Abstract
There is consensus about some general conditions on a theory of believing and belief such as (1) believing is a relation between a subject, the believer, and an object or set of objects as given in the grammatical form of the sentence, ’x believes that S’; (2) beliefs, whatever they are, can be acquired, replaced, or abandoned; (3) they enter along with desires, needs, wants and other particular circumstances into an explanation of action; and (4) for some circumstances and for some beliefs it is appropriate to describe a subject’s beliefs as justified or unjustified, rational or irrational, and the like.
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Notes
See S. P. Stitch, From Folk Psychology to Cognitive Science: The Case Against Belief ( Cambridge, Mass.: M.I.T., 1983). Also, D. Dennet, “Beyond Belief” in A. Woodfield, ed., Thought and Object (Oxford: Oxford Press, 1982).
The present paper in later sections amplifies and revises my “A Proposed Solution to a Puzzle about Belief,” Midwest Studies in Philosophy: Foundation of Analytic Philosophy, vol. VI, ed. P. French et al. (1981): 501–510 and “Rationality and Believing the Impossible,” The Journal of Philosophy” LXXXI (1983): 321-339. Those papers focused on S. Kripke’s “A Puzzle about Belief” in Meaning and Use, ed. A. Margalit (Dordrecht, Reidel: 1979). The disquotation principle discussed below was set out by Kripke.
See S. Guttenplan, ed., Mind and Language (Oxford, Oxford Press, 1975):.
The Foundations of Mathematics (New York: Humanities Press, 1950): 44. Ramsey also claimed that such introspective feelings are an insufficient guide when it comes to judging the difference between believing more or less firmly.
See “On Sense and Nomination” and other essays in G. Frege. Translations from the Philosophical Writings tr. P. Geach and M. Black (Oxford: Blackwell, 1952). The present discussion of propositions as linguistic entities mapped by sentences which “express” them does not apply to those more recent accounts of propositions as functions from worlds to truth values.
Computer scientists concerned with such “artificial intelligence” models actually use the language of belief in discussing their programs.
See The Language of Thought (New York: Crowell, 1975) and Representations (Cambridge, Mass. M.I.T., 1981).
Russell maintained throughout his work an object-oriented view of epistemological attitudes which is sometimes obscured by the use of “proposition” which has a linguistic connotation. “Propositions” for Russell contain non-linguistic constituents.
For Russell, believing relates the agent to the constituents of the proposition, and not the proposition. This suggests that one precludes the other, but it need not.
See the papers mentioned in Footnote 2. Also R. Chisholm, “Events and Propositions,” Nous4, (1970): 15–24. The recent work of J. Perry and J. Barwise on “Situation Semantics.” See Situations and Attitudes (Cambridge, Mass. M.I.T., 1983), N. Salmon, Frege’s Puzzle (Cambridge, Mass., MIT, 1986).
R. B. Braithwaite in “The Nature of Believing,” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, 33 (1932-3): 129–146 has a dispositional account but it is also a language—bound account. For Braithwaite “x believes S” is analyzed as follows: S (a proposition) must be entertained, and under relevant internal and external circumstances, x is disposed to act as if S were true. Such a language-oriented dispositional account also excludes unconscious beliefs, excludes beliefs of non-language users, and supposes that believing always entails entertaining linguistic or quasi-linguistic objects. The dispositional account I am proposing is rather unlike Quine’s in that he does not take states of affairs as objects of believing.
G. Frege, Philosophical and Mathematical Correspondence (University of Chicago Press, 1980): 169.
F. Dretske, “Epistemic Operators,” J of Phil. 67 (1970): 1007–1023 and later R. Nozick, Philosophical Explanations (Harvard 1981) question the claim that belief is closed under logical consequence but those purported counter examples are not critical in our present account.
Andrew Hodges in Alan Turing: The Enigma (Simon,& Schuster, NY, 1983): 154, reports a conversation between Turing and Wittgenstein on contradiction which includes the following exchange. Wittgenstein (citing the paradox of the liar):...it doesn’t matter...it is just a useless language game.... Turing: What puzzles one is that one usually uses a contradiction as a criterion for having done something wrong.... Wittgenstein: Yes-and more: nothing has been done wrong... where will the harm come? Turing: The real harm will not come unless there is an application in which a bridge may fall down or something of that sort. Wittgenstein:... But nothing need go wrong, and if something does go wrong-if the bridge breaks down-then your mistake was of the kind of using a wrong natural law. Turing: Although you do now know that the bridge will fall down if there are no contradictions, yet it is almost certain that if there are contradictions it will go wrong somewhere.
D. Davidson, “How is Weakness of the Will Possible?” in Moral Concepts, ed. J. Feinberg (Oxford, Oxford Press, 1970).
It is difficult to make a case for rejecting contradictions unless we see the connections between rationality, coherent action and plausible outcomes. A computer programmed with proper deductive rules and a contradiction will allow any sentence in its register of affirmations. In the absence of further action to be guided by those outputs, there is no problem of coherence as here described. Similar considerations apply to examples of brains in vats. See footnote 14.
Donnellan, “Speaking of Nothing,” Philosophical Review 83 (1974): 3–30. The Horn Papers were launched as history hence the characterization “hoax” rather than “fiction.”
“Dispensing with Possibilia,” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Association, Newark (1977). Also “Possibilia and Possible Worlds”, Grazer Philosophische Studien, Vol. 25, 26, 1985/86 The latter is a revision of the first of two lectures presented at the Collège de France May 1986. The present paper is a revision of the second lecture.
In my “Modalities and Intentional Languages,” Synthese. 13 (1961): 303–321 such a directly referential view of proper names was proposed. There, p. 310, I say “To give a thing a proper name is different from giving a unique description. This [identifying! tag, a proper name, has no meaning [as contrasted with having reference]. It simply tags. It is not strongly equatable with any of the singular descriptions of the thing.” It should be noted that on this view, proper names are not assimilated to descriptions, even “rigid” descriptions. Kripke, in “Naming and Necessity,” Semantics of Natural Language. ed. G. Harman and D. Davidson (Reidel, 1972) classifies proper names as “rigid designators” along with rigid descriptions, thereby obscuring the different semantical relationship between a proper name and the object named as compared with the relationship between a rigid description and the object described. Kripke, in commenting on my 1961 paper when it was presented at a symposium in February 1962 interpreted my views as taking the position that “the tags are the essential denoting phrases for individuals.” That was not part of my account but we can see in those 1961 remarks Kripke’s move toward his 1971 theory of “rigid designators.” His comments appear in SyntheseXlV (1962): 132-143 in “Discussion on the paper of Ruth B. Marcus.” See especially p. 142.
See Kripke, op cit, footnote 2. My example is an analogue of Kripke’s case of Pierre coming to believe a “contradiction.”
Principles of Human Knowledge, ed. C. M. Turbayne (New York, Bobbs Merrill, 1970):.
Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (London, Kegan Paul, 1922). See especially 4.461-4.466, 5.1362, 5.142, 5.43a, 6.11.
Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics (Oxford, Blackwell, 1956): 1–106.
This is what seems to be at the center of Davidson’s view discussed at the outset of this paper.
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Marcus, R.B. (1991). Some Revisionary Proposals About Belief and Believing. In: Brittan, G.G. (eds) Causality, Method, and Modality. The University of Western Ontario Series in Philosophy of Science, vol 48. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-011-3348-7_9
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