether and when one acts with those other attitudes as the cognitive inputs into choices and practical reasoning. In addition to arguing for this thesis, I take issue with Velleman's argument that belief and imagining cannot be distinguished on the basis of motivational role.