Abstract
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.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
Throughout this reply, I use the term “beliefs” (and its cognates) to refer to what I have elsewhere termed “attitudes of belief”—the beliefs that people attribute to each other in everyday life—as opposed to “cognitive states of belief”—the beliefs that some cognitive scientists posit as cogs in cognitive systems—since I have defended interpretivism about attitudes of belief but not cognitive states of belief (and, indeed, have argued (in Curry 2021b; see also 2018; 2023)) that one should be an interpretivist about attitudes of belief whether or not one takes cognitive states of belief to exist, and, if so, whatever one thinks about their metaphysics).
In this section, Poslajko also ascribes to me the view that “whether a given subject has a given belief in some cases is objectively [or “metaphysically”] indeterminate” (2022b, §5). But I have never committed to that view. Instead, I have argued (in Curry 2020, §§4 & 5; 2021b, §4) that even when belief is intersubjectively indeterminate, it is usually (perhaps always) objectively determinate. The objective facts-of-the-matter are simply fixed in relation to each relevant interpretive perspective: the parishioner objectively believes one thing in relation to the priest, and objectively believes a different thing in relation to the deacon.
Jackson and Pettit (1990) are the archetypical proponents of the theory critiqued in Curry (2021b, §3.3). For what it is worth, I have nowhere used the term “pure dispositionalism”; I have followed Jackson and Pettit in calling the relevant theory “pure functionalism” or “commonsense functionalism.” (It is also sometimes called “analytic functionalism” in the literature.) But it does not matter what we call it: as I argue in the main text, the view is (a) not Schwitzgebel’s preferred variety of dispositionalism and (b) untenable as a superficial theory of belief.
Ryle (1949), for his part, relied on the logic of commonsense belief talk to serve as the interpretive scheme that unveils which determinable dispositions are identical to which beliefs.
Schwitzgebel (2002) especially stresses the role of dispositional stereotypes in explaining how people with particular dispositional profiles can be understood as “in-between believing”—neither fully believing nor not believing. I’ve stressed the desideratum of explaining how people (and animals) with very different dispositions can fully—and not merely in-between—believe the same thing (Curry 2022; 2023).
Another candidate criterion is teleofunctional: patterns of dispositions might constitute beliefs insofar as they play the purposes that evolution or development have selected beliefs to play. I have discussed this possibility at length in Curry (2021b, §4), arguing that teleofunctionalists about belief should be interpretivists as well. For present purposes, it is worth adding that teleofunctionalism is at least as metaphysically extravagant (and mysterious, since it renders historical facts constitutive of present beliefs) as interpretivism—so a teleofunctional dispositionalism is not obviously more parsimonious than an interpretivist dispositionalism. And insofar as I am right that teleofunctional dispositionalists should be interpretivists too, it is strictly less parsimonious.
There are versions of dispositionalism articulated in the literature that (unlike Schwitzgebel’s) make no explicit appeal to folk psychology. For example, Ruth Barcan Marcus influentially argued that “x believes that S just in case under certain agent-centered circumstances including x's desires and needs as well as external circumstances, x is disposed to act as if S, that actual or non-actual state of affairs, obtains” (1990: 140). Marcus’s definition is a fine way of initially glossing the nature of belief, but it does not provide a precise criterion for individuating beliefs (or picking out the particular dispositions they comprise), much less for explaining how believers can have some of the dispositions associated with a particular belief but lack others. Marcus thus provides no way of dealing with puzzling cases of “in-between belief” (Schwitzgebel 2002), diverse “styles of belief” (Curry 2022), or intersubjective indeterminacy about what somebody believes (Curry 2020). As I note in Curry (2022, §3), deep theories like psychofunctionalism have ample resources for individuating beliefs, relating them to dispositions, and solving these puzzles. In contrast, so far as I know, interpretivism supplies the only principled means by which a dispositionalism can individuate beliefs (and specify the particular dispositions they comprise) without collapsing into a non-superficial theory of belief. And, as the articles already cited in this footnote explain, relativizing beliefs to folk psychological models solves (or dissolves) the puzzles about the individuation of belief that simple dispositionalisms like Marcus’s are otherwise wholly unequipped to handle.
This nutrition analogy (from Curry 2021b) is what prompted Poslajko (2022b, §4) to ask his first question answered above, concerning modal dependence. I trust that this retelling, taken in light of the preceding discussion of how interpretivism supplies dispositionalism with a principled way of individuating beliefs, makes it clear in what sense I take nutritiousness and belief to be analogous. (The analogy is imperfect, as all analogies are.)
I do not hereby mean to deny Daniel Dennett’s claim that beliefs are real patterns. Instead, I mean to emphasize, with Dennett, that while the real patterns of dispositions that constitute beliefs “are objective—they are there to be detected,” they nonetheless “are not out there entirely independent of us, since they are patterns composed partly of our own ‘subjective’ reactions to what is out there; they are the patterns made to order for our narcissistic concerns” (Dennett 1987, 39). Human cognitive systems give rise to countless—all real, although mostly utterly uninteresting—patterns of dispositions, some more intrinsically unified than others. Which of those patterns are unified in a new way—via their individuation as beliefs—depends on their relationship to folk psychological models. I’ve unpacked this point in Curry (2020, §2; 2021b, §3; 2022, §§3–4).
References
Curry, D. S. (2018). Beliefs as inner causes: the (lack of) evidence. Philosophical Psychology, 31(6), 850–877.
Curry, D. S. (2020). Interpretivism and norms. Philosophical Studies, 177(4), 905–930.
Curry, D. S. (2021a). Interpretivism without judgement-dependence. Philosophia, 49(2), 611–615.
Curry, D. S. (2021b). How beliefs are like colors. Synthese, 199(3–4), 7889–7918.
Curry, D. S. (2021c). g as bridge model. Philosophy of Science, 88(5), 1067–1078.
Curry, D. S. (2022). Belief in character studies. American Philosophical Quarterly, 59(1), 27–42.
Curry, D. S. (2023). Morgan’s Quaker gun and the species of belief. Philosophical Perspectives.
Dennett, D. C. (1987). The Intentional Stance. MIT.
Jackson, F., & Pettit, P. (1990). In defence of folk psychology. Philosophical Studies, 59, 31–54.
Marcus, R. B. (1990). Some revisionary proposals about belief and believing. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 50, 133–153.
Poslajko, K. (2020). Can deflationism save interpretivism? Philosophia, 48(2), 709–725.
Poslajko, K. (2021). How to think about the debate over the reality of beliefs. Review of Philosophy and Psychology, 13(1), 85–107.
Poslajko, K. (2022a). The Lycan-Stich argument and the plasticity of “belief.” Erkenntnis, 87(3), 1257–1273.
Poslajko, K. (2022b). Folk psychological models and the metaphysics of belief. A reply to Curry. Philosophia. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-022-00579-9
Ryle, G. (1949) The Concept of Mind. Chicago.
Schwitzgebel, E. (2002). A phenomenal, dispositional account of belief. Nous, 36(2), 249–275.
Schwitzgebel, E. (2013). A dispositional approach to the attitudes: thinking outside the belief box. In N. Nottelmann (Ed.), New essays on belief (pp. 75–99). Palgrave Macmillan.
Acknowledgements
Thanks to David Curry, Dan Dennett, Nabeel Hamid, Eric Mandelbaum, and an anonymous reviewer.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Ethics declarations
Conflict of Interest
The author declares that they have no conflict of interest.
Additional information
Publisher's Note
Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.
Rights and permissions
Springer Nature or its licensor (e.g. a society or other partner) holds exclusive rights to this article under a publishing agreement with the author(s) or other rightsholder(s); author self-archiving of the accepted manuscript version of this article is solely governed by the terms of such publishing agreement and applicable law.
About this article
Cite this article
Curry, D.S. Why Dispositionalism Needs Interpretivism: A Reply to Poslajko. Philosophia 51, 2139–2145 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-023-00663-8
Received:
Revised:
Accepted:
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-023-00663-8