About this topic
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. (1 other version)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. Frege Cases and Rationalizing Explanations.Mahrad Almotahari & Aidan Gray - forthcoming - Noûs.
    Russellians, Relationists, and Fregeans disagree about the nature of propositional-attitude content. We articulate a framework to characterize and evaluate this disagreement. The framework involves two claims: i) that we should individuate attitude content in whatever way fits best with the explanations that characteristically appeal to it, and ii) that we can understand those explanations by analogy with other ‘higher-level’ explanations. Using the framework, we argue for an under-appreciated form of Russellianism. Along the way we demonstrate that being more explicit about (...)
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  3. Wittgenstein and Contemporary Belief-Credence Dualism.Guy Axtell - forthcoming - In Pritchard Duncan & Venturinha Nuno (eds.), Wittgenstein and the Epistemology of Religion. 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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  4. Unsettled Belief.Bob Beddor - forthcoming - The Philosophical Quarterly.
    According to many philosophers, belief is a settling state. On this view, someone who believes p is disposed to take p for granted in practical and theoretical reasoning. This paper presents a simple objection to this settling conception of belief: it conflicts with our ordinary patterns of belief ascription. I show that ascriptions of unsettled beliefs are commonplace, and that they pose problems for all of the most promising ways of developing the settling conception. I proceed to explore the implications (...)
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  5. A Minimalist Threshold for Epistemically Irrational Beliefs.Marianna Bergamaschi Ganapini - forthcoming - In Eric Schwitzgebel & Jonathan Jong (eds.), What is Belief? Oxford University Press.
    This paper aims to shed light on the nature of belief and provide support to the view that I call ‘Minimalism’. It shows that Minimalism is better equipped than the traditional approach to separating belief from imagination and addressing cases of belief’s evidence- resistance. The key claim of the paper is that no matter how epistemically irrational humans’ beliefs are, they always retain a minimal level of rationality.
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  6. 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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  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. 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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  9. A new paradox of belief.Benoit Gaultier - forthcoming - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy.
    In this paper I raise a paradox of belief inspired by Kripke’s ‘paradox of knowledge', which states that knowledge seems to make permissible an intuitively unacceptable form of dogmatism. This paradox of belief is based on an intuitively correct principle of doxastic coherence. My aim is to show that this paradox contributes to elucidating the puzzling nature of belief.
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  10. 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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  11. 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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  12. 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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  13. 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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  14. (1 other version)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.
    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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  15. '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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  16. 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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  17. (1 other version)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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  18. 2010: Belief.Eric Schwitzgebel - forthcoming - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
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  19. Belief as Commitment to the Truth.Keshav Singh - forthcoming - In Eric Schwitzgebel & Jonathan Jong (eds.), The Nature of Belief. 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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  20. Belief as a Feeling of Conviction.Declan Smithies - forthcoming - In Eric Schwitzgebel & Jonathan Jong (eds.), The Nature of Belief. 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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  21. How to Dissolve the Moral Problem.Jussi Suikkanen - forthcoming - Belgrade Philosophical Annual.
    According to The Moral Problem, there is so much metaethical disagreement because it is difficult to explain both the objectivity and the practicality of moral judgments in the framework provided by the Humean picture of human psychology. Smith himself hoped to solve this problem by analysing the content of our moral judgments in terms of what our fully rational versions would want us to do. This paper first explains why this solution to the moral problem remains problematic and why we (...)
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  22. 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 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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  23. The Oxford Handbook of the Cognitive Science of Belief.Neil Van Leeuwen & Tania Lombrozo (eds.) - forthcoming - Oxford University Press: Oxford.
  24. Judgment's Aimless Heart.Matthew Vermaire - forthcoming - Noûs.
    It's often thought that when we reason to new judgments in inference, we aim at believing the truth, and that this aim of ours can explain important psychological and normative features of belief. I reject this picture: the structure of aimed activity shows that inference is not guided by a truth‐aim. This finding clears the way for a positive understanding of how epistemic goods feature in our doxastic lives. We can indeed make sense of many of our inquisitive and deliberative (...)
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  25. Doxastic Voluntarism.Mark Boespflug & Elizabeth Jackson - 2024 - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
    Doxastic voluntarism is the thesis that our beliefs are subject to voluntary control. While there’s some controversy as to what “voluntary control” amounts to (see 1.2), it’s often understood as direct control: the ability to bring about a state of affairs “just like that,” without having to do anything else. Most of us have direct control over, for instance, bringing to mind an image of a pine tree. Can one, in like fashion, voluntarily bring it about that one believes a (...)
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  26. Are Credences Different From Beliefs?Roger Clarke & Julia Staffel - 2024 - In Blake Roeber, Ernest Sosa, Matthias Steup & John Turri (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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  27. Attitudes as positions.Daniel Drucker - 2024 - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 67 (8):2463-2475.
    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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  28. Reasons and belief.Daniel Fogal - 2024 - Philosophical Issues 34 (1):323-348.
    Much recent work in epistemology has concerned the relationship between the epistemic and the practical, with a particular focus on the question of how, if at all, practical considerations affect what we ought to believe. Two main positive accounts have been proposed: reasons pragmatism and pragmatic encroachment. According to reasons pragmatism, practical (including moral) considerations can affect what we ought to believe by constituting distinctively practical (i.e., non‐epistemic) reasons for or against belief. According to pragmatic encroachment, practical considerations bear on (...)
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  29. Belief revision in psychotherapy.J. P. Grodniewicz - 2024 - Synthese 203 (4):1-22.
    According to the cognitive model of psychopathology, maladaptive beliefs about oneself, others, and the world are the main factors contributing to the development and persistence of various forms of mental suffering. Therefore, the key therapeutic process of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT)—a therapeutic approach rooted in the cognitive model—is cognitive restructuring, i.e., a process of revision of such maladaptive beliefs. In this paper, I examine the philosophical assumptions underlying CBT and offer theoretical reasons to think that the effectiveness of belief revision (...)
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  30. Unreal beliefs: an anti-realist approach in the metaphysics of mind.Poslajko Krzysztof - 2024 - London: Bloomsbury Academic.
    Krzysztof Poslajko offers a novel version of an anti-realist view about beliefs, rejecting the extreme proposal of eliminativism that claims beliefs do not exist. He argues we should rather say that beliefs exist, but they are not real. By arguing for the antirealist view as a revision of our common-sense view about the nature of mind, Poslajko makes the case for adopting a pragmatic metaphilosophy when we deal with philosophical questions about belief.
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  31. Replies to Leite, Shaw, and Campbell.Eric Marcus - 2024 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 108 (3):858-868.
    Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, EarlyView.
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  32. Precis of belief, inference, and the self‐conscious mind.Eric Marcus - 2024 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 108 (3):833-837.
  33. Desire as Belief: A Study of Desire, Motivation, and Rationality, by Alex Gregory. [REVIEW]Michael Milona - 2024 - Mind 133:891-899.
    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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  34. The virtue of ignorance: How epistemic agency needs cognitive limitations.Benjamin T. Rancourt - 2024 - Southern Journal of Philosophy 62.
    The thesis defended in this article is that epistemology should treat some of our cognitive limitations not as unfortunate defects or external perturbations to be idealized away in theories of epistemic agency, but as necessary underpinnings of good reasoning. We begin with a problem regarding deliberation that calls epistemic agency into question: our reasons in support of belief are never conclusive and never rule out all doubt. Yet we must rule out all doubt to close deliberation; we must close deliberation (...)
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  35. (1 other version)Sleeping Beauty: Awakenings, Chance, Secrets, and Video.Nathan Salmón - 2024 - In Alessandro Capone, Roberto Graci & Pietro Perconti (eds.), New Frontiers in Pragmalinguistic Studies: Theoretical, Social, and Cognitive Approaches. Springer.
    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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  36. (1 other version)Sleeping Beauty: Awakenings, Chance, Secrets, and Video.Nathan Salmón - 2024 - In Alessandro Capone, Pietro Perconti & Roberto Graci (eds.), Philosophy, Cognition and Pragmatics. Springer Nature Switzerland. pp. 53-65.
    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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  37. Group identity and the willful subversion of rationality: A reply to De Cruz and Levy.Neil Van Leeuwen - 2024 - Mind and Language 39 (4):590-596.
    De Cruz and Levy, in their commentaries on Religion as make‐believe, present distinct questions that can be addressed by clarifying one core idea. De Cruz asks whether one can rationally assess the mental state of religious credence that I theorize. Levy asks why we should not explain the data on religious “belief” merely by positing factual beliefs with religious contents, which happen to be rationally acquired through testimony. To both, I say that having religious credences is p‐irrational: a purposeful departure (...)
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  38. 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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  39. 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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  40. 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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  41. 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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  42. 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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  43. 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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  44. 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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  45. Cults, Conspiracies, and Fantasies of Knowledge.Daniel Munro - 2023 - Episteme (3).
    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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  46. 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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  47. 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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  48. How to judge intentionally.Antonia Peacocke - 2023 - Philosophical Perspectives 37 (1):330-339.
    Contrary to popular philosophical belief, judgment can indeed be an intentional action. That's because an intentional judgment, even one with content p, need not be intentional as a judgment that p. It can instead be intentional just as a judgment wh- for some specific wh- question—e.g. a judgment of which x is F or a judgment whether p. This paper explains how this is possible by laying out a means by which you can perform such an intentional action. This model (...)
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  49. 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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  50. 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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