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Summary What distinguishes belief from other states of mind? There are, on the one hand, other information-bearing states of mind, such as perceptual experience or sub-personal cognitive states, that seem to fall short of belief. On the other hand, there are other types of propositional attitudes, notably desire, intention, fear and conjecture, that need to be distinguished from belief. Is the ability to have beliefs essentially connected with rationality, having some other propositional attitudes, the ability to act and the possession of language?
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  1. Knowledge: A Human Interest Story.Brian Weatherson - manuscript
    Over the years I’ve written many papers defending an idiosyncratic version of interest-relative epistemology. This book collects and updates the views I’ve expressed over those papers. -/- Interest-relative epistemologies all start in roughly the same way. A big part of what makes knowledge important is that it rationalises action. But for almost anything we purportedly know, there is some action that it wouldn’t rationalise. I know what I had for breakfast, but I wouldn’t take a bet at billion to one (...)
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  2. Wittgenstein and Contemporary Belief-Credence Dualism.Guy Axtell - forthcoming - In Wittgenstein and the Epistemology of Religion. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.
    This paper examines religious epistemics in relationship to recent defenses of belief-credence dualism among analytic Christian philosophers, connecting what is most plausible and appealing in this proposal to Wittgenstein’s thought on the nature of religious praxis and affectively-engaged language-use. How close or far is Wittgenstein’s thought about faith to the analytic Christian philosophers’ thesis that “beliefs and credences are two epistemic tools used for different purposes”? While I find B-C dualism appealing for multiple reasons, the paper goes on to raise (...)
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  3. Implicit Attitudes Are (Probably) Beliefs.Joseph Bendana - forthcoming - In Dirk Kindermann, Andrea Onofri & Cristina Borgoni (eds.), The Fragmented Mind. Oxford, UK: pp. 1-377.
    Implicit biases help maintain disparities between social groups. Arguably, in order to understand how to combat the effects of implicit biases we need to know what kind of mental states the implicit attitudes that undergird them are. Moreover, whether or not you care about combatting the effects, we need to understand what implicit attitudes are to begin understanding human cognitive architecture. Accordingly, one question that a lot of recent research in philosophy and psychology has focused on is: how belief-like are (...)
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  4. The Fragmentation of Belief.Joseph Bendana & Eric Mandelbaum - forthcoming - In Cristina Borgoni, Dirk Kindermann & Andrea Onofri (eds.), The Fragmented Mind. Oxford, UK:
    Belief storage is often modeled as having the structure of a single, unified web. This model of belief storage is attractive and widely assumed because it appears to provide an explanation of the flexibility of cognition and the complicated dynamics of belief revision. However, when one scrutinizes human cognition, one finds strong evidence against a unified web of belief and for a fragmented model of belief storage. Using the best available evidence from cognitive science, we develop this fragmented model into (...)
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  5. Are Credences Different From Beliefs?Roger Clarke & Julia Staffel - forthcoming - In Blake Roeber, Matthias Steup, John Turri & Ernest Sosa (eds.), Contemporary Debates in Epistemology, 3rd edition. Wiley Blackwell.
    This is a three-part exchange on the relationship between belief and credence. It begins with an opening essay by Roger Clarke that argues for the claim that the notion of credence generalizes the notion of belief. Julia Staffel argues in her reply that we need to distinguish between mental states and models representing them, and that this helps us explain what it could mean that belief is a special case of credence. Roger Clarke's final essay reflects on the compatibility of (...)
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  6. Attitudes as Positions.Daniel Drucker - forthcoming - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy.
    In these comments on David Hunter's insightful new book On Believing, I consider Hunter's account of believing that p as being in a position to act in light of the fact (or apparent fact) that p. After investigating how this kind of view is supposed to work, I raise a challenge for it: the account is unlikely to generalize to other attitudes like hoping and fearing that p. I then argue that this really is an objection to the account of (...)
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  7. Resistant Beliefs, Responsive Believers.Carolina Flores - forthcoming - Journal of Philosophy.
    Beliefs can be resistant to evidence. Nonetheless, the orthodox view in epistemology analyzes beliefs as evidence-responsive attitudes. I address this tension by deploying analytical tools on capacities and masking to show that the cognitive science of evidence-resistance supports rather than undermines the orthodox view. In doing so, I argue for the claim that belief requires the capacity for evidence-responsiveness. More precisely, if a subject believes that p, then they have the capacity to rationally respond to evidence bearing on p. Because (...)
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  8. Why think that belief is evidence-responsive?Carolina Flores - forthcoming - In Eric Schwitzgebel & Jonathan Jong (eds.), What is Belief? Oxford University Press.
    The orthodox view in epistemology is that belief is constitutively evidence-responsive. I offer a novel argument for a version of this view, one that appeals to capacities to rationally respond to evidence. I do so by developing the Sellarsian idea that the concept of belief functions to mark the space of reasons in a non-intellectualist and naturalistic direction. The resulting view does justice to the role of belief in social interactions, joint deliberation, and rational persuasion, while including evidence-resistant beliefs and (...)
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  9. Credal sensitivism: threshold vs. credence-one.Jie Gao - forthcoming - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy.
    According to an increasingly popular view in epistemology and philosophy of mind, beliefs are sensitive to contextual factors such as practical factors and salient error possibilities. A prominent version of this view, called credal sensitivism, holds that the context-sensitivity of belief is due to the context-sensitivity of degrees of belief or credence. Credal sensitivism comes in two variants: while credence-one sensitivism (COS) holds that maximal confidence (credence one) is necessary for belief, threshold credal sensitivism (TCS) holds that belief consists in (...)
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  10. Rational Agency and the Struggle to Believe What Your Reasons Dictate.Brie Gertler - forthcoming - In Cristina Borgoni, Dirk Kindermann & Andrea Onofri (eds.), The Fragmented Mind. Oxford University Press.
    According to an influential view that I call agentialism, our capacity to believe and intend directly on the basis of reasons—our rational agency—has a normative significance that distinguishes it from other kinds of agency (Bilgrami 2006, Boyle 2011, Burge 1996, Korsgaard 1996, Moran 2001). Agentialists maintain that insofar as we exercise rational agency, we bear a special kind of responsibility for our beliefs and intentions; and it is only those attitudes that represent the exercise of rational agency that are truly (...)
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  11. Unreal Beliefs: An Anti-Realist Approach in the Metaphysics of Mind.Poslajko Krzysztof - forthcoming - London: Bloomsbury Publishing.
    The main idea behind this book is that beliefs are, in an interesting philosophical sense, unreal. There are three main aims of the book. The first is to provide a novel characterization of the debate about the reality of beliefs that focuses not on the question of whether beliefs exist, but rather on the question of whether they can be treated as natural properties. The second aim is to propose and justify a novel version of anti-realism, called “minimal non-realism”. It (...)
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  12. Neuroexistentialism, Eudaimonics, and Positive Illusions.Timothy Lane & Owen Flanagan - forthcoming - In Byron Kaldis (ed.), Mind and Society: Cognitive Science Meets the Philosophy of the Social Sciences. SYNTHESE Philosophy Library Studies in Epistemology, Logic, Methodology, & Philosophy of Science. Springer Science+Business.
    There is a distinctive form of existential anxiety, neuroexistential anxiety, which derives from the way in which contemporary neuroscience provides copious amounts of evidence to underscore the Darwinian message—we are animals, nothing more. One response to this 21st century existentialism is to promote Eudaimonics, a version of ethical naturalism that is committed to promoting fruitful interaction between ethical inquiry and science, most notably psychology and neuroscience. We argue that philosophical reflection on human nature and social life reveals that while working (...)
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  13. Belief and Settledness.Wooram Lee - forthcoming - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy.
    This paper elucidates the sense in which belief is a question-settling attitude. In her recent work, Jane Friedman suggests that we understand the settledness of belief in terms of a normative principle about belief and inquiry: one ought not inquire into a question and believe the answer to the question at the same time. On the basis of the distinction between dispositional and occurrent belief, I argue against Friedman that there is no principle linking belief and inquiry that is both (...)
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  14. Desire, Disagreement, and Corporate Mental States.Olof Leffler - forthcoming - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy.
    I argue against group agent realism, or the view that groups have irreducible mental states. If group agents have irreducible mental states, as realists assume, then the best group agent realist explanation of corporate agents features only basic mental states with at most one motivational function each. But the best group agent realist explanation of corporate agents does not feature only basic mental states with at most one motivational function each. So corporate agents lack irreducible mental states. How so? I (...)
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  15. The Science of Belief: A Progress Report (Expanded Reprint).Eric Mandelbaum & Nicolas Porot - forthcoming - In Joseph Summer Julien Musolino (ed.), The Science of Beliefs: A Multidisciplinary Approach. Cambridge University Press. Cambridge, UK:
    Expanded reprint of the WIREs Science of Belief paper for Julien Musolino, Joseph Sommer, and Pernille Hemmer's The Science of Beliefs: A Multidisciplinary Approach. Cambridge University Press.
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  16. How the Cognitive Science of Belief Can Transform the Study of Mental Health.Eric Mandelbaum & Nicolas Porot - forthcoming - JAMA Psychiatry.
    The cognitive science of belief is a burgeoning field, with insights ranging from detailing the fundamental structure of the mind, to explaining the spread of fake news. Here we highlight how new insights into belief acquisition, storage, and change can transform our understanding of psychiatric disorders. Although we focus on monothematic delusions, the conclusions apply more broadly. -/- .
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  17. Precis of Belief, Inference, and The Self-Conscious Mind.Eric Marcus - forthcoming - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research.
  18. Replies to Leite, Shaw, and Campbell.Eric Marcus - forthcoming - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research.
  19. 'Belief' and Belief.Eric Marcus - forthcoming - European Journal of Philosophy.
    Our interest in understanding belief stems partly from our being creatures who think. However, the term ‘belief’ is used to refer to many states: from the fully conscious rational state that partly constitutes knowledge to the fanciful states of alarm clocks. Which of the many ‘belief’ states must a theory of belief be answerable to? This is the scope question. I begin my answer with a reply to a recent argument that belief is invariably weak, i.e., that the evidential standards (...)
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  20. Desire as Belief: A Study of Desire, Motivation, and Rationality, by Alex Gregory. [REVIEW]Michael Milona - forthcoming - Mind:1-8.
    A traditional Humean view about motivation says that only desires motivate action. This theory meshes with the familiar ‘directions of fit’ metaphor: while beli.
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  21. Cults, Conspiracies, and Fantasies of Knowledge.Daniel Munro - forthcoming - Episteme:1-22.
    There’s a certain pleasure in fantasizing about possessing knowledge, especially possessing secret knowledge to which outsiders don’t have access. Such fantasies are typically a source of innocent entertainment. However, under the right conditions, fantasies of knowledge can become epistemically dangerous, because they can generate illusions of genuine knowledge. I argue that this phenomenon helps to explain why some people join and eventually adopt the beliefs of epistemic communities who endorse seemingly bizarre, outlandish claims, such as extreme cults and online conspiracy (...)
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  22. A Puzzle About Weak Belief.Joshua Edward Pearson - forthcoming - Analysis.
    I present an intractable puzzle for the currently popular view that belief is weak—the view that expressions like ‘S believes p’ ascribe to S a doxastic attitude towards p that is rationally compatible with low credence that p. The puzzle concerns issues that arise on considering beliefs in conditionals. I show that proponents of weak belief either cannot consistently apply their preferred methodology when accommodating beliefs in conditionals, or they must deny that beliefs in conditionals can be used in reasoning.
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  23. The science of belief: A progress report.Nicolas Porot & Eric Mandelbaum - forthcoming - WIREs Cognitive Science 1.
    The empirical study of belief is emerging at a rapid clip, uniting work from all corners of cognitive science. Reliance on belief in understanding and predicting behavior is widespread. Examples can be found, inter alia, in the placebo, attribution theory, theory of mind, and comparative psychological literatures. Research on belief also provides evidence for robust generalizations, including about how we fix, store, and change our beliefs. Evidence supports the existence of a Spinozan system of belief fixation: one that is automatic (...)
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  24. A Puzzle about Belief-about.Alex Rausch - forthcoming - Mind.
    I present a puzzle for the standard, propositional semantic account of belief reports by considering novel inferences which it incorrectly predicts to be invalid under assumptions that are plausible by its advocates’ own lights. In response, I propose a conservative departure from the standard view on which certain ‘that’-clauses designate novel devices of semantic type that I call open propositions. After outlining some desiderata for a theory of open propositions, I provide some reasons for advocates of the standard view to (...)
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  25. Sleeping Beauty: Awakenings, Chance, Secrets, and Video.Nathan Salmón - forthcoming - In Alessandro Capone, Roberto Graci & Pietro Perconti (eds.), New Frontiers in Pragmalinguistic Studies. Springer Nature.
    A new philosophical analysis is provided of the notorious Sleeping Beauty Problem. It is argued that the correct solution is one-third, but not in the way previous philosophers have typically meant this. A modified version of the Problem demonstrates that neither self-locating information nor amnesia is relevant to the core Problem, which is simply to evaluate the conditional chance of heads given an undated Monday-or-Tuesday awakening. Previous commentators have failed to appreciate the significance of the information that Beauty gains upon (...)
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  26. 2010: Belief.Eric Schwitzgebel - forthcoming - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
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  27. Belief as Commitment to the Truth.Keshav Singh - forthcoming - In Eric Schwitzgebel & Jonathan Jong (eds.), The Nature of Belief. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
    In this essay, I develop an account of belief as commitment to the truth of a proposition. On my account, to believe p is to represent p as true by way of committing to the truth of p. To commit to the truth of p, in the sense I am interested in, is to exercise the normative power to subject one’s representation of p as true to the normative standard of truth. As I argue, my account of belief as commitment (...)
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  28. Belief as a Feeling of Conviction.Declan Smithies - forthcoming - In Eric Schwitzgebel & Jonathan Jong (eds.), The Nature of Belief. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
    This chapter defends the thesis that feeling conviction is sufficient for belief: if you feel conviction that p, then you believe that p. I begin with a neutral characterization of belief in terms of its normative profile: belief is a state that is subject to certain distinctive norms of rationality. The main argument of the chapter is that feelings of conviction are beliefs because they are subject to the same norms of rationality that govern our beliefs. Functionalists often deny that (...)
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  29. The Story of the Ghost in the Machine.Adam Toon - forthcoming - In Sonia Sedivy (ed.), Art, Representation and Make-Believe: Essays on the Philosophy of Kendall L. Walton. New York, NY, USA:
  30. De Se Thought and Communication: An Introduction.Stephan Torre - forthcoming - In Manuel Garcia-Carpintero & Stephan Torre (eds.), About Oneself: De Se Thought and Communication. Oxford University Press. pp. 1-21.
    This chapter provides a critical overview of various influential accounts of de se attitudes including those proposed by Frege, Lewis and Perry. It also addresses the charge that there is nothing distinctive about de se attitudes. The second half outlines a widely accepted and influential model of communication and various complications that arise in applying this model to the communication of de se thoughts. The final section provides an overview of the papers in this volume.
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  31. The Trinity and the Light Switch: Two Faces of Belief.Neil Van Leeuwen - forthcoming - In Eric Schwitzgebel & Jonathan Jong (eds.), The Nature of Belief. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
    Sometimes people posit "beliefs" to explain mundane instrumental actions (e.g., Neil believes the switch is connected to the light, so he flipped the switch to illuminate the room). Sometimes people posit "beliefs" to explain group affiliation or identity (e.g., in order to belong to the Christian Reformed Church Neil must believe that God is triune). If we set aside the commonality of the word "belief," we can pose a crucial question: Is the cognitive attitude typically involved in the first "light (...)
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  32. Morgan’s Quaker gun and the species of belief.Devin Sanchez Curry - 2023 - Philosophical Perspectives 37 (1):119-144.
    In this article, I explore how researchers’ metaphysical commitments can be conducive—or unconducive—to progress in animal cognition research. The methodological dictum known as Morgan’s Canon exhorts comparative psychologists to countenance the least mentalistic fair interpretation of animal actions. This exhortation has frequently been misread as a blanket condemnation of mentalistic interpretations of animal behaviors that could be interpreted behavioristically. But Morgan meant to demand only that researchers refrain from accepting default interpretations of (apparent) actions until other fair interpretations have been (...)
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  33. Why dispositionalism needs interpretivism: a reply to Poslajko.Devin Sanchez Curry - 2023 - Philosophia 51 (4):2139-2145.
    I have proposed wedding the theories of belief known as dispositionalism and interpretivism. Krzysztof Poslajko objects that dispositionalism does just fine on its own and, moreover, is better off without interpretivism’s metaphysical baggage. I argue that Poslajko is wrong: in order to secure a principled criterion for individuating beliefs, dispositionalism must either collapse into psychofunctionalism (or some other non-superficial theory) or accept interpretivism’s hand in marriage.
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  34. Radical Misinterpretation.Edward Elliott - 2023 - Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 104 (3):646-684.
    This paper provides an exposition and defence of Lewis' theory of radical interpretation. The first part explains what Lewis' theory was; the second part explains what it wasn't, and in so doing addresses a number of common objections that arise as a result of widespread myths and misunderstandings about how Lewis' theory is supposed to work.
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  35. Fragmented and conflicted: folk beliefs about vision.Paul E. Engelhardt, Keith Allen & Eugen Fischer - 2023 - Synthese 201 (3):1-33.
    Many philosophical debates take for granted that there is such a thing as ‘the’ common-sense conception of the phenomenon of interest. Debates about the nature of perception tend to take for granted that there is a single, coherent common-sense conception of vision, consistent with Direct Realism. This conception is often accorded an epistemic default status. We draw on philosophical and psychological literature on naïve theories and belief fragmentation to motivate the hypothesis that untutored common sense encompasses conflicting Direct Realist and (...)
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  36. Inquiring Minds Want to Improve.Arianna Falbo - 2023 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 101 (2).
    Much of the recent work on epistemology of inquiry defends two related theses. First, inquiry into a question rationally prohibits believing an answer to that question. Second, knowledge is the aim of inquiry. I develop a series of cases which indicate that inquiry is not as narrow as these views suggest. These cases can be accommodated if we take a broader approach and understand inquiry as aiming at epistemic improvement, described more generally. This approach captures a wider range of inquiring (...)
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  37. Critical ordinary language philosophy: A new project in experimental philosophy.Eugen Fischer - 2023 - Synthese 201 (3):1-34.
    Several important philosophical problems (including the problems of perception, free will, and scepticism) arise from antinomies that are developed through philosophical paradoxes. The critical strand of ordinary language philosophy (OLP), as practiced by J.L. Austin, provides an approach to such ‘antinomic problems’ that proceeds from an examination of ‘ordinary language’ (how people ordinarily talk about the phenomenon of interest) and ‘common sense’ (what they commonly think about it), and deploys findings to show that the problems at issue are artefacts of (...)
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  38. The Pragmatic Hypothesis Testing Theory of Self-Deception and the Belief/Acceptance Distinction.Kevin Lynch - 2023 - Philosophy 98 (1):29-53.
    According to the pragmatic hypothesis testing theory, how much evidence we require before we believe something varies depending on the expected costs of falsely believing and disbelieving it. This theory has been used in the self-deception debate to explain our tendencies towards self-deceptive belief formation. This article argues that the application of this theory in the self-deception debate has overlooked the distinction between belief and acceptance, and that the theory in all likelihood models acceptance rather than belief, in which case (...)
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  39. Success Semantics, Reinforcing Satisfaction, and Sensory Inclinations.Howard Nye & Meysam Shojaeenejad - 2023 - Dialogue:1-12.
    Success semantics holds, roughly, that what it is for a state of an agent to be a belief that P is for it to be disposed to combine with her desires to cause behaviour that would fulfill those desires if P. J. T. Whyte supplements this with an account of the contents of an agent's “basic desires” to provide an attractive naturalistic theory of mental content. We argue that Whyte's strategy can avoid the objections raised against it by restricting “basic (...)
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  40. Reasoning Simplifying Attitudes.Michele Palmira - 2023 - Episteme 20 (3):722-735.
    Several philosophers maintain that outright belief exists because it plays a reasoning simplifying role (Holton 2008; Ross and Schroeder 2014; Staffel 2019; Weisberg 2020). This claim has been recently contested, on the grounds that credences also can simplify reasoning (Dinges 2021). This paper takes a step back and asks: what features of an attitude explain its alleged ability to simplify reasoning? The paper contrasts two explanations, one in terms of dispositions and the other in terms of representation, arguing in favour (...)
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  41. Blind Rule-Following and the Regress of Motivations.Zachary Mitchell Swindlehurst - 2023 - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 66 (6):1170-1183.
    Normativists about belief hold that belief formation is essentially rule- or norm-guided. On this view, certain norms are constitutive of or essential to belief in such a way that no mental state not guided by those norms counts as a belief, properly construed. In recent influential work, Kathrin Glüer and Åsa Wikforss develop novel arguments against normativism. According to their regress of motivations argument, not all belief formation can be rule- or norm-guided, on pain of a vicious infinite regress. I (...)
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  42. Religion as Make-Believe: a theory of belief, imagination, and group identity.Neil Van Leeuwen - 2023 - Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
    We often assume that religious beliefs are no different in kind from ordinary factual beliefs—that believing in the existence of God or of supernatural entities that hear our prayers is akin to believing that May comes before June. Neil Van Leeuwen shows that, in fact, these two forms of belief are strikingly different. Our brains do not process religious beliefs like they do beliefs concerning mundane reality; instead, empirical findings show that religious beliefs function like the imaginings that guide make-believe (...)
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  43. The Puzzle of Belief.Neil Van Leeuwen & Tania Lombrozo - 2023 - Cognitive Science 47 (2):e13245.
    The notion of belief appears frequently in cognitive science. Yet it has resisted definition of the sort that could clarify inquiry. How then might a cognitive science of belief proceed? Here we propose a form of pluralism about believing. According to this view, there are importantly different ways to "believe" an idea. These distinct psychological kinds occur within a multi-dimensional property space, with different property clusters within that space constituting distinct varieties of believing. We propose that discovering such property clusters (...)
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  44. On Believing: Being Right in a World of Possibilities. [REVIEW]Simon Wimmer - 2023 - Philosophical Quarterly 73 (3):926-928.
    David Hunter starts his book with Anscombe's remark that the difficulty of accommodating belief's psychological and logical aspects makes it the most difficult.
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  45. Ways to Knowledge-First Believe.Simon Wimmer - 2023 - Erkenntnis 88 (3):1189-1205.
    On a widely suggested knowledge-first account of belief, to believe p is to phi as if one knew p. I challenge this view by arguing against various regimentations of it. I conclude by generalizing my argument to alternative knowledge-first views suggested by Williamson and Wimmer.
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  46. The Limits of Partial Doxasticism.Facundo M. Alonso - 2022 - Philosophical Quarterly 72 (2):326-345.
    Doxasticism is the thesis that intention is or involves belief in the forthcoming action (Velleman, Harman). Supporters claim that it is only by accepting that thesis that we can explain a wide array of important phenomena, including the special knowledge we have of intentional action, the roles intention plays in facilitating coordination, and the norms of rationality for intention. Others argue that the thesis is subject to counterexample (Davidson, Bratman). Yet some others contend that the thesis can be reformulated in (...)
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  47. The Importance of Forgetting.Rima Basu - 2022 - Episteme 19 (4):471-490.
    Morality bears on what we should forget. Some aspects of our identity are meant to be forgotten and there is a distinctive harm that accompanies the permanence of some content about us, content that prompts a duty to forget. To make the case that forgetting is an integral part of our moral duties to others, the paper proceeds as follows. In §1, I make the case that forgetting is morally evaluable and I survey three kinds of forgetting: no-trace forgetting, archival (...)
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  48. I Hear You Feel Confident.Adam Michael Bricker - 2022 - Philosophical Quarterly 73 (1):24-43.
    Here I explore a new line of evidence for belief–credence dualism, the thesis that beliefs and credences are distinct and equally fundamental types of mental states. Despite considerable recent disagreement over this thesis, little attention has been paid in philosophy to differences in how our mindreading systems represent the beliefs and credences of others. Fascinatingly, the systems we rely on to accurately and efficiently track others’ mental states appear to function like belief–credence dualists: Credence is tracked like an emotional state, (...)
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  49. Mental fact and mental fiction.Tim Crane & Katalin Farkas - 2022 - In Tamas Demeter, Ted Parent & Adam Toon (eds.), Mental fictionalism. London, UK: pp. 303-319.
    It is common to distinguish between conscious mental episodes and standing mental states — those mental features like beliefs, desires or intentions, which a subject can have even if she is not conscious, or when her consciousness is occupied with something else. This paper presents a view of standing mental states according to which these states are less real than episodes of consciousness. It starts from the usual view that states like beliefs and desires are not directly present to the (...)
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  50. The Limits of the Doxastic.Tim Crane & Katalin Farkas - 2022 - In Oxford Studies in Philosophy of Mind 2. Oxford: Oxford University Press. pp. 36-57.
    It is usual to distinguish between two kinds of doxastic attitude: standing or dispositional states, which govern our actions and persist throughout changes in consciousness; and conscious episodes of acknowledging the truth of a proposition. What is the relationship between these two kinds of attitude? Normally, the conscious episodes are in harmony with the underlying dispositions, but sometimes they come apart and we act in a way that is contrary to our explicit conscious judgements. Philosophers have often tried to explain (...)
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