Notion Of Belief Research Articles

The Case Against the Case Against Belief

Some of our most prominent philosophical thinkers maintain that scientific advances threaten to show that nothing answers to our common-sense framework of intentional states such as belief, desire, hope, fear, and the rest. Paul Churchland argues that the elimination of what he calls 'folk psychology' is 'richly possible' in light of the 'advancing tide of neuroscience' (Churchland, 1981, p. 90). Stephen Stich, although not as convinced as Churchland, also is pessimistic about the existence of intentional states. Stich asks whether our ordinary belief ascriptions may turn out not to be true and answers this way: 'this is indeed a serious possibility, since ordinary belief ascription makes a pair of empirical assumptions, both of which might turn out to be false... it is too early to say whether folk psychology has a future' (Stich, 1983, p. 242). For Daniel Dennett the conflict between 'our vision of ourselves as responsible, free, rational agents, and our vision of ourselves as complex parts of the physical world of science' (Dennett, 1978, p. x) is potentially so troublesome that he has embraced an explicitly instrumentalistic view of intentional states ('intentional systems theory') in order to preserve intentional ascriptions in the face of whatever science might tell us about ourselves. Worries about the viability of common-sense mental concepts have become a growing theme in recent philosophizing about the cognitive sciences. In his intriguing new book From Folk Psychology to Cognitive Science: The Case Against Belief (Stich, 1983) Stich uses several arguments regarding cognitive psychology to claim that the existence of the common-sense notion of belief is in jeopardy. My strategy in this paper is to grant Stich's claims about psychology and argue that one still need not renounce the existence of belief. I try to show that Stich has portrayed the realist view as more precarious than it really is and that Stich has overestimated the strength of his argument by ignoring certain distinctions important to realism.