Abstract
The paper defends the view that there is a constitutive relation between believing something and believing that one believes it. This view is supported by the incoherence of affirming something while denying that one believes it, and by the role awareness of the contents one’s belief system plays in the rational regulation of that system. Not all standing beliefs are accompanied by higher-order beliefs that self-ascribe them; those that are so accompanied are ones that are “available” in the sense that their subjects are poised to assent to their contents, to use them as premises in reasoning, and to be guided by them in their behavior. The account is compatible with the possibility of negative self-deception—mistakenly believing that one does not believe something—but the closest thing to positive self-deception it allows is believing falsely that a belief with a certain content is one’s dominant belief on a certain matter through failure to realize that one has a stronger belief that contradicts it. The view has implications about Moore’s paradox that contradict widely held views. On this view self-ascriptions of beliefs can be warranted and grounded on reasons—but the reasons are not phenomenally conscious mental states (as held by Christopher Peacocke) but rather available beliefs.
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Notes
Byrne (forthcoming).
As was forcefully urged by members of the audience when I read this paper at Brown University.
The conclusion that it is in one’s interest to act on the assumption that p is drawn from the proposition that it is in anyone’s interest to do so, this because it is in anyone’s interest to act on assumptions that are true when in relevant circumstances. So if p is the proposition that it is raining here, in Ithaca, NY, and that proposition is true, it is in the interest of Vladimir Putin to act on the assumption that it is raining in Ithaca if he is in relevant circumstances (as, of course, he is not, and is unlikely ever to be). But in the sense in which it is true of me that I ought to act on the assumption that p, given that I believe it, this is not true of Putin. Given that I believe that p, I ought to act on the assumption that p even if in fact p is false, and obviously this is not true of Putin, who does not believe it. And because he does not believe it, we cannot conclude about him, as we can about me, that I believe that I ought to act on the assumption that p. But of course the proposition that I, the person giving the zany argument, believes that p does not figure as a premise in the argument—if it did, the argument would be question-begging. The role played by the fact that I believe that p consists simply in the fact that I use p as a premise; and once that premise is seen to lead to the conclusion that I ought to act on the assumption that p I will, if rational, believe that consequence of what I believe.
What are arguably coextensive are the propositions “I believe that p” and “I ought to be guided by acceptance of p”; the sentences “NN believes that p” and “NN ought to be guided by acceptance of p,” where “NN” has the same reference in both, can differ in truth value.
McGinn (1982), p. 20.
Moran (2001), pp. 109–113.
See Shoemaker (2003), p. 399.
Perhaps an exception should be made for beliefs that are “tacit.” Nico Silins points out that if I can be counted as believing that I did not eat an airplane for breakfast, never having thought of the matter, perhaps in the same sense I can be counted as believing that I believe things I have never thought about.
See Block (1995). I say “something like” because Block apparently holds that in actual cases (as contrasted with fictional cases such as that of “superblindsight”) what is access conscious is always phenomenally conscious, whereas beliefs that are available in my sense are frequently not phenomenally conscious. I first used “available” in this sense in my 1994.
Moran (2001), p. 85.
The transparency will not be complete. As Nico Silins pointed out to me, if the answer to the question whether p is true is “maybe,” the answer to the question whether one believes that p will normally not be that.
Very different versions of this view are proposed in Heal (1994) and my 1994—in Heal it is presented as part of an anti-functionalist view, while in my paper it is part of a functionalist view.
Peacocke (1998), p. 90.
Wittgenstein (1958), p. 192.
See Peacocke (1998).
Martin (1998).
Peacocke (1998), p. 90.
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Acknowledgments
Earlier versions of this paper were presented at the University of Toronto, at conferences in Dubrovnik, Croatia, and Duisburg, Germany, at Brown University, and at Girona, Spain. Thanks to the audiences on these occasions, and to Nico Silins and an anonymous referee, for helpful comments.
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Shoemaker, S. Self-Intimation and Second Order Belief. Erkenn 71, 35–51 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10670-009-9172-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10670-009-9172-z