Abstract
Most philosophers assume (often without argument) that belief is a mental state. Call their view the orthodoxy. In a pair of recent papers, Matthew Boyle has argued that the orthodoxy is mistaken: belief is not a state but (as I like to put it) an act of reason. I argue here that at least part of his disagreement with the orthodoxy rests on an equivocation. For to say that belief is an act of reason might mean either (i) that it’s an actualization of its subject’s rational capacities or (ii) that it’s a rational activity (hence, a certain kind of event). And, though belief is not an act of reason in the second sense, it may nonetheless be one in the first: it may be a static actualization of its subject’s rational capacities.
Highlights
According to Matthew Boyle, “for a rational subject to believe something is for him to have his power to be persuaded by reasons actualized in a present and persisting act” (2011: 22, my emphasis)
In taking this view—that, as I’ll put it, belief is an act of reason Boyle places himself in stark opposition to the orthodoxy, i.e., the widespread view that belief is not an act but a state, and that, a subject’s power to be persuaded by reasons is actualized, not in her believing what she does, but, instead, in her judging what she does—where, at least when all goes well, her so judging results in appropriate changes to her beliefs
Boyle’s view seems to be that belief is an act of reason in both of these senses: it is an actualization of its subject’s rational capacities that is an activity (“a present and persisting act”) of hers
Summary
According to Matthew Boyle, “for a rational subject to believe something is for him to have his power to be persuaded by reasons actualized in a present and persisting act” (2011: 22, my emphasis). The fundamental insight toward which Boyle points us is that belief is an actualization of its subject’s rational capacities, and so belongs, and belongs essentially, to the faculty of reason; whereas, for all the orthodoxy says, it could be related to reason only per accidens This insight, at least, is independent of the highly questionable heterodox claim that belief is not a state—a fact that, at the very least, Boyle’s own discussion tends to obscure. I’ll be confining myself to asserting—as I already have—that the orthodoxy fails to acknowledge the fact that belief is an act of reason, in the sense that it’s an actualization of its subject’s rational capacities. With respect to the orthodoxy, the only thing I will show here is that it doesn’t follow from the fact that belief is an actualization of its subject’s rational capacities (from the fact that it’s an act of reason in that sense) that it isn’t a state—a point that, in itself, is friendly to the orthodoxy
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