On Believing: Being Right in a World of Possibilities

Abstract

David Hunter starts his book with Anscombe's remark that the difficulty of accommodating belief's psychological and logical aspects makes it the most difficult topic. Despite this, Hunter's book covers even more than these two aspects: it also delves into a third, normative one, and develops highly original views of all three. In its wide-ranging ambition alone, On Believing is a significant contribution to the literature on belief. For Hunter, the psychological aspect of belief is that ‘what one does, thinks, and feels can be rationalized or explained by [what one believes]’ (p. 1). However, as Chapter 1 argues, this role of the object of one's belief is neither due to one's belief playing a causal role nor due to its adding to one's overall dispositions or abilities. Rather, Hunter characterises belief as a ‘rational position’ (p. 2): belief makes a difference to the reasons or potential reasons for which one can exercise one's abilities and manifest one's dispositions. It is thus not because belief is a disposition or a state playing a certain causal role that a believer will typically do certain things, but because a believer is typically rational enough to exploit the (potential) reasons their beliefs provide.