Abstract
Double dissociations between perceivable colors and physical properties of colored objects have led many philosophers to endorse relationalist accounts of color. I argue that there are analogous double dissociations between attitudes of belief—the beliefs that people attribute to each other in everyday life—and intrinsic cognitive states of belief—the beliefs that some cognitive scientists posit as cogs in cognitive systems—pitched at every level of psychological explanation. These dissociations provide good reason to refrain from conflating attitudes of belief with intrinsic cognitive states of belief. I suggest that interpretivism provides an attractive account of the former (insofar as they are not conflated with the latter). Like colors, attitudes of belief evolved to be ecological signifiers, not cogs in cognitive systems.
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Notes
I use the term of art ‘attitudes’ broadly, following the tradition of Donald Davidson (1963) and Eric Schwitzgebel, to mean “a temporary or habitual posture of the mind” (Schwitzgebel, 2013: p. 76) that is attributed in folk psychological practices. I do not mean to imply by the use of the term ‘attitude’ that beliefs are attitudes towards propositions; I am more sympathetic with the claim that they are attitudes towards the world (Sommers, 2009).
I use the term ‘cognitive’, in ‘cognitive states’, similarly broadly, to mean ‘relating to cognition’, where cognition is assumed to be constituted by mental (or neural) states (or processes) that cognitive scientists describe in terms of how they contribute to the functioning of the organism who possesses them. Thus, cognitive states (theoretically) occur at neurophysiological, subpersonal, personal, and etiological levels of psychological explanation, since cognitive scientists describe mental/neural states/processes as contributing to the functioning of organisms at each of these levels of explanation.
Empirical research indicates that subjects’ expectations about illumination conditions—and attendant modulation of color constancy mechanisms—drive the differential perceived colors The Dress exhibits due to the ambiguous illuminance conditions presented by the backlighting in the image (Wallisch, 2017). In normal daylight viewing conditions, there is not much ambiguity in illuminance, so there is not much ambiguity in perceived color. Other researchers have offered (less convincing) explanations of the phenomenon in terms of differential macular pigment optical density (Rabin et al., 2016) or the top-down influence of knowledge of the color of the dress in normal illuminance conditions (Schlaffke et al., 2015).
My argument for and account of attitudes of belief—while usefully illustrated by analogy with the argument for relationalism about color—does not stand or fall with any particular metaphysics of color. Like all analogies, the analogy between belief and color is imperfect and incomplete. Most strikingly, organisms see colors. Following Shannon Spaulding (2015), I reject views according to which belief attributors literally perceive beliefs. In some ways, this point of disanalogy renders the metaphysics of attitudes of belief easier to pin down than the metaphysics of perceivable colors. Embracing belief attribution as a thoroughly cognitive (as opposed to perceptual) phenomenon enables us to ignore tricky questions about the cognitive penetration of perception. It also enables model-theoretic accounts of belief attribution (Curry, forthcoming b; Godfrey-Smith, 2005; Maibom, 2009; Spaulding, 2018), according to which interpreters construct and wield model psychological profiles of people in order to ascribe attitudes (and other traits) to those people. Model psychological profiles are more theoretically and empirically tractable than the amodal perceptual processes posited by theorists who countenance mindseeing. A related point of disanalogy stems from the impact that cultural forces have on models of belief. Culture may affect color perceptual learning (Connolly, 2019), but models of belief are much more culturally variable (Curry, 2020; Heyes & Frith, 2014; Lavelle, forthcoming). Likewise, belief attributors can construct models of new beliefs on the fly (Curry, forthcoming a), whereas color perceivers cannot learn to perceive new colors.
These dissociations have a cascading structure: although computationalism dodges the arguments against identity theory, and pure functionalism dodges the arguments against computationalism, the arguments against (paramechanical) pure functionalism also condemn (paramechanical) computationalism and the arguments against (paramechanical) computationalism also condemn (paramechanical) identity theory. Given this cascading structure, I will give more space to the later (more comprehensive) arguments.
Unlike Smart, U.T. Place (1956) developed his pioneering version of the identity theory about consciousness as a supplement to his staunchly anti-paramechanical Rylean view of belief.
‘Computational functionalisms’, as I use the term loosely, include machine state functionalism, most classic forms of psychofunctionalism, and many embodied/embedded/extended/enactive/etc. functionalisms that complicate the simplistic input-computation-output functional analysis but retain some commitment to mental states intervening between perception and action. Computational functionalism is, however, to be distinguished from pure functionalism and teleofunctionalism, which I discuss in §§3.3 and 4.
A thoroughgoing externalist might deny this difference in representational content (Burge, 2010; Fodor & Pylyshyn, 2016). I prefer externalisms which allow for internal factors that cause differences in content between mental representations with the same referent. Regardless, the claim that Mo, Delia, and Roger’s mental representations have different content is not required to dissociate attitudes of belief from computational states: as explained in the next sentence of the main text, differences in psychofunctional roles—or in what Fodor calls “the syntactic structure of modes of presentation” (1992: p. 54), if you go in for that kind of thing—do the trick.
Matthews (2007: p. 241) gives a very similar argument for the conclusion that attitudes must be personal (rather than subpersonal) phenomena, though (like Sterelny, as well as Jackson and Pettit, as discussed below) he goes in for a paramechanical view which conflates attitudes with personal functional states.
I provide more examples (and analysis) of diverse styles of belief elsewhere (Curry, forthcoming a).
Jones’s may be a deeply flawed way of thinking about people’s motivations. By stipulation, it is a predictively powerful interpretive strategy. (Jones predicts whether or not people will kill themselves with as much accuracy as Brown; he just does not use the attribution of belief that one ought to kill themselves in order to get to that prediction.) But perhaps it fails to capture what actually motivates people to act. However, whether Jones is a nonideal social cognizer is beside the point. Insofar as attitudes of belief are determined by folk models of belief—as Jackson and Pettit readily admit—they are determined by the nonideal, messy ways in which belief attributors actually model beliefs. Compare: humans may be deeply flawed color perceivers. We fail to represent whole chunks of the spectrum! But that humans are nonideal color perceivers is beside the point, when it comes to the metaphysics of perceivable colors. Perceivable colors are determined by the nonideal, messy visual spectrum, as it manifests itself in relation to particular nonideal color perceivers.
As previously noted in footnote 3, readers need not accept this relativism about perceivable colors in order to accept the analogous relativism about attitudes of belief. The analogy between belief and color is illuminating, but it does not do any argumentative work. Rather, the argument for relativism about belief formally mirrors the argument for relativism about color, but one argument may be sound and the other unsound due to divergent facts about the respective phenomena of interest. It may be that The Dress is really particular determinate shades of blue and black for all humans, even while attitudes of belief are fully intersubjectively indeterminate. Elsewhere (Curry, 2020), I have argued at length against the ways in which other interpretivists have relativized attitudes of belief to intersubjectively determinate normative standards (like color relationalists who relativize colors to species-standard perceivers and viewing conditions).
For Davidson, it follows from the irreducibly social nature of belief attribution that if Jones and Brown know the same set of facts about Ella, then they cannot rationally disagree about what Ella believes. For Baker, Ella believes whatever the common sense interpretation would have her believe. Similarly, for Mölder, what Ella believes depends on a canonical ascription, which is partly determined by how ordinary people attribute beliefs. Elsewhere (Curry 2020), I have argued against these views and for relativism about belief. My present point is that attitudes ought not be conflated with cognitive states if attitudes are determined relative to attributors’ models of belief, regardless of whether the veridicality conditions for belief attribution are set relativistically, objectively, or intersubjectively.
For attitude irrealists, this is because no lay belief attributions are veridical. For Dennettians, this is because there is no objective fact of the matter. For Davidsonians, this is because what fixes the veridical attribution is a constitutive norm of interpretation—the principle of charity. For Bakerites, this is because what fixes the veridical attribution is what passes for common sense in a linguistic community, and, similarly, for Mölderians it is because what fixes the veridical attribution is how ordinary ascribers interpret people.
Elsewhere (Curry, forthcoming b), I have argued that dispositionalists are ipso facto interpretivists, so I will henceforth restrict my discussion to interpretivism.
Attitudes of belief do, of course, contribute indirectly to cognitive operations. The bolt of self-knowledge that accompanies self-attributing the belief that one’s job sucks might lead one to quit.
Millikan adds: “(though, in the case of beliefs, not directly according to function)” (1993: p. 173). This is because “being a little more precise, it is the belief-forming mechanisms that produce the adaptations, the adjustments, of the organism to the environment, the beliefs. Beliefs themselves are functionally classified, are “individuated,” not directly by function but according to the special conditions corresponding to them that must be met in the world if it is to be possible for them to contribute to proper functioning of the larger system in a historically normal way” (189). For Millikan, belief-forming mechanisms and belief-consuming mechanisms are selected for teleofunctions, whereas beliefs are individuated on the basis of their ability—read: systemic capacity function (Cummins, 1975)—to aid in the proper functioning of these cognitive mechanisms. This nuance of Millikan’s teleofunctionalism does not impugn my analysis. For one thing, the idea of attitude-of-belief-forming- and attitude-of-belief-consuming-mechanisms is dubious precisely because we ought not conflate attitudes of belief with cognitive states of belief. Moreover, if my arguments are good, then insofar as it does make sense to speak of attitude-of-belief-forming-mechanisms, these mechanisms must be taken to include the social mindshaping forces detailed below. And insofar as it makes sense to speak of attitude-of-belief-consuming mechanisms, these mechanisms must be taken to include the belief attribution practices detailed below. Thus, if my arguments are good, then a follower of Millikan should take the mechanisms that form and consume cognitive states to have distinct proper functions from the mechanisms that form and consume attitudes.
Fodor (1992) has influentially argued that teleofunctionalism faces a different kind of indeterminacy worry, which he terms ‘the disjunction problem’: there is no way of saying whether a frog’s belief is there is a fly, or there is a bug, or there is a small black object. Sterelny (1990a, b: pp. 125–127) provides an externalistic response to the disjunction problem, and Neander (2017) addresses it with reference to empirical findings about toad fly-detection capacities.
My general reservations concerning etiological teleofunctionalism are articulated by Paul Sheldon Davies (2001, 2009), and my specific reservations concerning etiological teleofunctionalism about the individuation of belief are articulated by Sober (1985) and Sterelny (1990a, b: pp. 128–137). Note that, due to these reservations, the central argument of this section is conditional in form. If one is a teleofunctionalist, then they ought to be an interpretivist about attitudes of belief too. If one is not a teleofunctionalist, then the arguments of the previous sections ought to have already convinced them of interpretivism about attitudes of belief. This section should, nevertheless, be of interest to all readers, insofar as exploring the evolutionary history and present functions of everyday belief attribution adds plausibility and detail to my ecological interpretivism (regardless of whether one buys teleofunctionalism as a principle for individuating beliefs).
Many theorists countenance these four capacities as (at least nigh) uniquely human. There is, however, no consensus about which of these capacities emerged first in the history of human evolution. Many psychologists and philosophers take mindreading to have led to the other abilities, but Zawidzki argues that mindshaping is “our sociocognitive linchpin” (2013: p. 1). Sterelny (2012) and Heyes (2018) rally against the idea of any single magic bullet.
Although he stresses that the point of sophisticated mindreading is not to identify cognitive states (2013: p. 237), Zawidzki nevertheless fails to question the paramechanical assumption that attitudes of belief do happen to be “concrete, unobservable causes of behavior” (2013: p. 11). This leads him to endorse a Dennettian interpretivism about the targets of unsophisticated mindreading while retaining certain paramechanistic assumptions about the attitudes of belief attributed in sophisticated mindreading.
It might be objected that attitudes of belief function to give attributors a grip on the cognitive functioning of believers. Attitudes of belief can function, in part, to give attributors a loose, indirect grip on the cognitive functioning of believers. But I reject the implication that attitudes of belief can therefore unproblematically be conflated with cognitive states of belief. After all, perceivable colors can function, in part, to give perceivers a grip on how objects reflect light. (Seeing that my mug is blue gives me a loose, indirect grip on the fact that it reflects more light at the lower end of the visual spectrum.) Nevertheless, perceivable colors cannot be unproblematically conflated with SSRs.
Dretske makes a distinction between behavior and bodily movement and argues that beliefs cause behavior whereas the brain states they weakly supervene on cause bodily movement. Depending on how it goes, an argument for the weak supervenience of attitudes of belief on cognitive states of belief might entail that whereas cognitive states of belief cause behavior, attitudes of belief render that behavior suitable for folk explanation, prediction, regulation, and evaluation.
Lee and Dewhurst (2021) offer an illuminating discussion of the relationship between interpretivism (spelled out in terms of Dennett’s ‘intentional stance’) and various perspectivisms about mechanistic explanation.
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Acknowledgements
This article had a long adolescence. I first developed the analogy between belief and color in a term paper for a 2013 graduate seminar on Evolution and Perception led by Gary Hatfield. That term paper became the seed for my doctoral dissertation on the metaphysics of belief, which I defended in 2018 under Hatfield’s supervision. Despite the fact that its earliest ancestor was the first piece of the dissertation to fall into place, the present article is the last direct descendent of the dissertation that I expect to appear in print as a standalone article. Along the way, it has been reworked and sharpened through feedback from audiences at the University of Pennsylvania, Kenyon College, The College of Wooster, Utica College, West Virginia University, and the 2014 Meeting of the Society for Philosophy and Psychology in Vancouver, and especially through conversations with Kristin Andrews, Ben Baker, Marie Barnett, Justin Bernstein, Ned Block, Brett Calcott, Liz Camp, David Cerbone, David Chalmers, Jonathan Cohen, Amelia Curry, David Curry, Louise Daoust, Dan Dennett, Karen Detlefsen, Zoltan Domotor, Alkistis Elliott-Graves, Steve Esser, Marth Farah, Lindsey Fiorelli, Daniel Fryer, Geoff Georgi, Kurt Gerry, Peter Godfrey-Smith, Nabeel Hamid, Gary Hatfield, David Hoinski, Brian Huss, Karen Kovaka, Susan Sauvé Meyer, Lisa Miracchi, Thomas Noah, Emily Parke, Hal Parker, Jay Peters, Charles Phillips, Pierce Randall, Brian Reese, Sharon Ryan, Carlos Santana, Dan Singer, Jordan Taylor, Garret Thomson, Michael Weisberg, and Rob Willison. Many thanks to all of the aforementioned, to those I've failed to mention, and to several anonymous reviewers, including reviewers for Synthese who provided particularly generous comments.
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Curry, D.S. How beliefs are like colors. Synthese 199, 7889–7918 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-021-03144-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-021-03144-1