Direct and Indirect Belief

Abstract

The word 'belief' is ambiguous, referring sometimes to what is believed, sometimes to the act or state of believing it. I believe that as I write this it is sunny outside. This belief is true. is true is what I believe, namely that it is sunny, not my believing it. On the other hand, my belief that it is sunny is rational and unshakeable, and it played a causal role in my deciding not to wear a coat today. is rational, unshakeable, and played a causal role is my believing a certain thing, not the thing I believe. I will say that what I believe is an object of belief, and that my believing it is a belief state. There is a parallel distinction between perceptual states and objects of perception. If sees an then one object of her perception is a cow, and she herself is in one of the perceptual states which can be gotten into by looking at a cow. If I say, Agnes sees an Angus, then I am conveying two sorts of information: information about Agnes' perceptual state, and information about the object of her perception. In ascriptions of belief, too, we convey information both about the believer's state and about the object of his or her belief.1 I take the moral of much-discussed examples due to Tyler Burge and Saul Kripke to be that the relation between one's belief state and what one believes is rather loose: one could be in the same belief state but have different objects of belief, and one can have the same objects of belief in virtue of being in different belief states (with qualifications to be noted later). In section II I explain why. I then suggest, following my paper What is a Belief State?2 that one's being in a particular belief state is nevertheless best characterized by a set of propositions, namely those one would believe in any situation in which one