Abstract
This chapter explores the nature of belief. An often-overlooked distinction between believing in something and believing that something is true is explored. It is made clear that the first notion of belief is really an expression used to signify trust or faith in something rather than the sort of belief that is a component of knowledge. Once the importance of believing that is made clear the various major accounts of the nature of belief are briefly examined. The chapter concludes by making it clear that the dispositional and representationalist accounts of belief are the best options. In light of this it follows that the best way to understand the belief component of knowledge is either in terms of having certain dispositions or in terms of having certain mental representations of information. Further, it is made clear that we do not need to decide which of these accounts is superior for the purpose of understanding scientific knowledge.
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Notes
- 1.
Here, and throughout the remaining chapters, we will follow the common convention of using “<p>” to signify the content of a proposition.
- 2.
Unless otherwise noted we will use the term “world”, as it is commonly used among philosophers, to refer to the entire universe (or multiverse, depending on the correct physics).
- 3.
See Price (1965).
- 4.
Plantinga (2000) similarly distinguishes between believing that God exists from believing in God. According to Plantinga, the former state simply consists in believing that a particular sort of being exists. However, he maintains that believing in God includes much more: loving God, trusting God, and seeing God as beautiful and glorious.
- 5.
As we noted in the first chapter, this distinction may be relevant to issues in science education such as the issue of the proper goals for science education. It also seems to be particularly relevant to the issue of how we should understand data concerning the acceptance rates of various scientific theories (Kampourakis and McCain 2016).
- 6.
For now we will simply stick with an intuitive understanding of what it means to say that a proposition is true. In the next chapter we will dive into the deep waters of the nature of truth.
- 7.
- 8.
- 9.
The most prominent supporter of this version of representationalism is Fodor (1975).
- 10.
- 11.
- 12.
The discussion here follows Schwitzgebel (2014) in referring to the three primary strands of dispositionalism as “traditional dispositionalism ”, “liberal dispositionalism ”, and “interpretationism ”.
- 13.
- 14.
See Chisholm (1957).
- 15.
- 16.
- 17.
It is worth noting that representationalism , traditional dispositionalism , liberal dispositionalism , and interpretationism all seem to be compatible with a broader view about mental states known as “functionalism”. According to functionalism, the actual and potential causal relations to behavior, other mental states, and sensory stimuli are what make something the particular type of mental state that it is. Very roughly, a mental state counts as the type of mental state that it is because of how it functions in one’s cognitive system (mind), not because of how it is realized in particular creatures. For example, the mental state of experiencing pain can be realized by the activity of different kinds of neurons in different species or even by something other than neurons in creatures like Martians. Nonetheless, so long as the activity of whatever Martians have in their heads, say, leads to the same sorts of causal relations in the Martian’s cognitive system as the activity of the neurons in a human’s does in her cognitive system each is experiencing pain. See Armstrong (1968), Block (1991), Fodor (1968), Lewis (1972), and Putnam (1975) for important discussions of functionalism.
- 18.
- 19.
See Dennett (1978) for similar examples.
- 20.
This is similar to Audi’s (1994) discussion of dispositions to believe .
- 21.
- 22.
Such skeptical possibilities will be discussed much more fully in chapter eleven.
- 23.
- 24.
Of course, this is not the only source of the tentativeness of scientific knowledge as we will see later.
- 25.
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McCain, K. (2016). Belief. In: The Nature of Scientific Knowledge. Springer Undergraduate Texts in Philosophy. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-33405-9_3
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