‘Exclusivity’ is the claim that when deliberating about whether to believe that p one can only be consciously motivated to reach one's conclusion by considerations one takes to pertain to the truth of p. The pragmatist tradition has long offered inspiration to those who doubt this claim. Recently, a neo-pragmatist movement, Keith Frankish (), and Conor McHugh ()) has given rise to a serious challenge to exclusivity. In this article, I defend exclusivity in the face of this challenge. First, I (...) dispute a crucial assumption underlying the challenge, namely, that one can have evidence sufficient to enable but not compel belief. Secondly, I examine several cases that McHugh in particular offers to call exclusivity into question and argue on independent grounds that these cases do not threaten exclusivity. Whether or not exclusivity holds, in addition to being of intrinsic interest, has a decisive consequence for the contemporary debate over Bernard Williams’ () claim that “beliefs aim at truth”. If exclusivity is true, as David Owens () has argued, the deliberator cannot be said to literally aim at truth. So, in defending exclusivity, I thereby show that the notion of ‘aiming’ fails to illuminate the nature of belief. (shrink)

The philosophical difficulties presented by self-deception are vexed and multifaceted. One such difficulty is what I call the ‘doxastic problem’ of self-deception. Solving the doxastic problem involves determining whether someone in a state of self-deception that ∼p both believes that p and believes that ∼p, simply holds one or the other belief, or, as I will argue, holds neither. This final option, which has been almost entirely overlooked to-date, is what I call ‘ nondoxasticism ’ about self-deception. In this article, (...) I present a negative case for nondoxasticism according to which, in the paradigm case of self-deception, there is no explanatory need to attribute the self-deceived person either their undesired belief that p, or their desired belief that ∼p. Folk psychology is replete with concepts other than belief, and if we bear this in mind, it becomes clear that the explanatory roles for which the self-deceived person's purported beliefs have traditionally been enlisted can be comfortably filled without recourse to belief. (shrink)

According to what I call the ‘Vagueness Thesis’ about belief, ‘believes’ is a vague predicate. On this view, our concept of belief admits of borderline cases: one can ‘half-believe’ something or be ‘in-between believing’ it. In this article, I argue that VT is false and present an alternative picture of belief. I begin by considering a case—held up as a central example of vague belief—in which someone sincerely claims something to be true and yet behaves in a variety of other (...) ways as if she believes that it is not. I argue that, even from the third-person perspective prioritised by proponents of VT, the case does not motivate VT. I present an alternative understanding of the case according to which the person in question believes as they say they do yet also has a belief-discordant implicit attitude otherwise. Moreover, I argue that, independently of the interpretation of any particular case, VT fails to accommodate the first-person perspective on belief. Belief is not only an item of one’s psychology that helps explain one’s behaviour; it is what one takes to be true. This fact about belief manifests itself in the nature of deliberation concerning whether to believe something and that of introspection regarding whether one believes something. Attending to these phenomena reveals that VT is not merely unmotivated, but untenable. (shrink)

What is salience? This collection addresses this neglected question by considering the role of salience in a wide variety of areas. All 13 chapters are specially commissioned, and written by an international team of contributors.