With his Humean thesis on belief, Leitgeb seeks to say how beliefs and credences ought to interact with one another. To argue for this thesis, he enumerates the roles beliefs must play and the properties they must have if they are to play them, together with norms that beliefs and credences intuitively must satisfy. He then argues that beliefs can play these roles and satisfy these norms if, and only if, they are related to credences in the way set (...) out in the Humean thesis. I begin by raising questions about the roles that Leitgeb takes beliefs to play and the properties he thinks they must have if they are to play them successfully. After that, I question the assumption that, if there are categorical doxastic states at all, then there is just one kind of them—to wit, beliefs—such that the states of that kind must play all of these roles and conform to all of these norms. Instead, I will suggest, if there are categorical doxastic states, there may be many different kinds of such state such that, for each kind, the states of that type play some of the roles Leitgeb takes belief to play and each of which satisfies some of the norms he lists. As I will argue, the usual reasons for positing categorical doxastic states alongside credences all tell equally in favour of accepting a plurality of kinds of them. This is the thesis I dub pluralism about belief states. (shrink)

The first thesis is that beliefs play a role in explaining behavior. This is reasonably uncontroversial, though it has been controverted. Why did I raise my arm? Because I wanted to emphasize a point, and believed that I could do so by raising my arm. The belief that I could emphasize a point by raising my arm is central to the most natural explanation of my action.

What we believe depends on more than the purely intrinsic facts about us: facts about our environment or context also help determine the contents of our beliefs. 1 This observation has led several writers to hope that beliefs can be divided, as it were, into two components: a "core" that depends only on the individual?s intrinsic properties; and a periphery that depends on the individual?s context, including his or her history, environment, and linguistic community. Thus Jaegwon Kim suggests that "within (...) each noninternal psychological state that enters into the explanation of some action or behavior we can locate an ?internal core state? which can assume the causal-explanatory role of the noninternal state."2 In the same vein, Stephen Stich writes that "nonautonomous" states, like belief, are best viewed as "conceptually complex hybrids" made up of an autonomous component together with historical and contextual features.3 John Perry, whose term I have adopted, distinguishes between belief states, which are determined by an individual?s intrinsic properties, and objects of belief, which are not.4 And Daniel Dennett makes use of the same notion when he asks:5. (shrink)

We introduce a new operator – belief fusion– which aggregates the beliefs of two agents, each informed by a subset of sources ranked by reliability. In the process we definepedigreed belief states, which enrich standard belief states with the source of each piece of information. We note that the fusion operator satisfies the invariants of idempotence, associativity, and commutativity. As a result, it can be iterated without difficulty. We also define belief diffusion; whereas fusion generally produces (...) a belief state with more information than is possessed by either of its two arguments, diffusion produces a state with less information. Fusion and diffusion are symmetric operators, and together define a distributive lattice. Finally, we show that AGM revision can be viewed as fusion between a novice and an expert. (shrink)

In our approach credibility of information plays an importantrole in modeling of both belief state and belief change [4]. It turns out thatthe credibility-based consequence operators used to define the notion of beliefstate tolerate inconsistency under some conditions.

We introduce a new operator – belief fusion– which aggregates the beliefs of two agents, each informed by a subset of sources ranked by reliability. In the process we definepedigreed belief states, which enrich standard belief states with the source of each piece of information. We note that the fusion operator satisfies the invariants of idempotence, associativity, and commutativity. As a result, it can be iterated without difficulty. We also define belief diffusion; whereas fusion generally produces (...) a belief state with more information than is possessed by either of its two arguments, diffusion produces a state with less information. Fusion and diffusion are symmetric operators, and together define a distributive lattice. Finally, we show that AGM revision can be viewed as fusion between a novice and an expert. (shrink)

In recent years, various computational models have been developed for studying the dynamics of belief formation in a population of epistemically interacting agents that try to determine the numerical value of a given parameter. Whereas in those models, agents’ belief states consist of single numerical beliefs, the present paper describes a model that equips agents with richer belief states containing many beliefs that, moreover, are logically interconnected. Correspondingly, the truth the agents are after is a theory (a (...) set of sentences of a given language) rather than a numerical value. The agents epistemically interact with each other and also receive evidence in varying degrees of informativeness about the truth. We use computer simulations to study how fast and accurately such populations as wholes are able to approach the truth under differing combinations of settings of the key parameters of the model, such as the degree of informativeness of the evidence and the weight the agents give to the evidence. (shrink)

In this paper we describe two approaches to the revision of probability functions. We assume that a probabilistic state of belief is captured by a counterfactual probability or Popper function, the revision of which determines a new Popper function. We describe methods whereby the original function determines the nature of the revised function. The first is based on a probabilistic extension of Spohn's OCFs, whereas the second exploits the structure implicit in the Popper function itself. This stands in (...) contrast with previous approaches that associate a unique Popper function with each absolute (classical) probability function. We also describe iterated revision using these models. Finally, we consider the point of view that Popper functions may be abstract representations of certain types of absolute probability functions, but we show that our revision methods cannot be naturally interpreted as conditionalization on these functions. (shrink)

It is argued that the intuitively sanctioned distinction between beliefs and non-belief states that play a role in the proximate causal history of beliefs is a distinction worth preserving in cognitive psychology. The intuitive distinction is argued to rest on a pair of features exhibited by beliefs but not by subdoxastic states. These are access to consciousness and inferential integration. Harman's view, which denies the distinction between beliefs and subdoxastic states, is discussed and criticized.

Parents in Iran, China and the United States were asked 1) about their potential influence on their children’s religious and scientific views and 2) to consider a situation in which their children expressed dissent. Iranian and US parents endorsed their influence on the children’s beliefs in the two domains. By contrast, Chinese parents claimed more influence in the domain of science than religion. Most parents spoke of influencing their children via Parent-only mechanisms in each domain, although US parents did spontaneously (...) note Multiple sources for the transmission of religious views. Parents proposed a similar stance towards children’s dissenting religious and scientific views. Chinese and US parents were more likely to express Supportive approaches and Iranian parents were more likely to express a Directive approach by comparison. The present research informs our understanding of the cultural transmission of views about science and religion. (shrink)

Little work has been done on beliefs toward academic misconduct in Ukraine. This study explored the beliefs of Ukrainian students toward various forms of academic misconduct and compared the results to the U.S. undergraduate students (N = 270). Twenty-two forms of cheating, plagiarism, and questionable academic behaviors were grouped in five categories: unilateral cheating, collective cheating, falsification gaining favoritism, and performing extra work to receive better grades. Cross-cultural comparisons of beliefs were pivotal in this study. Results indicated that, in general, (...) Ukrainian students are less likely to believe that academic misconduct is wrong compared to their U.S. counterparts, as well as seem to have different beliefs on what is and isn’t academic misconduct. Recommendations are proposed to help students change their beliefs and to reduce academic dishonesty. These recommendations also have application purposes outside of Ukraine. (shrink)

During the past couple of decades, philosophy of mind--with its siblings, philosophy of psychology and cognitive science--has been one of the most exciting areas of philosophy. Yet, in that time, I have come to think that there is a deep flaw in the basic conception of its object of study--a deep flaw in its conception of the so-called propositional attitudes, like belief, desire, and intention. Taking belief as the fundamental propositional attitude, scientifically-minded philosophers hold that beliefs, if there (...) are any, are brain states. I call this conception of belief. (shrink)

This article provides a simple decision theoretic model in which elements of the world successively enter the decision maker’s scope and the state space expands over time, which is intended to be the closest correspondence to the standard subjective expected utility theory. We propose a dynamic consistency condition that after any expansion of the scope, the preference ranking should remain unchanged over acts to which the expansion is irrelevant. Together with other natural axioms, it characterizes a model in which (...) the decision maker’s belief extends over time in order that the marginal distribution of the new belief induced over the old state space coincides with the old belief. It is extended to encompass both expansion of scope and learning events, and we characterize the model with an additional property that the decision maker’s belief updating follows Bayes’ rule when she learns events. (shrink)

Psychological essentialism is the belief that some internal, unseen essence or force determines the common outward appearances and behaviors of category members. We investigated whether reasoning about transplants of bodily elements showed evidence of essentialist thinking. Both Americans and Indians endorsed the possibility of transplants conferring donors' personality, behavior, and luck on recipients, consistent with essentialism. Respondents also endorsed essentialist effects even when denying that transplants would change a recipient's category membership (e.g., predicting that a recipient of a pig's (...) heart would act more pig-like but denying that the recipient would become a pig). This finding runs counter to predictions from the strongest version of the “minimalist” position (Strevens,2000), an alternative to essentialism. Finally, studies asking about a broader range of donor-to-recipient transfers indicated that Indians essentialized more types of transfers than Americans, but neither sample essentialized monetary transfer. This suggests that results from bodily transplant conditions reflect genuine essentialism rather than broader magical thinking. (shrink)

Industrial emissions of greenhouse gases are significant contributors to climate change, which poses a grave threat to social and economic systems. Our understanding of what might drive firms to reduce their emissions of these gases, however, is incomplete, and it is not clear that the knowledge gained from other environmental issues will readily apply to these emissions. We argue and find that indicators of environmental injustice previously shown to relate to toxic pollutants, for example, are poor predictors of greenhouse gas (...) emissions. Instead, we show that the degree of belief in and concern about climate change in a local community is a significant predictor of the facility’s rate of emission improvements. Furthermore, we find that beliefs at both the facility and headquarter communities influence emission reduction, and that those effects are substitutes for each other. (shrink)

In his Treatise of Human Nature, Hume defines a belief as "a lively idea related to or associated with a present impression".1 He offers variations on this definition throughout the work, writing, for instance, that "belief is a more vivid and intense conception of an idea, proceeding from its relation to a present impression" and that his "general position" is "that an opinion or belief is nothing but a strong and lively idea deriv'd from a present impression (...) related to it". Lest his readers misunderstand, Hume endeavours to clarify these notions of "vivacity" and "liveliness" by appealing to a cluster of other notions, such... (shrink)

Thought Theory seems to provide an answer to the paradox of fiction which has the ontological merits of current pretence accounts without, however, assuming mere pretence emotions. This article will question whether present formulations of TT live up to what they promise. Whenever its current versions try to include evaluative beliefs in a TT framework in order to comply with a cognitivist account of emotions, they either stop being a genuine thought theory or endorse the irrationalism of fictional emotions. This (...) unfortunate outcome can be prevented by shifting the focus to thoughts, and specifically to the genetic dynamics of how we come to think of the objects in question. This is at least what we can learn from Edmund Husserl, who developed a still underestimated account according to which it is possible to have the belief that x merits evaluation as appearing emotion-worthy without this belief implying that x merits being believed to exist. (shrink)

Psychedelic substances elicit powerful, uncanny conscious experiences that are thought to possess therapeutic value. In those who undergo them, these altered states of consciousness often induce shifts in metaphysical beliefs about the fundamental structure of reality. The contents of those beliefs range from contentious to bizarre, especially when considered from the point of view of naturalism. Can chemically induced, radically altered states of consciousness provide reasons for or play some positive epistemic role with respect to metaphysical beliefs? In this paper, (...) I discuss a view that has been underexplored in recent literature. I argue that psychedelic states can be rationally integrated into one’s epistemic life. Consequently, updating one’s metaphysical beliefs based on altered states of consciousness does not have to constitute an instance of epistemic irrationality. (shrink)

Much attention has been paid recently to the role of anomalous experiences in the aetiology of certain types of psychopathology, e.g. in the formation of delusions. We examine, instead, the top-down influence of pre-existing beliefs and affective factors in shaping an individual’s characterisation of anomalous sensory experiences. Specifically we investigated the effects of paranormal beliefs and alexithymia in determining the intensity and quality of an altered state of consciousness . Fifty five participants took part in a sweat lodge ceremony, (...) a traditional shamanic ritual which was unfamiliar to them. Participants reported significant alterations in their state of consciousness, quantified using the ‘APZ’ questionnaire, a standardized measure of ASC experience. Participants endorsing paranormal beliefs compatible with shamanic mythology, and those showing difficulty identifying feelings scored higher on positive dimensions of ASC experience. Our findings demonstrate that variation in an individual’s characterisation of anomalous experiences is nuanced by pre-existing beliefs and affective factors. (shrink)

Science motivational beliefs are crucial for STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) performance and persistence, but these beliefs typically decline during high school. We expanded the literature on adolescents’ science motivational beliefs by examining: 1) changes in motivational beliefs in three specific science subjects, 2) how gender, immigrant generation status, and perceived support from key social agents predicted differences in adolescents’ science motivational beliefs, and 3) these processes among Latino/as in the United States, whose underrepresentation in STEM is understudied. We (...) used hierarchical linear modeling to estimate the changes in 104 (40% female) Latino/a high school students’ physics, chemistry, and biology motivational beliefs from 9th to 11th grade. Subject-specific ability self-concept, interest, and utility were regressed on gender, immigrant generation status, and perceived science support while controlling for family income, parent education, and adolescents’ school. Adolescents’ utility declined from 9th to 11th grade whereas their interest remained stable for all three science subjects. Adolescents’ ability self-concept increased for biology, decreased for physics, but remained stable for chemistry. Gender differences in adolescents’ motivational beliefs at 9th grade only emerged for physics utility as well as physics and chemistry interest; yet, there were no gender differences in how adolescents’ science motivational beliefs changed over time. Contrary to expectations, immigrant generation status was not significantly associated with adolescents’ science motivational beliefs at 9th grade or in terms of how they changed over time. Adolescents who perceived higher science support generally had higher motivational beliefs in 9th grade, but did not differ on their rate of change. Our findings highlight the need to examine specific science subjects, and that typical gender differences in adolescents’ motivational beliefs discussed in the literature may not generalize to all racial and ethnic groups. (shrink)

On approach to competitive situations, affective states (emotions and anxiety) occur through the complex interaction of cognitive antecedents. Researchers have intimated that irrational beliefs might play an important role in the relationship between cognitive appraisals and affective states, but has ignored challenge and threat. In the current research, we examine the interaction between cognitive appraisals, irrational beliefs, and challenge and threat to predict golfers’ pre-competitive affective states. We adopted a cross-sectional atemporal design to examine how golfers approached two different competitive (...) situations: imagined imminent golf competition (phase 1), and actual future golf competition (phase 2). Path analysis revealed how cognitive appraisals, irrational beliefs, and challenge and threat interact to predict affective states among golfers. Serial atemporal multiple mediation analysis indicated that the relationships between cognitive appraisals and affective states were mediated by irrational beliefs and challenge and threat. Further, some differences were revealed between phase 1 and phase 2 in the serial multiple atemporal mediation results with regard to challenge. That is, at phase 1 no significant serial mediation was found for any affective outcomes, but at phase 2 significant serial mediation was found for all affective states, showing that irrational beliefs and challenge serial mediated the associations between cognitive appraisals and affective states. The finding that mediation and bivariate associations differed across phase 1 and phase 2 is echoed in the phase 1-phase 2 tests of differences. The current research makes a theoretical advancement by elucidating in more detail the complex interaction between cognitive antecedents and mediators of affective states. Specifically, the inclusion of challenge and threat alongside irrational beliefs and cognitive appraisals is an important theoretical advancement that builds on work inside of sport literature (e.g., Dixon et al., 2016) and outside of sport literature (e.g., David et al., 2002; 2005), as this constellation of theoretically related antecedents of affective states has not been examined together in the extant research. (shrink)

Sometimes agents sincerely profess to believe a claim and yet act inconsistently with it in some contexts. In this paper, I focus on mismatch cases in the domain of religion. I distinguish between two kinds of representations: prompts and default states. Prompts are representations that must be salient to agents in order for them to play their belief-appropriate roles, whereas default states play these roles automatically. The need for access characteristic of prompts is explained by their vehicles: prompts are (...) realized in symbolic systems or even artifacts that make them inapt for automatic regulation of inference and behavior. I argue that some mismatch cases are explained by the fact that agents often report the contents of prompts when they report their beliefs, but behavior is controlled by prompts only when they are made salient to agents. I show that a number of otherwise puzzling findings in the cognitive science of religion, concerning belief intuitiveness, are illuminated by the distinction. (shrink)

Although many accept the Rawlsian distinction between ‘end-state’ and ‘transitional’ principles, theorists disagree strongly over which feasibility constraint to use when selecting the former. While ‘minimalists’ favor a scientific-laws-only constraint, ‘non-minimalists’ believe that end-state principles should also be constrained by what people could (empirically) accept after reasoned discussion. I argue that a theorist who follows ‘non-minimalism’ will devise end-state principles that cannot be realized (as end-state principles), or cannot be stabilized (as end-state principles), or are (...) indistinguishable in content from those she would have selected had she followed ‘minimalism.’ The paper ends by outlining the implications of my analysis for the broader methodological map of political philosophy. (shrink)

Let propositionalism be the thesis that all mental attitudes are propositional. Anti-propositionalists typically point at apparently non-propositional attitudes, such as fearing a dog and loving a spouse, and play defense against attempts at propositional analysis of such attitudes. Here I explore the anti-propositionalist’s prospects for going on the offensive, trying to show that some apparently propositional attitudes, notably belief and judgment, can be given non-propositional analysis. Although the notion that belief is a non-propositional attitude may seem ludicrous at (...) first, it is admirably defended by Franz Brentano, whose analysis I propose to expound, update, and deepen here. The basic strategy can be thought of as follows. First, although the grammar of belief-that reports clearly suggests a propositional attitude, the grammar of belief-in reports suggests instead an ‘objectual’ attitude. Second, with some ingenuity all belief-that reports can be paraphrased into belief-in reports. Third, given certain general considerations, this paraphraseability recommends the view that the psychological reality of belief states is objectual rather than propositional. Nonetheless, I will argue, there are two very real costs associated with this non-propositional analysis of belie. (shrink)

This book is addresses a topic that has received little or no attention in orthodox epistemology. Typical epistemological investigation focuses almost exclusively on knowledge, where knowing that something is the case importantly implies that what is believed is strictly true. This condition on knowledge is known as factivity and it is, to be sure, a bit of epistemological orthodoxy. So, if a belief is to qualify as knowledge according to the orthodox view it cannot be false. There is also (...) an increasingly influential group of epistemologists who argue that one ought to act only on what one knows, because truth of belief is the surest way to guarantee that our actions work out as planned. They defend what is known as the knowledge norm for action. This view is typically justified in virtue of the idea that successful intentional action should stem from knowledge because knowledge is a factive propositional attitude and it is, as a result, success-prone with respect to intentional action. In other words, true beliefs that constitute knowledge are the rationally normative standard for successful acting. But, there are clearly multitudes of cases where epistemic agents operate successfully and even rationally on the basis of beliefs that are false. That this is the case is not especially controversial. Sometimes false beliefs facilitate successful action. Of course, this can be because the agent is simply lucky. However, there is something particularly important about some false beliefs that relates to successful action but not in virtue of luck. While not strictly true, the beliefs in question are close to the truth or approximately true. This gives rise to the possibility that there are knowledge-like states that play roles very similar to knowledge but which are only quasi-factive. That is to say such states imply approximate truth and do not imply strict truth. Moreover, often such beliefs facilitate successful action in virtue of their being approximately true and this suggests a much more plausible norm for successful action that encompasses both cases of rational action guided by such quasi-factive states as well as cases of rational action guided by knowledge. The thesis of this book is that quasi-factive knowledge-like states are far more common that epistemologists have acknowledge and the book introduces a theory of such states and how they give rise to a much more reasonable account of the norms for action. This involves some tricky issues concerning approximate truth, the rationality of believing not strictly true claims, the justification of approximately true beliefs, the nature of false but approximately true evidence, the norms of belief, knowledge and quasi-knowledge, etc. (shrink)

“Probably Peirce’s best-known works are the first two articles in a series of six that originally were collectively entitled Illustrations of the Logic of Science and published in Popular Science Monthly from November 1877 through August 1878. The first is entitled ‘The Fixation of Belief’ and the second is entitled ‘How to Make Our Ideas Clear.’ In the first of these papers Peirce defended, in a manner consistent with not accepting naive realism, the superiority of the scientific method over (...) other methods of overcoming doubt and ‘fixing belief.’” — Robert Burch, “Charles Sanders Peirce,” entry in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (2021 revision) -/- “Pragmatist epistemologies often explore how we can carry out inquiries in a self-controlled and fruitful way. (Where much analytic epistemology centres around the concept of knowledge, considered as an idealised end-point of human thought, pragmatist epistemology centres around the concept of inquiry, considered as the process of knowledge-seeking and how we can improve it.) So pragmatists often provide rich accounts of the capacities or virtues that we must possess in order to inquire well, and the rules or guiding principles that we should adopt. A canonical account is Peirce’s classic early paper ‘The Fixation of Belief‘. Here Peirce states that inquiry is a struggle to replace doubt with “settled belief“, and that the only method of inquiry that can make sense of the fact that at least some of us are disturbed by inconsistent beliefs, and will subsequently reflect upon which methods of fixing belief are correct is the Method of Science, which draws on the Pragmatic Maxim described above. This contrasts with three other methods of fixing belief: i) refusing to consider evidence contrary to one’s favored beliefs (the Method of Tenacity), ii) accepting an institution’s dictates (the Method of Authority), iii) developing the most rationally coherent or elegant-seeming belief-set (the A Priori Method).“ — Catherine Legg, “Pragmatism,” entry in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (2021 revision). (shrink)

A commonly-discussed feature of perceptual experience is that it has ‘assertoric’ or ‘phenomenal’ force. We will start by discussing various descriptions of the assertoricity of perceptual experience. We will then adopt a minimal characterization of assertoricity: a perceptual experience has assertoric force just in case it inclines the perceiver to believe its content. Adducing cases that show that visual experience is not always assertoric, we will argue that what renders these visual experiences non-assertoric is that they are penetrated by (...) class='Hi'>belief-like imaginings. Lastly, we will explain why it is that when belief-like imaginings—as opposed to beliefs (and other cognitive states)—penetrate visual experience, they render visual experiences non-assertoric. (shrink)

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 of my argument for the relation between belief and credence, and for the relative importance of belief in psychological explanation. (shrink)