Introduction: The Varieties of Belief and Acceptance

Abstract

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 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 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 assertion 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.