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Why implicit attitudes are (probably) not beliefs

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Abstract

Should we understand implicit attitudes on the model of belief? I argue that implicit attitudes are (probably) members of a different psychological kind altogether, because they seem to be insensitive to the logical form of an agent’s thoughts and perceptions. A state is sensitive to logical form only if it is sensitive to the logical constituents of the content of other states (e.g., operators like negation and conditional). I explain sensitivity to logical form and argue that it is a necessary condition for belief. I appeal to two areas of research that seem to show that implicit attitudes fail spectacularly to satisfy this condition—although persistent gaps in the empirical literature leave matters inconclusive. I sketch an alternative account, according to which implicit attitudes are sensitive merely to spatiotemporal relations in thought and perception, i.e., the spatial and temporal orders in which people think, see, or hear things.

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Notes

  1. This case is based on Rydell et al. (2006), which measured the influence of subliminal conditioning on a timed association task (the Implicit Association Test) but not on more ecologically valid behaviors (e.g., Kawakami et al. 2007a, b).

  2. Sommers (2009) writes, “To believe is to take something to be so and so... animal and human belief is mainly... propositionless” (pp. 269, 270).

  3. This “descriptive” approach differs from the “normative” understanding of logical form, as the idealized structure of sentences or thoughts. Here logical form refers to properties of concrete entities, not idealized abstractions.

  4. Thanks to two referees for noting these possibilities. See Brownstein (2015), Huebner (forthcoming), Gendler (2008a, b), Leslie (forthcoming) for various ways implicit attitudes might be structured.

  5. What role does the agent play in such psychological transitions? Which sensitivities and abilities must an agent, or a cognitive system, have for these transitions to take place? I remain neutral about these questions, which require a separate treatment. My focus is on the properties of certain states within the cognitive system.

  6. Critics of “wide-scope” interpretations of rationality point to asymmetries between ways of resolving inconsistency (e.g., Kolodny 2005). If Madeleine intends to drink a beer and believes beer is in the fridge, it seems better, rationally speaking, to resolve the situation by going to the fridge to get the beer than by abandoning her belief that there is beer in the fridge. But both responses reflect form-sensitivity.

  7. In (4) and (4*), Madeleine is a little better off than a broken clock, perhaps more like the frog who endlessly laps its tongue at things that look like flies and never learns any better (Fodor 1990; Gendler 2008b).

  8. Satisfaction of this condition might require that the agent be equally familiar with the two distinct formulations, but it is not clear how much prior familiarity is necessary. A lot of bad, all-too-easily intelligible poetry rearranges words in this sort of way. Garbled as his syntax may be, Master Yoda’s sage advice is easy to understand (“Strong is Vader. Mind what you have learned. Save you it can!”).

  9. See my (Madva, forthcoming) for further discussion of cognitive accessibility and the mechanisms underlying implementation intentions, from which this summary borrows.

  10. Thanks to an anonymous referee for emphasizing this point.

  11. Thanks to Katie Gasdaglis for this suggestion.

  12. See also Horcajo et al.’s (2010) findings that persuasive arguments influenced implicit attitudes toward vegetables and brands. See Levy (2014a, b) and de Houwer (2011, 2014) for surveys of other bbc-relevant studies.

  13. Gawronski and Bodenhausen (2011, Sect. 2.1.2) summarize several potential pathways of indirect influence, but do not discuss the strategy I highlight below.

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Acknowledgments

This essay was revised during my Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship at the University of California, Berkeley, and subsequently with institutional support from Vassar College. For insightful comments on earlier drafts or lively debates about the ideas in this paper, I am indebted to Alejandro Arango, Charles Michael Brent, Michael Brownstein, Taylor Carman, Guillermo del Pinal, Andrew Franklin-Hall, Katie Gasdaglis, Bertram Gawronski, Tamar Szabó Gendler, Lydia Goehr, Brian Kim, Patricia Kitcher, Felix Koch, Chloe Layman, Eric Mandelbaum, Christia Mercer, Nate Meyvis, John Morrison, Matthew Moss, Marco Nathan, Andreja Novakovic, Christiana Olfert, Katherine Rickus, David Rosenthal, Michael Seifried, Beau Shaw, Susanna Siegel, Virginia Valian, Anubav Vasudevan, Sebastian Watzl, and several anonymous referees. Thanks also to audiences at Columbia University and the Eastern Division meeting of the American Philosophical Association in Atlanta, December 2012.

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    Alex Madva

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Madva, A. Why implicit attitudes are (probably) not beliefs. Synthese 193, 2659–2684 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-015-0874-2

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