What Is Belief? (A Short Reflection)
Naturally, one may start with the specific feeling they have when it occurs to them that they are in the state of believing, whatever believing may be. Psychological concepts such as BELIEF and DESIRE are folk-concepts. That is, through linguistic and social upbringings, we learn to use these concepts without necessarily knowing exactly what these concepts are referring to. Similarly, physical concepts such as HARDNESS are folk-concepts, and we learn to use them without necessarily knowing that hardness consists in certain configurations or dynamics of subatomic particles. It is only through theoretical physics do we come to understand what hardness really is.
Given that the term ‘belief’ is a place-holder for this feeling one has in having learned how to use the term in social settings, the question is then what this feeling is about. The easy answer is to identify this feeling with some neurological activity—just as hardness is identified with certain subatomic phenomena. But there is a problem with this approach. Unlike hardness, belief is conceptually independent from neurological activities. As a description of a physical phenomenon, the concept of hardness is inseparable from the actual physical state it purports to be about. That is, there is no concept of hardness without the very phenomenon it is describing. This much is built into the concept of hardness. In contrast, what makes us distinguish this feeling as belief from other feelings (desire, hope, etc.) by different terms has to do with the content of the feeling rather than the physical (or neurological) state that this feeling is. Let us say that feeling-A is associated with neuron-A rather than neuron-B. What makes us call feeling-A ‘belief’ has nothing to do with whether it is neuron-A or neuron-B. Surely, physically speaking, if belief-feeling is neuron-A, this feeling would have been a different feeling (e.g., desire) if it were neuron-B. But what causes us to have feeling-A is different from what feeling-A feels like. Again, we need not know whether feeling-A is caused by neuron-A or neuron-B in order to know what feeling-A is. What has enabled us in the first place to distinguish feeling-A from other feelings is the content of this feeling (how it feels like). (Similarly, if the question concerns what the feeling of hardness is, then we need not know what hardness really is to know what this feeling is. But this is a different problem than that of what hardness is. In asking what hardness is, we are not asking what it is for something to feel like when we call it ‘hardness.’ But, on this natural phenomenological approach I am taking, in asking what belief is, we are asking what it is for something to feel like when we call it ‘belief’ rather than what is the physical state that a belief is.) So the explicandum here is the feeling, not the physical state behind the feeling. Identifying the physical state of this feeling (viz., neurological activity) does not help with the question of what we are describing with psychological terms. This is one way the hard problem of consciousness could be articulated.
Having taken the phenomenological approach as our natural starting point, what then is this feeling? First and foremost, the feeling we call ‘belief’ has intentionality. That is, a belief is a state that is about something. You always believe that such is so and so or believe about something that it is such and so. But so are other psychological states such as desire and resentment. What distinguishes belief further is that a belief has a distinctive intentionality or aboutness. A belief is about something in a specific way. The object of a belief is paradigmatically a state of affairs that is expressed by a proposition (e.g., I believe that San Jose is south of San Francisco). But so are other psychological states. What is special about belief is that it is a semantic attitude, i.e., to have a belief is to be committed to or to be disposed to regard that a proposition (a description of a state of affairs) is true. If I wish that SJ were north of SF, I am not committed to the truth of that wish. You would not accuse me of a wrong wish as I could wish whatever I want to. (You would only accuse me of having a weird wish.) But, if I believe that SJ is north of SF, you would accuse me of a wrong belief because, in believing that SJ is north of SF, I am responsible for correcting myself if it turns out that SJ is south of SF. (I can still wish that SJ were north of SF even after having corrected my belief about it.) If I refuse to change my belief in respect to counter-evidence, you will call my psychological state a wishful thought, not a belief. The point of calling some of our psychological states ‘beliefs’ (i.e., of identifying some of our feelings as beliefs) is that, in doing so, we (should) acknowledge that we are responsible for being committed to the truth of our beliefs and thereby for correcting our beliefs if they turn out to be false. For this reason, doxastic states (beliefs) are regulated by epistemic norms (knowledge-generating principles).
Epistemic norms are governed by rules of inference (logic). The rules of inference, or logic, are nothing but a collection of appropriate procedures for determining which propositions are true. These rules are by definition objective and are therefore independent of the human mind and fallibility. (Some interpret Gödel’s incompleteness theorem to be implying that logic itself is fallible, but this is a misinterpretation of the implication of the theorem. The theorem simply implies that any logical or mathematical system is not self-contained, but could be proven or is analyzable by meta-linguistic systems.) Now, in philosophy, one of the biggest questions is whether there are self-justified propositions. The general consensus is that the prospect of the possibility of self-justification is rather dim. (If there are some self-justified propositions, propositions about self-awareness are good candidates. But this is controversial.) If so, no belief is self-justifiable. Justifications happen only within a specific logical system, and beliefs are by nature committed to the semantic responsibility. Thus, to the extent that semantics involve justification or inferential processes, beliefs are under the governance of logic. In other words, there is (or should be) no belief without reasoning. In attributing beliefs to oneself or others, as Sellars puts it, one places oneself or others in the space of reasons where one engages in the game of giving and asking for reasons. The fact that we are describing in applying the psychological term ‘belief’ is this fact: by being believers, the feelings of the individuals are subject to the regulations by epistemic norms consisting in the rules of inference (logic). This much is built into the concept of belief.
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