Believing, holding true, and accepting
Pascal ENGEL
Philosophical Explorations, I, 2. 1998, 140-151
1. Suppose you
leaf through the pages of a book on Taoism[1], written by a renowned expert, and that you do not
know nothing about the Tao, or Chinese philosophy, or even the Chinese
language, and you read this:
"Zhuangzi's principle is that you cannot get a shi without having a cheng "
You do not know who this Zhuangzi is, not even if it
is the name of a man; you don’t know either what a shi or a cheng is. But on
the basis of the author's authority, you believe that the sentence “Zhuangzi's
principle is that you cannot get a shi without having a cheng” is true. You do
not understand this sentence, for you do not know what it means, therefore you
don't believe that Zhuangzi's principle is that you cannot get a shi without having a cheng. Nevertheless you believe the
sentence to be true. But how can you believe that a sentence is true without
believing what it says? That seems paradoxical, because it leads to a version
of Moore's paradox. You have:
"Zhuangzi's principle is that you cannot get a shi without having a cheng" is true, but I do not
believe that Zhuangzi's principle is that you cannot get a shi without having a cheng
but by the famous Tarskian equivalence you have:
"Zhuangzi's principle is that you cannot get a shi without having a cheng" is true iff Zhuangzi's
principle is that you cannot get a shi
without having a cheng.
And, substituting, you get a Moore's paradox :
Zhuangzi's principle is that you cannot get a shi without having a cheng, but I do not believe that
Zhuangzi's principle is that you cannot get a shi without having a cheng
But on
reflection, there is no Moorean paradox here. For there are two distinct
propositional attitudes. One is the familiar attitude of believing that p, in the sense of believing the content
or the proposition expressed by the sentence 'p'. The other one is the attitude of holding true the sentence 'p'.
And it certainly is possible to have the latter without having the former. This
happens quite often. We could never learn any new language, if we could not
hold true certain sentences which are presented to us, before learning their
meanings. For instance, my method for learning Mandarin asks me to hold true ‘Wo hui shuo Fawen ’, although I will
discover only later what it means. There are many things that we believe on the
basis of some authoritative statements, but that we do not understand , or at
least do not understand fully. I am not saying that it should happen all the
time, and that we should only believe what famous authorities say, although
that's obviously what authorities -- such as the Pope, or Nobel laureates, or
the Dalai Lama, or the Ministry of Information -- want us to believe. But it quite
often happens, especially when learning rules. As Wittgenstein says, when I
obey a rule, I follow the rule blindly.
In this respect, holding true is like following a rule. Some writers, like
Cardinal Newman, even say that this happens with religious belief (Newman wants
to allow that we can believe a lot of things which we do not understand, such
as the dogma of the Holy Trinity).
So the
conditional
(a) if X holds true 'p' then X believes that p
is not always true. But its converse seems to be true:
(b) if X believes that p, then X holds true 'p'
at least according to the view that believing that p involves assenting to a sentence
meaning that p. From the viewpoint of
(b) assenting can be either an inner mental act, accomplished in foro interno, or a public speech act
of asserting a sentence in a public language. So (b) can be spelled out in two
ways:
(b') if X believes
that p, then X assents mentally to 'p'
or
(b'') if X believes
that p, then X asserts 'p'.
Certainly if I believe that you can't have a shi without having a cheng, then I will normally assent to
the sentence "you can't have a shi without
having a cheng" and normally
assert this sentence, provided, of course, that I understand what the sentence
means. But this proviso is precisely the reason why a number of philosophers
object to the theory that believing that p
implies assenting to an actual or to a potential sentence which means that p. For, they say, you may not know what
'p' means, and you could believe that
p without ever assenting to any
sentence 'p ', actual or potential.
This is precisely the objection that has been put forward against all so-called
quotational theories of propositional attitudes reports, according to which to
believe that p is to be in relation
to a certain sentence. What these writers object to is the so-called
disquotational principle:
(c) if X sincerely (honestly) assents to 'p' then x believes that p
(see e.g. Marcus 1986). So, according to these
authors, believing that p cannot be a
matter of assenting to a sentence. Some authors take believing to be an assent
to entities other than sentences. For instance, some say:
(d) if X believes that p, then X assents to some mental
representation meaning that p.
or
(e) if X believes
that p, then X assents to a token
sentence 'p' in X's language of
thought.
But some writers do not like the idea of assenting to
any item at all. For these writers believing must involve a relationship to
some other entity than a sentence. Some say that:
(f) if X believes
that p, then X is related to a
proposition that p
and others say that:
(g) if X believes that p, then X
is related to the fact that p.
But there are also authors who do not think that
believing implies any assent, or any special relationship to an entity. Some
hold the dispositional view of belief:
(h) if X believes
that p, then X is disposed to act in
such a way that p comes out true.
However, (h) can, according to one version, come back
to the view that believing is assent to a sentence 'p', indeed by asserting that p
in some public language. But according to other versions, there is no conscious
assent to any sentence or any mental representation.
This is, in
particular, Ramsey's version of the so-called dispositional view of belief. For
Ramsey, it is not necessary, for believing that p, that one has any conscious mental episode of assent to any
mental or linguistic item. According to him, we have many beliefs during our
life of which we are never conscious, or which never ‘come to our mind’. This
does not mean that these beliefs are unconscious in some deep Freudian sense,
but only that they may never be activated
or become explicitly entertained by the individuals who have them. Nor does
this mean that such beliefs cannot be mental episodes, only that they may not
be. For instance, I may now believe that it is raining, and think or entertain
the thought that it is raining, and be consciously attending to my belief. But
I also may stop thinking that it is raining without stopping believing that it
is raining. Or I may have always believed that Hong Kong is smaller than Mexico
City, but the belief will probably have never occurred to me. Spelling out
fully the dispositional theory of belief is a delicate matter. Some
philosophers, like Peirce, say that beliefs in this sense are habits, just like
the habit I have of beginning with the left leg when I put on my trousers.
Others identify them with dispositions to act which are not necessarily habits.
Others talk of ‘tacit’ or ‘implicit’ beliefs, opposing them to explicit beliefs
which prompt certain acts of assent. Are beliefs in this sense dispositions,
states, or what? I shall not answer these difficult questions here. I shall
simply assume the following, more or less obvious things about beliefs.
(1) Beliefs are involuntary, and are not normally
subject to direct voluntary control. I cannot believe at will that my trousers
are on fire or that the Dalai Lama is a living God, even if you pay me a large
amount of money to believe so. Thus I agree with Bernard Williams (1971) that
the phrase ‘deciding to believe’ is a sort of contradiction in terms, which
makes Williams James's famous title The
will to believe at least odd. Williams links this feature to two others,
which are related :
(2) Beliefs aim at truth: this means that when one's
belief is shaped not by a concern for its truth, but by what one wants to be
the case, the subject is more or less a wishful thinker or possibly a
self-deceiver.
(3) In
relation to this, beliefs are shaped by evidence for what is believed, and the
degree to which a belief is reasonable is proportional to the degree of
evidence that one has for its truth. This is why, prima facie, it is not reasonable to believe contrary to the
evidence that one has. This is also why cases of wilful belief are not in
general cases of belief at will, but of manipulation of the evidence that leads
to having a belief (for instance, by use of drugs, or hypnosis).
(4) An agent’s beliefs are subject to an ideal of
integration or agglomeration. Other things being equal, we should try to make
our beliefs coherent or consistent, and to fit them together within some larger
view. Some philosophers say that in this sense belief is a ‘normative’ notion;
however, one does not need to express oneself in such grand terms to see what
this means. But this is another sense in which our beliefs aim at being
rational, or reasonable.
(5) Belief is context independent: at a given time a
subject believes something or does not believe this something, but he does not
believe that p relative to a context
and not relative to another. It would be absurd, or a case of conceit, to say
that on Wednesdays I believe that Hong Kong is a noisy town, and on Sundays I
do not believe this. I certainly can have both beliefs if they answer to
different pieces of evidence (for instance, there are a lot of cars on
Wednesdays which do not come to town on Sundays), but it is an odd thing to say
as a general truth about Hong Kong. Either I believe that Hong Kong is noisy,
or I don't, period.
These five
features, you will notice, apply to beliefs as well as to propositions, or to
sentences. A sentence is true or false independently of whether we like it
or not; depending on the evidence for
its truth, sentences can form consistent sets, and their truth, although often
contextual, can at least be envisaged independently of context. And similarly
for propositions, whatever they are supposed to be. So it is not surprising
that one can be tempted to assimilate the contents of beliefs with sentences or
with propositions understood as entities more or less similar to sentences, and
tempted to take believing to be some form of assent to sentences or to
propositions, some form of holding true a mental or a public sentence. But
although I do not deny that a number of our beliefs are tied to such mental
states of assent and to linguistic acts of assertion, they need not be so. In
this respect, I agree with Ramsey that not all of our beliefs need to be
conscious. Assents form only the tip of an iceberg of beliefs as more or less
persistent states or dispositions to act. So we have to distinguish beliefs as
assents from beliefs proper. The main difference is this (and this is the sixth
feature of belief):
(6) beliefs come in degrees, and these degrees are
subjective probabilities. In this respect I agree with the Ramseyian, Bayesian
view of beliefs. A belief corresponds to a probability function which is
determined by a person's preferences regarding gambles. According to the
Bayesian, one has subjective probability function p only if there exists a
utility function u such that one's
preferences maximise expected utility relative to p and u. In other terms,
belief is not primarily a qualitative
but a quantitative concept. This is
why it is not completely right to say, as I said above, that either you believe
that Hong Kong is noisy, or you don't. This disjunction applies to partial belief, belief to a degree
between 0 and 1 and not only to full
belief, belief to a degree 0 or 1.
Now Bayesians, when they defend the
quantitative notion of belief, tend to reject the qualita tive notion. For
instance, Patrick Maher writes: "The term belief is traditionally used to refer to propositions that a person
accepts, or holds as true. Belief in
this sense is closely associated with assent,
and like assent it is a qualitative concept: a person either believes something
or does not believe it." (Maher 1986: 363) And Maher goes on to argue that
belief as assent or as acceptance of a proposition is ‘irrelevant’ to rational
action (see also Jeffrey 1972). The Bayesian says this because, for him, to
determine whether an action is rational you need only ascribe to an agent
partial beliefs and degrees of desirabilities. The person need not believe, in the sense of assent to, or
accept a given proposition, in order to act upon it. She only needs to partially believe that p. Against this many writers object that
we can act rationally or deliberate when we take a given course of action
without assigning precise degrees to our beliefs. They point out that if we
were to attempt to assign such degrees, our computations would be so enormously
complicated that we would risk combinatorial explosion. They also argue that we
generally act and reason on the basis of propositions that we believe, or don't
believe, or that we accept or not, period. (Harman 1986, Ch. 3).
How can we
settle this dispute? I think the proper course to take is to split, as I did
before, the concept of belief into two different kinds, one being belief proper
(which has the six characteristic features of belief), the other being assent
or acceptance (cf. de Sousa 1971, or Dennett 1978). On this view, assent or
acceptance is one among other manifestations of belief proper. But indeed
assent or acceptance is related to
belief, in the following sense: in general we assent to propositions to which
we assign a high degree of probability (at least superior to 0.5), that is to
propositions which we take to be likely to be true on the basis of our
evidence. So from this point of view, even if assent or acceptance is a
different mental state from belief, it is still closely associated with it.
Indeed in this sense, assent or acceptance is irrelevant, or epiphenomenal,
with respect to rational action and with respect to reasoning or inquiry in
general.
But the critics
of the Bayesian, or of the dispositional conception of belief have something
else in mind than just a difference between belief proper and assent on the
other hand as based on belief. They want to argue that there are propositions
to which we give our assent or that we accept independently of what we believe, in the dispositional-subjective
probability sense. And they want to allow the possibility that we might accept
things in spite of what we actually
believe. So the strategy of splitting belief into two kinds has to be refined
by refining the concept of acceptance.
2. A
number of writers (in particular Stalnaker 1984, Van Fraassen 1989, Lehrer
1990, Cohen 1992, Ullman-Margalit and Margalit 1992, Bratman 1993) have argued
that one must distinguish belief, understood in more or less the sense that I
have given above, from acceptance. But the distinction they have in mind is not
the distinction between on the one hand belief as a disposition or a permanent
state, and on the other acceptance as a mental act of assenting to a sentence
(holding true) or to a proposition. For them, accepting that p may be tied to such a mental act, but
it need not be. Cohen's definition of acceptance is that
"to accept that p is to have or to adopt a policy of deeming, positing, or
postulating that p, i.e. of including that proposition or rule
among one's premisses for deciding what to do or think in a particular context,
whether or not one feels it to be true that p."
(Cohen 1992, p.4)
As these last words indicate, Cohen takes belief to be
a ‘feeling that p is true’. I do not
see what it means exactly. He says that belief is not a disposition or a habit,
but a mental state of feeling, which is presumably conscious, unlike dispositions.
Feeling that is a propositional
attitude more or less similar to mental act of assent, so it does not coincide
with what I have called belief proper. But we do not need to agree with Cohen
on this notion of belief to see the contrast that he wants to make. He claims
that acceptance differs from belief in the sense that one can accept, or posit,
or suppose that p irrespective of
what one believes on a matter. The reasons for accepting that p may be prudential, rather than
evidential, and they are often tied to a context of practical deliberation. To
take one of his examples, an attorney can accept, for the purposes of pleading
before a jury, that his client is innocent, although he believes that his
client is guilty. In this case, one accepts that p although one believes that not
p. Acceptance in this sense is very close to what Kant calls pragmatic belief and which he describes
with the following example:
"The physician must pursue some course in the
case of a patient who is in danger, but is ignorant of the nature of the
disease. He observes the symptoms, and concludes, according to the best of his
judgements, that it is a case of phthisis. His belief is, even in his own
judgement, only contin gent; another man might, perhaps, come nearer the truth.
Such a belief, contingent indeed, but still forming the ground of the actual
use of means for the attainment of certain ends, I term pragmatic belief. " (KRV, Transcendental
doctrine of method, quoted in Margalit & Ullman 1992, p.173)
Here, as Kant says, the physician may not believe --
in the sense of having good reasons for it -- that it is a case of phthisis.
But he nevertheless accepts it, for pragmatic reasons: it’s safer to err on the
side of prudence. As Kant's example show, acceptance that p in this sense can coexist with a relatively high degree of belief
that p, but it is a distinct mental
act, indeed a sort of deci sion, that one takes, whatever one believes. One can
frame a lot of examples like this. I may, on going out today, believe to a high
degree that it will rain, because there are a lot of heavy clouds in the sky,
and because the weather forecast predicts rain. But I don't believe it fully,
because in this region it quite often happens that there are signs of rain but
no rain comes. I may also find the prospect of carrying an umbrella not very
pleasant; in fact, I dislike carrying an umbrella or anything. Nor do I like
the prospect of getting wet. So in that case I may just accept, or take it for granted, that it will rain, and on the basis
of this acceptance, carry my umbrella. It simplifies my deliberation. Although
I believe that it will rain, it is not this belief which leads me to action. Or
take an example of Bratman's. A person who plans to build a house is given
various estimates of the cost by subcontractors (plumbers, carpenters, etc.).
But she is unsure whether she currently has all the financial resources to do
the whole thing at once. In the face of this uncertainty, she simply accepts
the highest of the estimates, and determines whether she has enough money to
start the project. Although she does not in fact believe that the house will
cost so much, it is useful to accept that it will cost a certain amount in
order to decide whether or not to start construction. As Bratman says, "in
contrast, if you offered me a bet on the actual cost of the project -- the
winner being the person whose guess is closest to the actual total -- I would
reason differently.
Acceptance in
this sense differs from belief. If we compare it to the various features of
beliefs that we have given, we see that it lacks a number of them, or even has
contrary ones.
(1') Acceptance is voluntary or intentional, unlike
belief. In a certain sense, it is a form of decision to believe. But it is not
a decision to believe in the sense
that a belief could be brought out by our will, because in all the cases I have
presented the agent does have certain, sometimes contrary, beliefs distinct
from what he accepts. So we can say that the belief content, or the proposition
which is accepted, is not the same or need not be the same as that which is the
object of acceptance.
(2') Acceptance aims not at truth, but at utility or
success. In this sense it is a pragmatic notion, not a cognitive or theoretical
one. On can accept certain things that one believes to be false. Nevertheless,
acceptance is also deeming true
certain things. It goes with the attitude of acceptance that it take what I
accept as true, although I may believe it is false.
(3') Acceptance, for the same reason, need not be
shaped by evidence or evidential reasons.
(4') Acceptance is not regulated by an ideal of
rational integration in the same sense as belief. I may, for pragmatic or
perhaps social reasons, accept certain things which do not cohere with my other
beliefs. For instance, it is in general a good social policy to accept that the
speaker who is reading a paper is not boring, although you may not believe it,
and repress yawns. Nevertheless, acceptance is subject to some sort of
practical, rational integration, in the sense, emphasised by Cohen, that my
policies of deeming true certain things have to be coherent.
(5') Unlike belief, acceptance is context-dependent.
As I said, I believe (to a degree) that p independently of a context. But my
acceptances are contextual: I may withdraw them in other contexts.
(6') Unlike belief, acceptance is an all or nothing
matter. My beliefs have degrees, but in the deliberation contexts in which I
accept that p, my acceptance is
qualitative, not quantitative.
We now have a
concept of acceptance that is distinct from the one we started with. Earlier I
have distinguished acceptance from belief on the basis of the idea that
acceptance is a form of conscious assent, the mental act of consciously
assenting that, or in a more traditional terminology, judging that p. This can
be either a voluntary act (for instance, it is one, based on] Descartes’
conception of judgement as a voluntary act of the will, where the will assents
to the ideas presented by the understanding), or a non-voluntary one (from
Hume’s point of view of belief as a certain feeling of assent -- and
perhaps from Cohen’s point of view,
assent is not an effect of the will). I do not want to discuss this issue here,
although I side more with Hume than with Descartes on this point. From the
viewpoint I propose, belief proper is distinct from assent, and from holding
true a sentence. Let us call acceptance as assent acceptance1. But
acceptance1 is distinct from the second species of acceptance that I
have presented, which we may call acceptance2. Acceptance1
is related to belief in the sense that is prompted by belief; it is indeed the
ordinary manifestation of belief, even if it is accomplished in foro interno. But acceptance2
is, as we saw, both distinct from belief, because it can occur without the
corresponding belief, and from acceptance1, because it may not be
tied to any assent. Acceptance2, in Cohen's or Bratman's sense, is a
policy of taking for granted that p.
The policy may not be reflexive or conscious. As Cohen says "acceptance
[i.e or us acceptance2 ] may be tacit” (1992, p.12). Nevertheless,
Cohen does not sufficiently distinguish acceptance1 from acceptance2,
although he does distinguish accepting2 and performing some speech
act of assertion. Ullman and Margalit (1992) have a nice word for acceptance2
: they call it holding as true, in
order to distinguish it from holding true or assent.
I think it is
quite useful to have this threefold distinction between belief, acceptance1
as assent, and acceptance2 as pragmatic acceptance. I agree with
Cohen that failure to make both the twofold and the threefold distinction leads
to all sorts of confusions on various topics (self-deception, purposive
explanation, belief vs knowledge, etc.). Most important, it allows us to see
that between the two extreme attitudes of entertaining an idea and knowledge,
there lies a multiplicity of attitudes on the spectrum ( Ullman & Margalit
1992, p.169). There are others. For instance, there is the attitude of holding
‘come what may’ a statement, in the sense in which Quine says in his critique
of the analytic-synthetic distinction:
"A statement can be true come what may [my italics], if we make drastic enough adjustments
in the system." (From a logical
point of view, p.13)
Here Quine is referring to an attitude, which is not
simply practical (although it is to some extent practical) but also
theoretical, of maintaining a statement in spite of good reasons we might have
for not doing so. Acceptance, in this more theoretical sense, may also coincide
with Van Fraassen's (1981, 1989) concept, when he says, in an instrumentalistic
vein, that we may accept a scientific theory as empirically adequate without
believing that it is true. This is closely related to acceptance2.
But I shall not examine Van Fraassen's view here. Another attitude along the
spectrum of doxastic attitudes that we have described, which Ullman and
Margalit mention, is Wittgenstein's notion of ‘holding fast’ in On Certainty. I hold fast, for instance,
that I was not born five centuries ago, or that the earth existed long before
my birth, etc. Nor would it be
appropriate to say that it is something I believe, or even that is something I
know. In some sense it is something that I accept, or take for granted, but not
in the more specific sense of acceptance2.
3. On Cohen and others’ conception of the distinction between belief and
acceptance (acceptance2, but I shall drop the subscript in what
follows, unless specified), the main point is that acceptance does not entail
belief and is independent of it. Hence their complaint that many philosophers
have lumped the two notions together. But why have the philosophers tended to
lump them together? Because, I want to argue, acceptance is much more closely
tied to belief than Cohen and others think.
The most
obvious connection between the two attitudes it that, as Cohen (1992, p.17)
says, "having a belief that p
can often be taken to be at least a prima
facie reason for accepting p,
even though it may well not be the only, or the best, or not even a sufficient
reason." We tend to accept something because in the first place we believe
it. But what actually makes acceptance distinct from belief is that belief is
not our only reason for accepting.
There are two kinds of cases that we have to distinguish here. One is the case
where we have a belief, but which is an insufficient but necessary reason for
acceptance. This is what happens in the example of the physician given by Kant,
in the example of the umbrella, and in the example of the person who plans to
build a house. And there are the cases where our beliefs are neither sufficient
nor necessary for acceptance, for instance the attorney case. But is it correct
to say, as Cohen and Bratman do, that belief can be neither a necessary nor a
sufficient reason for acceptance?
Take the
first kind of case. Would I accept that it will rain if I did not already have
the belief that it will rain? No, for in the case described, I have this
belief. My acceptance that it will rain is, so to say, supervenient upon my
belief: I would not accept it if I did not believe, and if I believed
differently, I would not accept it. So here belief is necessary. If I believed
that it will not rain, could I accept that it will rain? Cohen and Bratman say
it is possible. The first kind of case collapses into the second. That would be
a case similar to the attorney's case. But then I would accept, against all
odds, that it will rain. It would be very strange, and indeed to some extent
irrational, to go out with an umbrella on one of these sunny autumn days that
we enjoy in Hong Kong, when all the weather forecasts predict dry and sunny
days. I might insist that is safe to take my umbrella, but my sense of safety
may be exaggerated. It is said that Schopenhauer always insisted, when he sat
in a house, to be seated close to the door, in case of fire. That may have
proved to be prudent, but it might better be described as a case of mania. Take
now the attorney case. He believes that his client is guilty, but accepts that
he is not. This is rational, given his professional role. But why does he
accept that the client is innocent? Precisely because he believes that he is
not. He would not have to take this act of acceptance in the first place if did
not believe this. I want to suggest here that there is a similarity with
self-deception. A self-deceiver is
usually described as someone who believes that p on the basis of reasonable evidence, but nevertheless believes
that not p, because of some
unpleasantness of the belief that p,
or because in some way he desires that it would be true that not p (Davidson 1985). Cohen criticizes
(1992, Ch. 5) this description, and claims that what happens to the
self-deceiver is that he believes
that p, but accepts that not p. I
think it is correct, and that, for a least a class of cases, it dispels the
self-deception paradox: the subject is not irrational in the sense that he does
not have contradictory beliefs; it is
rather that he has two different states of mind, one with respect to p, the other with respect to not p. The reason why it is irrational,
nevertheless, is that there should be a connection between what one believes
and what one accepts. In the attorney case, something like this happens,
although it is not a case of irrationality. It is, in a sense, similar to
Ulysses’ attitude in the presence of the sirens (Elster 1979): he ties himself
to the mast in order not to react in the way he fears he will react, namely by
following these charming creatures. Similarly, we accept certain things because
we are not sure of where our beliefs can lead us. But these acts of acceptance
are hardly independent of our beliefs. Indeed, our beliefs are among the causes
of (reasons for) these acts, the other reasons being desires, fears, etc. and
other evaluative attitudes.
Finally, is
acceptance unrelated to belief in the sense that the former, but not the
latter, has degrees of subjective probability? Take here Bratman's example of
the person who plans to build a house. Bratman's point is that acceptance is,
like what he calls plans, quite independent of what I believe and of my
subjective probabilities. He wants to say that there can be rational
deliberation informed by plans but not by beliefs. Acceptance is just one
attitude coherent with this planning process. But here again, we can agree that
there can be acts of acceptance distinct from beliefs in the light of evidence,
without agreeing that they are independent of subjective probabilities. For
Bratman says that the prospective builder accepts that the cost will be a
certain amount, say £ 20,000. But (as Clarke 1994 remarks), what he accepts
here is not that the house will cost £ 20 000 . What he accepts is £ 20,000 but
that the probability of the estimated cost of £ 20,000 exceeds the estimated
cost that he makes. And he makes this estimation just in the way a good
Bayesian would do it: by calculating the prior estimated probability, and by
taking the conditional probability of the cost given this first estimate. He
accepts finally that the probability that the total cost of 20,000 exceeds his
prior estimate. But he certainly makes this estimate on the basis of his
subjective probabilities. So acceptance here is not identical to a subjective probability, although it is based on one.
So, contrary to what we said in point (6'), acceptance is tied to subjective
probabilities. Cohen recognizes this when he says that although acceptance is
not a matter of degree, acceptance-worthiness is (Cohen 1992, p.114). This does
not threaten, however, the idea that Cohen wants to put forward, i.e.that
acceptance is a qualitative attitude, voluntary, contextual, whereas belief is
an quantitative, involuntary, non-contextual attitude. But it does threaten the
idea that acceptance does not entail belief.
If this is
correct, then, there is an important distinction to be made between the various
kinds of attitude related to belief: belief itself, holding- true, assenting
(what I have called acceptance1) and pragmatic acceptance (acceptance2).
The distinctions are important not only for themselves, but also for a wide
variety of philosophical issues, which I have only mentioned in passing. But we
should not forget that these attitudes are, nevertheless, all closely related
to belief. Given that belief is primarily a cognitive attitude, which relates
to how we get information from the world, besides being also an attitude which
plays a role in our actions, we should not forget that however ‘pragmatic’ or
‘action-oriented’ our acceptances can be, they are tied to our beliefs, and
therefore to our cognition. This sets a limit to pragmatism, understood as a
doctrine according to which the pursuit of knowledge is determined by our
actions and their success. However much we will to believe, i.e. to accept,
there is still much to believe without willing it.*
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*
Versions of this paper have been
read at the Universities of Hong Kong, Osaka, Dundee, Edimburgh, Stirling,
King’s College London, at the Centre
de Recherches en Epistémologie Appliquée, Paris, at a Davidson conference in
Leuven in 1995 and at a conference on “believing ancd accepting” that I
organized at the University of Caen in
1995 (proceedings to appear in Engel (ed) to
appear . I thank for their remarks
the participants in these seminars and conferences, and in particular Laurence
Goldstein, Michio Kobayashi, Neil Cooper, Roger Young, Tim Williamson, Mark
Sainsbury, David Papineau, Richard Sorabji,
Jean Pierre Dupuy, David Clarke, Jonathan Cohen, Peter Railton, Donald
Davidson and Philip Pettit.