This paper explains a fallacy that often arises in theorizing about human minds. I call it the Factual Belief Fallacy. The Fallacy, roughly, involves drawing conclusions about human psychology that improperly ignore the large backgrounds of mostly accurate factual beliefs people have. The Factual Belief Fallacy has led to significant mistakes in both philosophy of mind and cognitive science of religion. Avoiding it helps us better see the difference between factual belief and religious credence; seeing that difference in turn enables (...) us to pose interesting normative questions about various mental states labeled “belief.”. (shrink)

Predictive processing framework has found wide applications in cognitive science and philosophy. It is an attractive candidate for a unified account of the mind in which perception, action, and cognition fit together in a single model. However, PP cannot claim this role if it fails to accommodate an essential part of cognition—conceptual thought. Recently, Williams argued that PP struggles to address at least two of thought’s core properties—generality and rich compositionality. In this paper, I show that neither necessarily presents a (...) problem for PP. In particular, I argue that because we do not have access to cognitive processes but only to their conscious manifestations, compositionality may be a manifest property of thought, rather than a feature of the thinking process, and result from the interplay of thinking and language. Pace Williams, both of these capacities, constituting parts of a complex and multifarious cognitive system, may be fully based on the architectural principles of PP. Under the assumption that language presents a subsystem separate from conceptual thought, I sketch out one possible way for PP to accommodate both generality and rich compositionality. (shrink)

Concept contextualism is the view that the information associated with a concept is dependent on the context in which it is tokened. This view is gaining support in recent years. The received and c...

In recent years, motivated reasoning has received significant attention across numerous areas of philosophy, including political philosophy, social philosophy, epistemology, moral psychology, philosophy of science, even metaphysics. At the heart of much of this interest is the idea that motivated reasoning (e.g., rationalization, wishful thinking, and self‐deception) is problematic, that it runs afoul of epistemic normativity, or is otherwise irrational. Is motivated reasoning epistemically problematic? Is it always? When it is, what is the nature of the violation? Philosophical projects on (...) motivated reasoning require informed positions on these questions, demanding explicit engagement with fundamental issues about epistemic normativity and the ethics of belief. But attention to this has been limited, thwarting progress on a variety of critical questions. In this paper, I distinguish some of the key issues at play and discuss their interactions. At the end, I offer three methodological recommendations for future research on motivated reasoning. (shrink)