Table Of ContentBELIEVING AND ACCEPTING
PHILOSOPHICAL STUDIES SERIES
VOLUMES3
Founded by Wilfrid S. Sellars and Keith Lehrer
Editor
Keith Lehrer, University ofA rizona, Tucson
Associate Editor
Stewart Cohen, Arizona State University. Tempe
Board of Consulting Editors
Lynne Rudder Baker. University of Massachusetts at Amherst
Radu Bogdan, Tulane University, New Orleans
Allan Gibbard, University ()f Michigan
Denise Meyerson, University o.fCape Town
Franois Recanati, Ecole Poly technique, Paris
Stuart Silvers. Clemson University
Nicholas D. Smith, Michigan State University
The titles published in this series are listed at the end of this volume.
BELIEVING AND ACCEPTING
Edited by
PASCAL ENGEL
Universite de Paris IV,
Sorbonne, France
SPRINGER-SCIENCE+BUSINESS MEDIA, B.V.
A C.I.P. Catalogue record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.
ISBN 978-94-010-5782-0 ISBN 978-94-011-4042-3 (eBook)
DOI 10.1007/978-94-011-4042-3
Printed on acid-free paper
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Origina1ly published by Kluwer Academic Publishers in 2000
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
PASCAL ENGEL / Introduction: the Varieties of Belief
and Acceptance 1
DAVID CLARKE / The Possibility of Acceptance Without
Belief 31
JONATHAN COHEN / Why Acceptance that P Does Not
Entail Belief that P 55
LAURENCE GOLDSTEIN / Moore's Paradox 65
ROBERT STALNAKER / On Moore's Paradox 93
MICHAEL LOSONSKY / On Wanting to Believe 101
JEAN-PIERRE DUPUY / Choosing to Intend, Wanting to
Believe 133
RICHARD JEFFREY / Transformations of Belief 145
JACQUES DUBUCS / Belief and Acceptance: A Logical
Point of View 159
PETER RAIL TON / Scientific Objectivity and the Aims of
Belief 179
KEITH LEHRER / Belief and Acceptance Revisited 209
ANDREW WOODFIELD / Commitments Defined with
the Help of Public Concepts 221
DAN SPERBER / Concepts, Beliefs and Metarepresentations 243
FRANCOIS RECANATI / The Simulation of Belief 267
INTRODUCTION:
THE VARIETIES OF BELIEF AND ACCEPTANCE
Pascal Engel
University of Caen, CREA and
Institut Universitaire de France
1. BELIEVING
The notion of belief is ubiquitous in contemporary philosophy: it
occurs in epistemology, when one discusses questions about the
rationality of belief and the difference between belief and knowledge,
in the philosophy of mind when one raises questions about the nature
of mental states and contents and about our various ways of ascribing
them to people through a "folk psychology", and in the philosophy of
language, when one deals with "the semantics of propositional
attitudes" and with the logic of "belief sentences of the form "X
II
believes that p". The ramifications of these questions and their
interconnections are numerous, and here, as elsewhere in philosophy,
it is not obvious that one field of inquiry or one angle of approach
dominates the others and deserves to be taken as primary or basic.
Questions about what beliefs really are, metaphysically, cannot be
easily divorced from epistemological questions about what
differentiates belief from knowledge, nor from questions about the
meanings of the sentences through which we attribute beliefs to other
people or to ourselves, and the latter cannot be separated from the
former. A good example of these interconnections is provided by
"Moore's paradox": "It rains, but I do not believe that it rains" (or "It
does not rain, but I believe that it rains "). According to Wittgenstein1,
Moore made a point, through such sentences, about "the logic of
2 PASCAL ENGEL
assertion", namely that it makes no sense, in ordinary talk, to say that
p, and to say, in the same breath, that one does not believe that p. This
simple "logical" point, however, does not pertain only to the "logic" of
assertion and belief talk. For, if Wittgenstein is right to say that "I
believe that p " is not a description by the speaker of one of her mental
states, but the expression of it, it is difficult to evade the question of
what constitutes a genuine description of a mental state, in contrast to
a mere expression of it. If there is a real contrast between such forms
as "I believe that p " and "He believes that p " (for ''p, but he does not
believe that p " does not give rise to a paradox), then any theory of
belief which gives a uniform account of the meaning of "believes"
when used in the first person and in the third person is bound to be
false. For instance the functionalist account of belief according to
which "believes" means in both cases "is a state apt to cause behaviour"
is threatened by this contrast. 2 Hence this simple "logical" point is not
innocuous with respect to what belief actually is. It is not innocuous
either with respect to the difference between belief and knowledge, for
a related simple "logical" point is that, unlike in the case of belief, a
genuine contradiction emerges when ones says, "I know that it rains,
but it does not rain": for knowledge implies the truth of the proposition
known, which is thus incompatible with the asserti,?n of its falsity. The
Moorean sentences invite us to reflect on this difference, which is, at
bottom, an epistemological one. It also invites us to reflect on the
difference between ascribing a belief content to oneself and ascribing
a belief content to others: when I ascribe a belief to myself, I know
what I believe, whereas there is, one the face of it, no such knowledge
when I ascribe a belief to someone else. This raises the question
whether there is a single notion of.belief content apt to be used in both
cases. Moore's paradox is a good way of thinking about the
interconnections between the psychology, the epistemology, and the
semantics of belief. But it is not the only way.
Another way, and a good point of departure for dealing with the
issues raised in this collection of essays, is to start from an intuitive
conception of belief, as a mental state which has the following set of
features. 3
INTRODUCTION 3
(1) Beliefs are involuntary, and not nonnally subject to direct
voluntary control. For instance I cannot believe at will that my trousers
are on fire, or that the Dalai Lama is a living God, even ify ou pay me
a large amount of money for believing such things.
(2) Beliefs are nonnally shaped by evidence for what is believed,
unless they are, in some sense, irrational. In general a belief is rational
if it is proportioned to the degree of evidence that one has for its truth.
In this sense, one often says that "beliefs aim at truth" .T his is why it is,
on the face of it, irrational to believe against the evidence that one has.
A subject whose beliefs are not shaped by a concern for their truth, but
by what she wants to be the case, is more or less a wishful thinker or
a self-deceiver.
(3) Beliefs are context independent, in the sense that at one time a
subject believes something or does not believe it; she does not believe
it relative to one context and not relative to another. For instance if I
believe that Paris is a polluted city, I cannot believe that on Monday
and not on Tuesday; that would be a change of belief, or a change of
mind, but not a case of believing one thing in one context and another
thing in another context. If I believe something, the belief is more or
less pennanent across various contexts. 4
(4) An individual's beliefs are subject to an ideal of coherence.
Other things being equal, one should be able to agglomerate one's
beliefs into a larger, coherent, set of beliefs. This is what one generally
means when one says that beliefs have a "nonnative" or "rational"
character: we try, in general to have correct or, in that sense, rational
beliefs, and this feature is revealed by our ordinary beliefs ascriptions:
on the whole we tend to ascribe to people beliefs which it is nonnal or
rational to have.
The overall familiar picture of belief which emerges from these
four features is that belief is a passive state of mind, rather than an
active one. Whether one conceives of beliefs as inner feelings (in the
Humean way), or as dispositions to act in various ways (in the Peircean
or the Rylean way), beliefs are states which we can't help having, and
which belong to the passive side of our natures. The fact that beliefs
are, in general, shaped by evidence, means that they have, in Searle's
useful phrase, the "world to mind direction of fit", rather than, like
4 PASCAL ENGEL
desires and wants, the "mind to world direction of fit"; in other words
they are cognitive attitudes, aimed at being true or false to the facts,
and not conative attitudes, aimed at changing the way the world is in
order, to try to make it fit to our wants. An action is contextual in a
sense in which a belief is not: according to the context, I may decide to
act in such or such a way, and in another context in another way, but
I cannot decide to believe in such or such a way depending on the
context. The rationality and the coherence ofm y beliefs are pressed on
me by the way the world is, or by general rules of rationality which
come, at least in part, from logic. I cannot change at will the rules
which provide inductive support for my beliefs, nor the logical rules
which make them coherent.
One may object here to this familiar picture of beliefs as passive
states that there do seem to be some beliefs which we may decide to
have, sometimes against contrary evidence. For instance may not a wife
decide to believe that her husband is faithful to her, in spite of all the
lipstick she regularly fmds on his collars? May not the Pascalian who
does not believe in God decide to believe in God when he is shown the
immense advantages of the eternal bliss provided by that belief? To
such cases the defender of the familiar picture usually responds that in
so far as these are cases of belief, these are either cases of irrational
-or in some sense abnonnal-beliefs, produced, as in the wife's
example, through some fonn of irrational belief-fonning process,
whereas the above features are supposed to apply to what we call in
general rational beliefs, or cases of rational actions, not of rational
beliefs. In the latter sort of case, it may be rational for me to believe in
God, but the very fact that I fmd the belief useful or beneficial in some
way is not enough to create in me the corresponding state, which
remains as passive and as shaped by evidence as it can be in the frrst
place. This is why Pascal, after giving his famous wager argument for
belief in God, advises us to go to church, to take the holy water, and to
get the habits which regularly go with such a belief: This will dull you
( "Cela vous abetira") . Getting oneself to get an habit does not count
as stopping to have a belief as a matter of habit or of passive
disposition; quite the contrary. Getting the habit to have an habit may
be voluntary, but the habit itself is not. Similarly I may induce myself
INTRODUCTION 5
to have a belief by, say, taking a certain drug, or by being subjected to
hypnosis, but the very fact that I need to acquire the belief through
some sort of causal process does show that beliefs are in general
caused by some processes, even when the processes are, to a certain
extent, under our control. In other words, I may have some reasons to
acquire certain beliefs, just in the same way as I may have some
reasons to take an action, but the fact that I have these reasons does not
imply that my beliefs are shaped by my reasons to have them.
Still, and even if one grants this point, one may want to argue that
it is not obvious that having a belief is a purely passive and involuntary
state; the fact that I believe, for instance, that Pomerol is expensive,
may be a dispositional state which leads me to certain actions, such as,
say, refraining to order a bottle of Pomerol in a restaurant when I do
not want to pay an excessive price, or, alternatively, hastening to order
this wine when my desire to drink good wine overrides my brief
awareness of the state of my [mances. The belief that Pomerol is
expensive may even be what some philosophers call a "tacit belief', a
belief which is not conscious until it is directly present to my mind, or
which does not occur to me unless it "crosses" my mind. But I may
nevertheless hold the belief to be true, give my assent to it, approve of
it, or even defend it against somebody who would urge the contrary. Is
not my assenting to the content of a belief, or my judging that a
proposition is true a voluntary act? The StoIcs called such an assent
sunkatathesis, and they considered it to be voluntary and under our
control. Descartes held that belief is a matter of the will when the will
S
assents to the ideas that are given to it by the understanding. Whether
one conceives of beliefs as inner acts of assent, or as tied in some way
to assertions, an assent is a mental act, and an assertion is a speech act.
So in that respect at least, belief seems to involve some voluntary
element. In this sense, I may feel responsible for my beliefs, I may want
to hold them and to defend them, which I would not do if they were
purely passive and involuntary. Does not that account, partly, for the
fact that our beliefs are, in general, subject to an ideal of integration
and coherence? Our beliefs are not rational simply because they happen
to be so; they are rational because we want them to be so, and irrational
