Online research in philosophy

This book provides a formal ontology of senses and the belief-relation that grounds the distinction between de dicto, de re, and de se beliefs as well as the opacity of belief reports. According to this ontology, the relata of the belief-relation are an agent and a special sort of object-dependent sense (a "thought-content"), the latter being an "abstract" property encoding various syntactic and semantic constraints on sentences of a language of thought. One bears the belief-relation to a thought-content T just in case one (is disposed as one who) inwardly affirms a certain sentence S of one’s language of thought that satisfies what T encodes, which in turn requires that S’s non-logical parts stand in appropriate semantical relations to items specified by T. Since these items may include other senses as well as ordinary objects, beliefs of arbitrary complexity are automatically accommodated. Within the framework of the formal ontology, a context-dependent compositional semantics is then provided for a fragment of regimented English capable of formulating ascriptions of belief—a semantics that treats substitutional opacity as a genuine semantic datum. Finally, the resulting picture of belief and its attribution is defended by showing how it solves standard puzzles, avoids objections to rival accounts, and satisfies certain adequacy conditions not fulfilled by traditional theories. Along the way, clarification and defense is offered for the ingredient conception of object-dependent senses, and it is shown how adoption of the language of thought hypothesis permits Bertrand Russell’s obscure doctrine of logical forms to be understood in a way that not only vindicates his Multiple Relation theory of de re belief but also reveals the connection between these logical forms and thought-contents.

Possible worlds semantics has been very useful in modeling not only the intensionality of necessity and possibility, future and past. It has also found its place in modeling the intentionality of propositional attitudes like belief and knowledge. There is something fruitful in analyzing a belief as a set of possible worlds. The belief is the set of possible worlds in which the belief is true. The belief is true if and only if the actual world is in the corresponding set of propositions. The possible worlds in the set corresponding to the belief represent how the agent per- ceives the world to be. If the belief is false, then the world isn’t how the agent sees the world to be, and so the actual world isn’t in the set of worlds corresponding to the belief (see Lewis [4] and Stalnaker [9]). The same can be said of whole belief states just as much as it can be said of individual beliefs. My belief state is the set of worlds consistent with what I believe. This view has been very fruitful, not least because the set-theoretic structure of sets of possible worlds corresponds nicely with the logical structure of entailment relations among propositions and the behavior of propositional connectives like conjunction, disjunction, and negation. However, the story does not deal well with inconsistent belief. Inconsistent beliefs are true in no possible worlds, so they are each modeled by the same set of worlds—the empty set. My beliefs are often inconsistent, and so are those of many..

An agent can usually hold a very large number of beliefs. However, only a small part of these beliefs is used at a time. Efficient operations for belief change should affect the beliefs of the agent locally, that is, the changes should be performed only in the relevant part of the belief state. In this paper we define a local consequence operator that only considers the relevant part of a belief base. This operator is used to define local versions of the operations for belief change. Representation theorems are given for the local operators.

An attempt is made to pinpoint the way in which perception is related to belief. Although, for familiar reasons, it is not true to say that we necessarily believe in the existence of the objects we perceive, nor that they actually have their ostensible characteristics, it is argued that the relation between perception and belief is more than merely contingent There are two main issues to address. The first is that `collateral' beliefs may impede perceptual belief. It is argued that this still assigns an essential role to belief in perception, though the belief may be of an attenuated form. The second is Fred Dretske's claim that even attenuated belief may be entirely absent from perception. It is argued that (a) `non-epistemic' perception can be understood only by employing the concept of `epistemic' perception; (b) that the former can occur only partially-i.e., within perceptions that are otherwise epistemic; and (c) that by switching attention from the perception of objects to the Phenomenological tradition's concern with the perception of world, we can see that perception must be entirely permeated with `doxastic' force.

Abstract Stephen P. Stich rejects the de dicto?de re belief state and ascription distinction. He proposes an analysis by which belief sentences imply univocal doxastic predicates expressing functionally similar states of belief subjects and counterfactual third person belief ascribers, concluding that the apparent opacity of de dicto belief sentences is better explained by the unsystematic contextually?sensitive similarity vaguenesses of belief ascriptions. But Stick's reduction appeals to contexts of background beliefs which themselves unavoidably exhibit ramified de dicto?de re ambiguity. The distinction is presupposed rather than eliminated by Stick's method, which effectively blocks the extensional reduction of belief state opacity.

When I talk about the objects of belief I do not mean, e.g., the sun to which my thought that the sun will rise tomorrow refers; I do not mean the objects we think about. I take objects rather in a general philosophical sense; they simply are the bearers of properties and the relata of relations. I am thus concerned with the objects that are related by the belief relation „_a_ believes that _p_“. In this scheme „ _a _“ represents a person or an epistemic subject; but I am not going to discuss what a person is. „ _p _“ or „that _p _“ represents an object, namely the object of belief; and I am going to discuss what this is. In other words, I am interested in belief contents – to use a less neutral, narrower and equally unclear term.

A first-order logic of belief with identity is proposed, primarily to give an account of possible de re contradictory beliefs, which sometimes occur as consequences of de dicto non-contradictory beliefs. A model has two separate, though interconnected domains: the domain of objects and the domain of appearances. The satisfaction of atomic formulas is defined by a particular S-accessibility relation between worlds. Identity is non-classical, and is conceived as an equivalence relation having the classical identity relation as a subset. A tableau system with labels, signs, and suffixes is defined, extending the basic language $\mathscr{L}_{\mathbf{QB}}$ by quasiformulas (to express the denotations of predicates). The proposed logical system is paraconsistent since $\phi \wedge \neg\phi$ does not ``explode'' with arbitrary syntactic consequences.

This paper articulates a formal theory of belief incorporating three key theses: (1) belief is a dyadic relation between an agent and a property; (2) this property is not the belief's truth condition (i.e., the intuitively self-ascribed property which the agent must exemplify for the belief to be true) but is instead a certain abstract property (a thought-content) which contains a way of thinking of that truth condition; (3) for an agent a to have a belief about such-and-such items it is necessary that a possesses a language of thought, M a , and that a (is disposed as one who) inwardly affirms a sentence of M a in which there are terms that denote those objects.Employing an extended version of E. Zalta's system ILAO, the proffered theory locates thought-contents within a typed hierarchy of senses and their modes of presentation, the provisional definitions of which (suppressing complications added later to accommodate the contents of beliefs about beliefs) are as follows. A mode of presentation of e is a ternary relation of the sort [xyz z is a name in M y that denotes x, and D e yz] in which D e is an e-determiner – a relation between agents and their mental expressions imposing a syntactico-semantic condition sufficient for such an expression to denote e therein. A sense of an entity e is an abstract property that contains a mode of presentation R e of e by dint of encoding its property-reduct [x(y)(z)R e xyz]. In particular, a thought-content is a sense T of an ordinary first-order property P containing a mode of presentation whose P-determiner D P is such that, for any y and z, D P yz entails that z is a -abstract [ v S] of M y in which S is a sentence whose non-logical parts stand in appropriate semantic relations to the constituents of T's (some of which may themselves be senses).

Eaker argues that there is no genuine ambiguity to be found between de re and de dicto readings or interpretations of belief sentences. She considers two ways characterizing the distinction: 1. Psychological characterization (a) De re belief sentences attribute de re belief to subjects (b) De dicto belief sentences attribute de dicto belief to subjects 2. Truth-conditional characterization (a) The preservation of subjects’ “ways of thinking” of objects is not required for the truth of de re belief sentences (b) The preservation of subjects’ “ways of thinking” of objects is required for the truth of de dicto belief sentences And she suggests either way, the distinction is usually taken to be encoded in linguistic theory by means of the notion of scope: 3. Scope encoding (a) In de re belief sentences, expressions referring to objects of belief have wide scope (b) In de dicto belief sentences, expressions referring to objects of belief have narrow scope Eaker criticizes both characterizations of the ambiguity, as well as the claim that it can be understood as a scope ambiguity. First, Eaker’s presents the following argument against the psychological characterization: (i) even if the distinction between de re and de dicto belief can be drawn, this distinction does not map on to the putative distinction between de re and de dicto belief sentences: de re belief sentences can be used to report de dicto beliefs, e.g.

Belief and its benefits -- Belief, reason, goodness -- Belief and the unknown -- Obstacles to belief -- Belief and meaning -- Learning to believe -- Believing and living.