Implicit Beliefs

Abstract

One might take explicitness and implicitness to be a function of representation and lack thereof, such that if an agent has a mental representation that P with the right functional role, they have an explicit belief that P. Whereas if the content that P implies Q, but there is no mental representation that Q, then they have an implicit belief that Q. Dispositionalist, simple consequence, and virtual theories of implicit beliefs all offer this kind of notion of implicitness, but it seems to not mesh particularly well with the core of representationalism about belief. One might characterize the explicitness and implicitness of belief in terms of its functional role, such that the more accessible represented information is, the more explicit it is, and conversely, the less accessible it is, the more implicit it is. Representationalists that endorse the view that the format of belief is map-like and those that endorse Fragmentation seem to adopt this kind of notion of implicitness. Although this functional notion of explicitness and implicitness seem to mesh well with representationalism, it remains to be seen whether they can actually accommodate the intuitions around belief attributions that threatened representationalism in the first place. Finally, taking a page from psychology, one might simply adopt an operational notion of implicitness, according to which the implicitness of a mental state or process is just a function of the measure – typically measures which are in some sense indirect relative to verbal reports. On this kind of view, a mental state such as a belief or mental process counting as implicit need not have any implication about its nature, but the terminology might nevertheless be helpful for distinguishing between different kinds of measures.