DISPOSITIONAL BELIEF, ASSENT, AND ACCEPTANCE
Pascal Engel
Dialectica, 53 , 3 / 4 , (1999) , 211-226
In a remarkable
series of essays [1], Ruth Marcus
has argued, against a number of contemporary language-centered theories of
belief , that belief is not a relation to sentences or to linguistic entities.
On her view, belief is a relation between an individual and a certain kind of
object, which is neither a sentence nor an internal representation nor a
proposition in the sense of an entity which is truth evaluable, but an actual
or a possible state of affairs which obtains or not. It is a proposition in the
Russellian sense of a complex entity (which may be non actual or possible) made
up of actual individuals and relations. An important consequence of this view
is that one cannot really believe, but only claim
to believe, a contradiction, since a contradiction is an impossible state
of affairs, and belief is a relation to a possible state of affairs. This
automatically blocks such belief ascriptions as those that are familiar from
Kripke’s puzzle[2], which seems
to lead us to attribute to an individual a contradictory belief. On the subjective side of the relation of
believing, Marcus takes belief to be a disposition to act as if the
corresponding state of affairs obtained. It is not a disposition to assent to a
sentence or to a linguistic representation. This blocks the extended use of the
familiar “disquotation” principle used by Kripke to frame his puzzle, according
to which if a subject sincerely assents to P, then he believes that P.
Divorcing believing from its usual manifestations in adult humans, such as
assenting to a sentence, Marcus claims, allows us also to grant beliefs to non
linguistic creatures, such as animals or infants, and to make room for unconscious
or tacit beliefs, which, on linguistic accounts of believing, are not genuine
beliefs or are not beliefs at all. It also permits a more adequate account of
the rationality of belief, by tying rationality not to coherence of sentences
but to a more general rationality of action.
Although I do not want to commit myself to such entities as Russellian
propositions or states of affairs, I think that the other features of belief
that Marcus stresses are essential, and I agree with her that the linguistic
accounts of belief are unable explain them. Here I shall not discuss directly
all the aspects of her views about belief, but I shall try to give an analysis
which bears a number of similarities with hers and supplements it in some
respects. In particular, her view seems to me to be unable to account for
another dimension of belief, which has close ties both to dispositions to act
and to acts of assent, but which is reducible to neither of them: belief as
acceptance, a state which has intentional and active components[3].
On the view presented here, belief is a generic attitude, which has most of the
properties which Marcus emphasises, but it has also many subvarieties, which
make it a layered and diverse, rather than a unitary, phenomenon.
I
Marcus’s conception of belief is
summarised in the following definition:
D. An agent believes that S just in case (1) under
agent-centered circumstances such as desires, need, and other psychological
states including other believings and (2) external circumstances (3) the agent
will act as if S obtained, i.e will act in ways appropriate to S, where S is a
state of affairs, actual or non-actual.[4]
This definition, which she adapts from
Braithwaite, which himself adapted it from Ramsey[5],
captures most of the interesting characteristics of a dispositionalist account.
The mention of desires and other mental states such as believing avoids the
familiar problem of reductive analyses of belief as a disposition to act: a
belief is such a disposition only given
other states such as desires, as well as other beliefs. Most contemporary
functionalist views, which I take to be compatible with this one, admit that
belief cannot be defined in a non circular way. For this reason, let us call it
the “dispositional-functionalist” view. The view also incorporates Ramsey’s
insight in “Truth and probability ”(1927): it says that given desires, belief
is a disposition to act in ways which maximise the expected utility of the
agent desires. The troublesome feature of (D) lies in the mention of states of
affairs, possible or actual. There are familiar problems about theories of belief content which take it to
a be Russellian proposition made up of object and property.[6]
But let us forget for the moment Russellian propositions, and let us try to
work with an account which has some important similarities with Marcus’s.
The account is Stalnaker’s (1984) analysis of propositions in terms of
sets of possible worlds. Stalnaker’s first step (“the pragmatic picture”)
consists in taking an individual belief believing that P to be a disposition to
act in ways that would tend to satisfy one’s desires in a world in which P is
true (Stalnaker 1984: 15). In other terms: an agent who believes that P has a
behaviour of a kind that would maximise, other things being equal, the expected
satisfaction of his desires, in a P-world, or to behave as if the actual world were a P-world. The problem with this first
step is with the “would tend”, and “other things being equal”. In other terms,
individual beliefs underdetermine behaviour. But beliefs do not come one by
one,: they have an holistic nature. Stalnaker’s further step consists in
identifying the content of the total belief state of the agent with his
dispositions to act: the content of his whole belief state is given by the set
of worlds in which P is true, and there might be a number of individual beliefs
in this state (1984: 82). As Stalnaker says: “If one conceives of beliefs in
this way, they look like something negative: to believe that P is simply to be
in a belief state which lacks any possible world in which P is false.” (1984 :
69) For example, suppose that a soldier believes that there are mines in this
field. His behaviour is consistent with his desire to avoid walking on a mine,
and with a whole set of beliefs – that there is a mine near the tree, that
mines are dangerous, that the mine is going to be triggered if he steps here,
etc. The possible world analysis does not cut finer. The agent believes that P
if and only P is true in the set of P-worlds compatible with his belief, i.e in
his belief worlds.
Stalnaker’s
account does not identify propositions with linguistic entities[7].
Morover it shares several features with the dispositional theory of belief set
forth by Ramsey. First, beliefs are, as Ramsey said, “maps by which we steer”:
the total belief state of an agent is such a map[8].
It is the functional role of a belief, together with its location in a set of
possible worlds which determines its content. Second the account can be supplemented
in order to incorporate the fact that beliefs can have degrees of confidence:
an agent can be inclined to take himself to be located in one subset of
possible worlds rather than another. Third, it is compatible with Ramsey’s
pragmatist theory of belief-content: the content of a belief that P is given by
the actions for whose utilities the truth of P is a necessary and sufficient
condition. In other terms the truth conditions of a belief are its utility or
its success conditions. [9] Fourth, it accommodates the phenomenon of
tacit or unconscious beliefs: since the propositions which are the objects of
belief are relatively indeterminate entities, they can be consciously
entertained or not: the fact that they are present to the mind of their
beholders does not matter. As Ramsey says, “the beliefs that we hold most
strongly are often accompanied by no feeling at all”, and “my belief that the
earth is round [is a belief of which] I rarely think of, which would guide my
action in any case to which it was relevant”[10].
Stalnaker’s
possible world version of the dispositional-functionalist view, however, faces
two well known difficulties. First, as we already saw, it gives us only a very
coarse-grained analysis of the content of beliefs: qualifications have to be made
to take into account the problem of indexical beliefs (I do not locate myself
only in the worlds in which Pascal Engel believes there are mines in a field, but also in the worlds in which I
believe that there are mines in this
field), to take into account that agents are not always rational and can
sometimes switch between different beliefs worlds. Second, there is the
difficulty known as the problem of deduction: if a belief content P logically
entails a belief content Q, then if a subject believes P, he must also believe
Q, which is by definition true in the set of worlds in which P is true. If this
is so, everyone believes all necessary truths, and everyone behaves as if the
necessary truths are true. But it is a commonplace that someone can, say, believe
that a triangle is equilateral, without believing that this triangle has equal
angles. Moreover everyone behaves as if the necessary truths are true. In other
words, with necessary truths we steer by the very same maps. Here again the
pragmatic functional or dispositional account individuates belief contents too
coarsely[11].
At this point, we
could doubt that the possible world analysis of belief content gives us the
right account, and we may prefer to revert to Marcus’s analysis of the object
of beliefs as Russellian propositions or states of affairs. But the problem of
deduction is going to be still with us, for an agent who believes that Hesperus
is Phosporus will be in relation with the same Russellian proposition or state
of affairs as the proposition that Hesperus is Hesperus, and an agent who is in
relation with a state of affairs which entails the existence of an other state
of affairs will be in relation to both, and indeed with all the necessary
states of affairs. Hence (D) does not fare better, on that score, that
Stalnaker’s account.
Before being
tempted to move here to conceptions which would revert to the idea that we need
to construe the belief-relation as a relation to a sentence, or to an internal
representation having some appropriate characteristics (such as nomological
covariance, or an appropriate evolutionary history, say), or to the use of such
notions as Fregean modes of presentation, we should pause a little bit to see
whether a dispositionalist account like (D) or its possible world alternative
is really so bad. It is not so bad, for it captures at least the fact that,
given a certain desire, a belief in a necessary proposition P or another Q
represent the same set of worlds. Being an equilateral triangle and having
three equal angles are not two different ways things might be, and in that
respect, the possible world analysis captures a legitimate notion of content.[12] Actually this is just what Marcus’s analysis
captures too: for someone who believes that Hesperus is Phosphorus and someone
who believes that Hesperus is Hesperus do
believe the same thing, given that
Hesperus is Phosphorus. This is what
underlies her apparently surprising claim that someone cannot really believe
that Hesperus is different from Phosphorus, for this is an impossible state of
affairs. Of course the problematic feature of both the possible world analysis
and, for that matter, of (D) is that although both beliefs, given the desires
and the actions of the subject represent the same thing, they do not represent
them in the same way, for a given
subject, or for two different subjects, and this is just what the problem of
intentionality is about. But at least the following is true: if an astronaut
desires to fly to a planet and flies to Hesperus, we have a prima facie reason to ascribe to him the
belief that Hesperus is a planet, even though he might represent to himself
Hesperus as Phosphorus. In other
terms, as Stalnaker says, the functional-dispositional view captures at least
the negative fact that the agent does not locate himself, behaviourally, in the
possible worlds in which it is false that Hesperus is Phosphorus. We would not
ascribe to him this belief if he were not disposed to act as if it were true.
In this sense, we can say that the dispositional account is the minimal notion
of belief content: a belief the P is
always at least a disposition to act as if P were true, no matter how richer
the belief set of an individual might be. The first mark of believing is to
behave appropriately, although there can be other more complex modes of
believing. Therefore (D), or Stalnaker’s possible world analysis, are correct
in this sense: belief is always a disposition to act as if a certain content
were true, or as if the agent were located in the appropriate worlds, or as if
the appropriate state of affairs obtained, although this does not exhaust the
phenomenon of believing, since it is always to behave as if plus a certain mode of believing.[13]
II
What might these extra or richer features
be? The natural suggestion is that they might be sentences or linguistic
features, for we, humans, think most of our thoughts in words. The familiar idea is then is that to believe
that P is to be disposed to assent, either to an internal representation
meaning that P, or to a public sentence “P”. Let us call this the assent theory of belief, where assent is
always assent to a sentence or a sentence-like representation[14].
It is, however, important to distinguish a weaker and a stronger form of this
claim. The weaker claim says that among the acts to which one might behaves as
if P were true there are acts of assenting, although other forms of behaviour
may justify the ascription of belief. The stronger claim is that a disposition
to assent is not only a sufficient condition for belief, but a necessary one as
well: there can be no belief without assent. The weaker claim can be
accommodated by the dispositional-functional conception, for it says that in addition to dispositions to behave in
various ways, people have dispositions to assent to sentences which express
their beliefs. To have a belief is one thing, to be able to report the belief in a sentence or to
assent to a representation is another thing. This distinction fares well with
the distinction between explicit and implicit belief, for one can implicitly
believe that P without having the means to express this belief.[15]
But the stronger claim says that it is the very assent, or the disposition to
assent which creates the belief.
Hence it does not exist in its implicit form before it is explicitly recognised
by the cognitive system of the agent (or simply written in the “belief box”
without being recognised consciously)[16].
An obvious advantage of the strong assent theory of belief is that it eschews
the problem of deduction: if someone believes that P, and P entails Q, it does
not follow that he believes that Q, for the subject does not assent to the
second sentence when he assents to the first: he needs not recognise or process
the implication. But this advantage is lost if we reflect on the fact that
since for the strong assent theory, assenting that P implies believing that P.
And this is just the disquotational principle which Marcus criticizes when she
objects to Kripke’s use of this principle in his puzzle. Pierre assents to
“Londres est jolie” and to “London is not pretty”, and, given his bilingualism,
he should assent to “London is pretty and London is not pretty”. But, as Marcus
says (1993: 160) “The assent does not carry over into a belief”. Assent is
distributed over conjunction, but belief is not. The same feature, as Marcus
notes, is exemplified in the lottery paradox: given a lottery with one million
tickets, one can assent to the sentences “Ticket 1 will not win”, “Ticket 2
will not win”, without believing that the conjunction “Ticket 1 & ticket 2
& …ticket one million will not win”. Together with the other arguments
given by Marcus against the assent theory, such as the necessity to attribute
beliefs to many non linguistic creatures and the need to distinguish beliefs
from their linguistic manifestations, this suggests that only the weaker assent
theory is true, but not the stronger one. Thus we can grant with Marcus the
fact that a number of beliefs (and of course especially human beliefs) carry
over into assents, without allowing that all beliefs do so carry over, that is
without making of assent the very criterion of belief.
But this won’t solve the problem which led us to invoke the notion of
assent or the ability to express one’s beliefs in words: for the fact that
beliefs are not only behavioural maps by which we steer, but can also be
linguistic representations of those maps is precisely invoked in order to
reduce the coarseness of grain of the map conception. The very reason why
language-centered theories seem to give us a finer grain of belief contents is
that taking beliefs to be relations to sentences captures better the way people
take things to be. The linguistic shaping of thoughts allows us to distinguish
the subjective aspects under which we apprehend thoughts which are otherwise
related to the same sets of worlds, or to the same states of affairs. And such
aspects, be they linguistic or not, can be behaviourally relevant (remember the
difference between my belief that P.E. is attacked by a bear and my belief that
I am attacked by a bear). So, how do we locate ourselves in our
belief-worlds? Can we preserve the
picture that there is nothing essentially linguistic about belief and
grant that most of our beliefs are specified through language?
We can adopt, at
this point, two different strategies (although they are in many respects
complementary). One, to which I have already alluded above, would be to try to
specify the various ways in which we can believe one thing (be related to a
certain state of affairs) under a certain mode of presentation, and another
thing under another mode, and hence have different beliefs, or to specify the
various manners by which our beliefs can represent things. This involves
spelling out a particular theory of belief content.
There are indeed may ways of doing this, among which a Fregean theory which
associates each concept or expression with a particular sense or mode of
presentation is only one of them. There are many other competitors on the
market: informational semantics, conceptual role semantics, teleosemantics, to
name a few. The other strategy, which I prefer to take, consists in taking the
problem of content for granted, and to try to account for differences in
beliefs not in terms of their contents, but in terms of the kind of attitudes
that we have towards these contents. On this view, the fineness of grain in
believing does not come only from what is
believed, but also from how we
believe it. Marcus was after such a distinction when she distinguished actual
beliefs from mere claims to believe,
when she pointed out that cases of self-deception or akrasia may manifest divided attitudes in subjects (1993: 244), and
when in general she distinguished beliefs from assents. But we can look
further.
III
The
dispositional-functional conception, which is much involved in our common sense
ascriptions of beliefs has it that we act upon our beliefs, or that they
explain our actions. But we do not simply act out of our beliefs. We also often
act because we accept certain things, take for granted certain things, or see ourselves as committed
to certain things, in addition to our believing certain things, and
sometimes in spite of our believing certain things . For instance a teacher may give a good grade to a student’s
paper, and thus accept that the paper is good, in order to encourage him,
although he believes that the paper is not really worth this grade. Or someone
may feel that he is committed to a certain thesis, although he is not very
confident of its truth. A mathematician who intends to prove a proposition by reductio ad absurdum may take for
granted that the negation of this proposition is true, in order to show that it
is contradictory. Such psychological states as accepting that P, taking it for
granted, premising it, committing oneself to it, or postulating it, do not seem
to be beliefs proper, although, we could say, they arise in the neighbourhood
of beliefs and are belief-like attitudes. A number of writers, and in
particular Stalnaker, Lehrer, Cohen, and Bratman[17],
have emphasised the distinction between beliefs and acceptances, mainly on
the following points. (1) Whereas beliefs are involuntary, acceptances seem to
be voluntary, or at least seem to occur in the context of practical, rather
than theoretical reasoning: acts of acceptance are performed with an intention
to achieve a certain result, rather than to have as outcomes the truth of
certain propositions. (2) Acceptance-states, for this reason, are contextual,
and relative to the aim at stake, whereas beliefs are not.(3) Acceptance is
qualitative or categorical, whereas belief is graded and subject to degrees.
Two further features seem to derive from these points. Whereas beliefs can be
unconscious of tacit, acceptances seem to be explicit and reflective. A
proposition which I accept seems to be in need of being present “before the
mind”. And states of acceptance, for this very reason, seem to be relations to
linguistic entities, such as sentences. How, for example, can I accept, for the
sake of a reductio ad absurdum proof,
that P is not true, without considering explicitly the sentence “P” and what it
means? Cohen, in particular, takes acceptance to be dependent upon language.
For these reasons, it is very tempting to assimilate acceptances to assents, which we have defined as
relations to sentences[18].
But this line of thought creates a dilemma: either
acceptances as assents are mere manifestations
of belief, in which case it is not necessary to distinguish them from beliefs
proper, and one does dot see why the alleged differences (1)-(3) mark a real
distinction, apart from the fact that acceptances are beliefs fleshed out in
linguistic form, or acceptances as
assents are states which are different from beliefs, which implies
automatically the falsity of the stronger assent theory of belief (if assent is
different from belief, the former cannot be a necessary and sufficient
condition of the former) and the dubiousness of the weaker thesis, since it
precisely takes assent to be an explicitation of beliefs which can otherwise be
implicit.
I want to reject the dilemma: acceptances are identifiable neither to beliefs nor to assents, although they share a number of properties with both, since they enjoy a status which is intermediary between the two. Let us start with the differences and similarities between belief and acceptances, before envisaging the connections and differences between acceptances and assent. I take up the points (1)-(3) above in turn.
(1) Accepting
that P, unlike believing that P, is an intentional act, something like to take
the decision to hold a proposition. This constrast strongly with the essential
unvoluntariness of belief[19].
In particular, writers on acceptance frequently claim that one can accept a
proposition without believing that it is true, and even while believing that it
is false, hence contrary to the evidence for its truth. If we take belief to be
essentially a passive state shaped by
evidence, the possibility of such acts of acceptance marks a sharp difference
from belief. Conversely, if we take acceptances to be cases of deciding to
believe or of successful will to believe, then the existence of such
psychological states would be an argument for identifying acceptance and
belief, when belief is, on this view, voluntary. I shall not consider this
converse line of argument, for I do not think that there genuine cases of
voluntary belief, although I shall not deal with this matter here[20].
Now if we focus on the standard examples of acceptance without belief, such as
Cohen’s case of the lawyer who accepts, for professional reasons, that his
client his guilty although he believes that is guilty, it is not obvious that
the lawyer decides to believe, or
brings it about that he believes that his client is innocent. On the contrary,
he maintains his acceptance as a practical postulate, or as a provisional
premise, for the sake of the trial, without withdrawing his belief to the
contrary. Most of these cases involve what we may call pretendings to believe, or simulated
beliefs, in general in social contexts, and most of the time they involve some
sort of conflict between epistemic and practical norms of belief formation. But
such cases of accepting that P in spite of the evidence that justifies the
belief that P, although they dramatically reveal the difference between the two
kinds of states, are not necessarily central cases of acceptances. Many cases
of acceptance are cases where the agent still has evidence for what he accepts,
although the evidence is in some respects insufficient. Take Bratman’s (1992)
example of someone who projects to build a house and estimates the cost at a
certain price, but who nevertheless accepts that the price will be higher than
his estimate, for he wants to contract a loan, and does not want, in case the
actual price would be higher, to have an a lower funding. His acceptance is
distinct from his belief (if he had to bet on the price, he would not evaluate
the price that high); still he accepts the higher price on the basis of his
evidence[21]. Or take
the cases of acceptances as premising in the course of a theoretical reasoning:
they differ from beliefs, for they involve taking for granted a certain
proposition P which one may otherwise only believe to a certain degree, but
they are, like beliefs, shaped by a concern of evidence, and they “aim at
truth” just as beliefs do. In other terms, if justification and truth are norms
of belief formation, as the “evidentialist” thesis has it against voluntarism[22],
acceptances need not diverge from these norms. What they imply, however, is
that the subject has a more conscious grasp and recognition of these norms than
in the case of belief.
This remark gives
us a clue for understanding feature (2) above, the context sensitivity of
acceptances. A subject who accepts a proposition in the course of a reasoning
does not necessarily withdraw, for the purpose of his reasoning, his epistemic
end of searching after truth. But this end becomes for him more conscious than
when he simply forms the corresponding belief and acts upon it. In this sense,
there are two ways to reason, for instance, according to a modus ponens rule of inference: one consists simply in drawing,
from the belief that P and the belief that if P the Q, the conclusion Q, by
acting as if it were true (for instance by refraining to do things which would
imply that Q is not the case); the other consists in acknowledging the rule
itself, and take it as a reason which
validates the conclusion. The outcome, in both cases, is the same – it is the
entertaining of the belief that Q – but it is not reached in the same way. Thus
psychologists of reasoning distinguish between the psychological process of
deduction which individuals perform more or less irreflectively and the process
of meta-deduction which “prepare the way for the development of self conscious
methods for checking validity”[23].
I suggest that acceptance, most of the time, belongs to this (mostly, see below
for a qualification) reflexive stage of inference.
(3) The last
contrast, between belief as an attitude susceptible of degree, and ideally
measurable through subjective probabilities, and acceptance as a qualitative
attitude to propositions taken to be true or not, seems to be the stronger one.
Stalnaker (1984,ch.5) introduces precisely this distinction in order to deal
with the lottery paradox: I can certain believe to degree 0,99999, say, that
respectively ticket 1, ticket 2, …, ticket 10000, will not win, but my beliefs need not carry over to acceptance
that no ticket will win (1984: 91). Acceptances, being, unlike beliefs,
categorical states, are governed by the principle that to accept that P and to
accept that Q entail that I accept the conjunction P&Q. Similarly, although
I should accept that Q if I accept that P, and P entails Q, it does not follow
that the corresponding entailment holds for my beliefs (although it holds for
what I should believe). The
distinction is sufficient to block such contradictions as those that are
exemplified in the lottery or in the logical omniscience examples. But that
does not show that there has to be a huge gap between belief an acceptance. It
does not follow, if we suppose, like Bayesian decision theorists, that our
beliefs have subjective degrees of probability, and that we act on them
together with a principle of maximising utility, that our acceptances should
not mirror our beliefs. Just as in deductive reasoning accepting a proposition
involves becoming reflectively conscious of it, in probabilistic reasoning
accepting a proposition involves using consciously the Bayesian standards that
we use tacitly[24]. This may
involve, as in the lottery case, some conflicts between our usual deductive standards and the Bayesian ones, but
such conflicts are to be expected at the level of acceptance.
From what precedes,
then, I conclude that although acceptances are distinct from dispositional
beliefs, they need not be states which exclude
beliefs and which are totally unrelated to beliefs. Even in the dramatic cases
were they diverge from belief, they arise in the conscious evaluation of
diverging norms for belief: deductive vs inductive, theoretical vs practical.
But now we face a further difficulty. For is seems that the characterisation
that I have given of acceptance, as belief
made conscious, makes it close to assent. For how could we accept
propositions in a reflective manner without considering their linguistic
clothing in sentences. Certainly, the description that I have given above of
reasoning, in the acceptance mode, from a modus
ponens style of inference, seems to involve considering sentences. Moreover
acceptance as I have characterised it, seems to be made possible by the
capacity to reach second-order beliefs, beliefs about beliefs, which are often
said to be made possible only through language. It is an issue, in the theory of mind literature as well as in
ethology, whether meta-propositional thought is made possible by language, but
this thesis seems to be immensely plausible.[25]
It is, therefore, tempting to come back to the assimilation of acceptance
states to states of assent, and given that I have emphasised the similarities
between belief and acceptance, it runs the risk of bringing back a
language-centered view of belief. But I think that we can grant that what we
might call the acceptance system in the cognitive economy of an individual is
related, both in its formation and in its activation, to the capacity to
process and to consider sentences, without granting that acceptance is essentially a linguistic state, mainly
for two reasons. First, if acceptance is mostly a conscious state, it does not
follow that all conscious reasoning through acceptance goes by explicitly
considering sentences. If I form a plan, for instance, to come back home by
passing in front of a library and if I accept, in the course of my plan, that I
shall pick up a book if the library is open, my conscious thoughts need not
involve the consideration of sentences. Similarly for many cases of practical
reasoning. Second, although I have tended above to assimilate acceptance to a
conscious state, it need not be so: as Cohen says, there might me tacit
premising, and tacit acceptances as well[26].
This seems to be acknowledged by psychologists of reasoning. For instance when
Johnson-Laird and Byrne (1991) claim that propositional reasoning goes by the
formation of mental models and by the use of a semantic principle that an
inference is valid if it does not have counter-models, they can follow tacitly
this rule and the procedures of mental model formation, and hence accept them,
without consciously doing so. Nothing seems to prevent us from saying that
there is, in such cases, a tacit knowledge of normative principles[27].
But what, then, would be the difference between these tacit acceptances and the
tacit beliefs that we have granted on
the dispositional view? Surely such tacit acceptances have in common with the
tacit beliefs that they are dispositions, and that we act upon them as if they
were true. But what they do not have in common is that they are dispositions to
reason, and not simply to act, upon a certain pattern of beliefs, such as, for instance, the modus ponens pattern. Hence their importance in inferences. What
marks their difference with mere dispositional beliefs is that they are
dispositions to reason, not simply to act.[28]
Thus the active features of acceptances do not imply the falsity of an overall
functionalist picture of the mind: they are functional states. Only a narrow
kind of functionalism, which would insist on the essential passivity of belief,
would contradict the acknowledgement of such states.[29]
If this is correct, then, acceptances share both with
beliefs certain dispositional features, which relate them to acting as if
certain propositions were true, and with assents certain other features, which
relate them with the explicit consideration of linguistic propositions. But
what I have tried to suggest is that they reduce to neither of them, and enjoy
a intermediary status. Assents and acceptances are cases of dispositional
beliefs plus something, where the
“something” is different in each case. Instead of a simple difference between
belief and assent, as that upon which Ruth Marcus lays correct emphasis, we
should have a complex series of distinctions, between beliefs and acceptances,
between acceptances and assents, and between beliefs and assents. But the
distinctions do not mark, in many cases, sharp oppositions. All these states
lay on a continuum. In many respects it seems to be just a matter of
terminology, for sometimes it may be more economical to say that we are simply
dealing with “beliefs”. But in other cases failure to sort out the various
kinds of states leads to a distorsion of the facts. This is why doxastic life
is so complex.*
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[1] Marcus 1981; 1983, 1990 (both of these quoted from her 1993); 1995. These essays, written in her
caracteristically vigorous and lucid style, may well be as pioneering in their
field as her more well-known work on modality. For instance, her account
implies that there is much more symmetry between knowledge and belief than it
is usually said, an insight which has recently be rediscovered by Williamson
(1996); see for instance 1993: 144.
Ruth Marcus’s uncompromising sense of what good philosophy should be
and her unfailing search after truth have been for me a model. I dedicate the
present paper to her with admiration and affection.
[2] Kripke 1979.
[3] In my critical review of Marcus 1993
(Engel 1997b) I emphasised this point. I try here to develop it. See also Engel
(1995), Engel (1996 and 1997a) ,
Engel to appear
[4] Marcus 1995: 126; 1993: 241
[5] Brathwaite 1932-33, Ramsey 1926
[6] for such accounts, see for instance the
papers in Salmon and Soames 1988. for the difficulties, see in particular
Schiffer 1986 and for a summary of the difficulties Engel 1998 b
[7] Marcus 1993 (1986) : 147, note 5, notes
this point, in the only passage that I know of where she refers to Stalnaker’s
theory.
[8] For an explicit connexion between the
map image and the possible world analysis, see Braddon-Mitchell and Jackson
1996: 179-190
[9]
For a defense of the Ramseyian pragmatist theory of belief content, see
Whyte 1990 ( who calls it a “success semantics”)
[10] Ramsey 1926, p.65 ; p.68 respectively.
[11] Se Stalnaker 1984: 82
[12] Braddon-Mitchell & Jackson 1996:
192.
[13]
In this sense, Pettit (1998: 17) says : “The first mark of believing
something- if you like the criterion of belief- is that you are disposed to act
appropriately. Behavioural-plus modes of belief satisfy this mark and will be
distinguished from mere behavioural belief by the fact of involving something
else as well.” And he adds, just along the same lines as Marcus: “ This is not an
uncontentious line to take, of course. It means that all we have to say, for
example, that someone who claims to believe something that is necessarily false
– someone who assents to a necessarily false assertion – cannot really believe
it, they can only believe that the words accepted express a truth.”( ibid. note 1).
[14] Pettit 1998 uses a different term, and
calls this the “judgmental” conception of belief. It should be clear that
assent, in the sense in which I am taking it, is not simply assent to a sentence, for otherwise parroting, or
mere the “holding-true” of a sentence which one does not understand would be
belief. The assented sentence has to be
understood, and thus must be have a meaning for the subject. It has to be what
the sentence expresses, either in the language of the subject, or in some
language into which it can be translated, hence it must be something like a
proposition.
[15] Braddon-Mitchell and Jackson 1996: 192.
Marcus makes remarks to the same effect in 1993: 242-243
[16]
As Braddon-Mitchell and Jackson (ibid.) aptly remark, this does not imply that views according to which
belief is assent to a internal sentence are unable to acknowledge the existence
of implicit beliefs, but it implies a contrast between an internal sentence
theory of implicit belief and a dispositional one: for the latter all beliefs are potentially implicit and are already there in the
cognitive system, whereas for the former, implicit beliefs are those which can
be derived, more or less easily, from a core of internal sentences. In other
terms, for the dispositionalist you do
believe that elephants don’t wear
pyjamas, whereas for the internal sentence theorist you don’t really
believe it until someone attracts your attention to it.
[17]
Most notably Stalnaker 1984, ch. 5, Lehrer (1990), Cohen (1992), Bratman
(1992). For a review of this literature, see Engel (1998) and Frankish’s two
remarkable papers (1998a, 1998b).
[18] And indeed many writers seem to do so.
For instance De Sousa (1971) in a pioneering paper on this topics, seems to
call “assent” what we call here “acceptance”, and Dennett (1978) talks of
“opinions” as a species of linguistic
assentings.
[19] Locus
classicus: Williams 1971.
[20] For essentially the same reasons as
those given by Williams (1971). The fact that acceptances involve a voluntary
element does not imply, in my view, that voluntarism about belief is true. The
distinction between acceptance and belief implies only a weak form of
voluntarism, although I shall to try to ague for this here. For more on this
issue, see Engel 1997 a.
[21] Similarly, Kant’s ( KRV, A 824/ B 852)
example of a physician who accepts that his patient has tuberculosis, although
he is unsure, on the basis of the symptoms that it is actually tuberculosis: he
prefers to err on the side of prudence, but his acceptance is also justified by
his evidence
[22] Evidentialism is usually defined as the
thesis that beliefs are involuntary and only subject to epistemic norms,
whereas voluntarism combines both the psychological thesis that there can be
intentional acts of believing and the normative thesis that epistemic norms can
be, sometimes, preferred to practical or prudential norms.
[23] Johnson Laird & Byrne 1991: 147
[24] The point is well made by Frankish,
1998: 433.
[25] See for instance, among others in a vast
literature, Carruthers & Smith 1996
[26] Frankish 1998 b, develops a whole theory
of acceptance, as emulation or simulations of first-order dispositional
beliefs, which he calls virtual beliefs,
of which tacit acceptances are only a part. I take the remarks given here to be
very much in line with his, although I do not deal with the notion of
simulation.
[27] This marks a difference with usual
accounts of tacit knowledge, which ascribe such knowledge about a descriptive theory (of grammar, say).
what Peacocke (1992) calls possession conditions for concepts (especially
logical concepts) are both normative in this sense, and not necessarily
explicit.
[28] What I call implicit acceptance in this
sense are quite close to what Pettit (1998) calls “practical beliefs”, which he
defines precisely as “dispositions to reason according to a certain pattern.”
[29] It is characteristic of Stalnaker’s
account of acceptances (1984: ch.5) that he defines them as functional states
alongside with beliefs. The same point is stressed by Lehrer (forthcoming).
* Many thanks to Keith Frankish for his
remarks on this paper