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Beliefs and Believers

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Abstract

The concept of mind is an elusive one. Attempts to understand mind as a separate substance, a repertoire of behavioural dispositions, and as states of the brain, remain unsatisfactory. In this dismal scene, the folk concept of belief promised understanding of the mind without stepping into any of these options. The folk concept of belief has been viewed as designating mental states with some formally identifiable content, namely, the content of propositional attitudes . Thus, the concept of belief displays the character of mind by characterizing its states. A series of problems plague the prospect of determining contents of mental states . Moreover, ascription of beliefs does not seem to furnish a genuine science of the mind if beliefs are viewed in psychological terms. A very different view of beliefs emerges once they are freed from their alleged psychological role. In the alternative framework, the folk concept sorts beliefs into different kinds to highlight the believer , the kind of person she is. Since the sorting is always in context depending on the agents and their histories, no partitioning of beliefs is possible in advance. In that sense, belief is a concept designed for social-normative function ; it is not meant to designate some ‘genetic’ property of the human mind. The non-psychological view explains why radical scepticism, a scepticism that disbelieves everything, is genuinely possible.

There are aspects of higher mental processes into which the current armamentarium of computational models, theories, and experimental techniques offers vanishingly little insight.

Jerry Fodor

This is a revised version of a paper published as Mukherji (2006).

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Notes

  1. 1.

    There are ways of making Descartes’ distinction without substance dualism (Mukherji 2000, 2010a).

  2. 2.

    I am setting aside another important problem that assimilation of a variety of syntactically distinct items of language—proper names, common nouns, indexicals, definite descriptions, etc.—under the same semantic picture of direct reference is implausible in view of design of language (Mukherji 1996).

  3. 3.

    It could be that all that there is to rigid designation, direct reference, and the like, is that content-terms of a language may have a variety of uses rather than a variety of meanings (Strawson 1950, 1961; Donnellan 1966; Mukherji 1989, 1995, 1996 ).

  4. 4.

    In particular, I find Sperber’s idea of modularity of beliefs problematic (see Fodor 2000).

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  1. University of Delhi, Delhi, India

    Nirmalangshu Mukherji

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Mukherji, N. (2017). Beliefs and Believers. In: Reflections on Human Inquiry. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-5364-1_9

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