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  1. Attitudes as positions.Daniel Drucker - 2024 - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 67 (8):2463-2475.
    In these comments on David Hunter’s insightful new book On Believing, I consider Hunter’s account of believing that p as being in a position to act in light of the fact (or apparent fact) that p. After investigating how this kind of view is supposed to work, I raise a challenge for it: the account is unlikely to generalize to other attitudes like hoping and fearing that p. I then argue that this really is an objection to the account of (...)
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  • The Ethics of Belief (3rd edition).Rima Basu - forthcoming - In Kurt Sylvan, Ernest Sosa, Jonathan Dancy & Matthias Steup (eds.), The Blackwell Companion to Epistemology, 3rd edition. Wiley Blackwell.
    This chapter is a survey of the ethics of belief. It begins with the debate as it first emerges in the foundational dispute between W. K. Clifford and William James. Then it surveys how the disagreements between Clifford and James have shaped the work of contemporary theorists, touching on topics such as pragmatism, whether we should believe against the evidence, pragmatic and moral encroachment, doxastic partiality, and doxastic wronging.
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  • Cook Wilson on knowledge and forms of thinking.Simon Wimmer & Guy Longworth - 2022 - Synthese 200 (4):1-22.
    John Cook Wilson is an important predecessor of contemporary knowledge first epistemologists: among other parallels, he claimed that knowledge is indefinable. We reconstruct four arguments for this claim discernible in his work, three of which find no clear analogues in contemporary discussions of knowledge first epistemology. We pay special attention to Cook Wilson’s view of the relation between knowledge and forms of thinking (like belief). Claims of Cook Wilson’s that support the indefinability of knowledge include: that knowledge, unlike belief, straddles (...)
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  • What is Attention? Adverbialist Theories.Christopher Mole & Aaron Henry - 2023 - WIREs Cognitive Science 14 (1).
    This article presents theories of attention that attempt to derive their answer to the question of what attention is from their answers to the question of what it is for some activity to be done attentively. Such theories provide a distinctive account of the difficulties that are faced by the attempt to locate processes in the brain by which the phenomena of attention can be explained. Their account does not share the pessimism of theories suggesting that the concept of attention (...)
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  • Revisiting the problem of satisfaction conditions and the indispensability of i-desire.Yuchen Guo - 2020 - Filosofia Unisinos 21 (3):251-259.
    Gregory Currie has argued for the indispensability of i-desires – a kind of imaginative counterpart of desires – by drawing a distinction between the satisfaction conditions of the desire-like states involved in our emotional responses to tragedies and those of genuine desires. Nevertheless, Fiora Salis has recently shown that the same sort of distinction can also be found in nonfictional cases and has proposed a solution to the issue of satisfaction conditions that dispenses with i-desires. In this paper, I refute (...)
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  • (1 other version)Noncognitivism in Metaethics and the Philosophy of Action.Samuel Asarnow - 2020 - Erkenntnis 88 (1):95-115.
    Noncognitivism about normative judgment is the view that normative judgment is a distinctive kind of mental state, identical neither to belief or desire, but desire-like in its functional role and direction of fit. Noncognitivism about intention (also called the “distinctive practical attitude” theory) is the view that intention is a distinctive kind of mental state, identical neither to belief or desire, but desire-like in its functional role and direction of fit. While these theories are alike in several ways, they have (...)
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  • The Limits of Partial Doxasticism.Facundo M. Alonso - 2021 - Philosophical Quarterly 72 (2):326-345.
    Doxasticism is the thesis that intention is or involves belief in the forthcoming action (Velleman, Harman). Supporters claim that it is only by accepting that thesis that we can explain a wide array of important phenomena, including the special knowledge we have of intentional action, the roles intention plays in facilitating coordination, and the norms of rationality for intention. Others argue that the thesis is subject to counterexample (Davidson, Bratman). Yet some others contend that the thesis can be reformulated in (...)
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  • Out of habit.Santiago Amaya - 2020 - Synthese 198 (12):11161-11185.
    This paper argues that habits, just like beliefs, can guide intentional action. To do this, a variety of real-life cases where a person acts habitually but contrary to her beliefs are discussed. The cases serve as dissociations showing that intentional agency is possible without doxastic guidance. The upshot is a model for thinking about the rationality of habitual action and the rationalizing role that habits can play in it. The model highlights the role that our history and institutions play in (...)
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  • Planning on a Prior Intention.Facundo Alonso - 2020 - Journal of Ethics and Social Philosophy 18 (3):229-265.
    Intention plays a central role in coordinating action. It does so, it is commonly thought, by allowing one to plan further actions for the future on the basis of the belief that it will be executed. Doxasticists about intention (Harman, Velleman) conclude from this that accounting for this role of intention requires accepting the thesis that intention involves belief. Conativists (Bratman, Brunero, Mele) reject that conclusion. I argue that Doxasticists are right in calling attention to the existence of a cognitive (...)
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  • From Standpoint Epistemology to Epistemic Oppression.Briana Toole - 2019 - Hypatia 34 (4):598-618.
    Standpoint epistemology is committed to a cluster of views that pays special attention to the role of social identity in knowledge‐acquisition. Of particular interest here is the situated knowledge thesis. This thesis holds that for certain propositions p, whether an epistemic agent is in a position to know that p depends on some nonepistemic facts related to the epistemic agent's social identity. In this article, I examine two possible ways to interpret this thesis. My first goal here is to clarify (...)
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  • The Nature of Desire.Federico Lauria & Julien Deonna (eds.) - 2017 - New York, USA: Oxford University Press.
    Desires matter. What are desires? Many believe that desire is a motivational state: desiring is being disposed to act. This conception aligns with the functionalist approach to desire and the standard account of desire's role in explaining action. According to a second influential approach, however, desire is first and foremost an evaluation: desiring is representing something as good. After all, we seem to desire things under the guise of the good. Which understanding of desire is more accurate? Is the guise (...)
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  • Good Questions.Alejandro Pérez Carballo - 2018 - In Kristoffer Ahlstrom-Vij & Jeff Dunn (eds.), Epistemic Consequentialism. Oxford: Oxford University Press. pp. 123-145.
    Pérez Carballo adopts an epistemic utility theory picture of epistemic norms where epistemic utility functions measure the value of degrees of belief, and rationality consists in maximizing expected epistemic utility. Within this framework he seeks to show that we can make sense of the intuitive idea that some true beliefs—say true beliefs about botany—are more valuable than other true beliefs—say true beliefs about the precise number of plants in North Dakota. To do so, however, Pérez Carballo argues that we must (...)
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  • (1 other version)Imagination.Shen-yi Liao & Tamar Gendler - 2019 - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
    To imagine is to form a mental representation that does not aim at things as they actually, presently, and subjectively are. One can use imagination to represent possibilities other than the actual, to represent times other than the present, and to represent perspectives other than one’s own. Unlike perceiving and believing, imagining something does not require one to consider that something to be the case. Unlike desiring or anticipating, imagining something does not require one to wish or expect that something (...)
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  • Does "Think" Mean the Same Thing as "Believe"? Linguistic Insights Into Religious Cognition.Larisa Heiphetz, Casey Landers & Neil Van Leeuwen - 2021 - Psychology of Religion and Spirituality 13 (3):287-297.
    When someone says she believes that God exists, is she expressing the same kind of mental state as when she says she thinks that a lake bigger than Lake Michigan exists⎯i.e., does she refer to the same kind of cognitive attitude in both cases? Using evidence from linguistic corpora (Study 1) and behavioral experiments (Studies 2-4), the current work provides evidence that individuals typically use the word “believe” more in conjunction with statements about religious credences and “think” more in conjunction (...)
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  • Deliberation and the First-Person Perspective.Jens Dam Ziska - 2016 - Teorema: International Journal of Philosophy 35 (1):35-57.
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  • On not getting out of bed.Samuel Asarnow - 2019 - Philosophical Studies 176 (6):1639-1666.
    This morning I intended to get out of bed when my alarm went off. Hearing my alarm, I formed the intention to get up now. Yet, for a time, I remained in bed, irrationally lazy. It seems I irrationally failed to execute my intention. Such cases of execution failure pose a challenge for Mentalists about rationality, who believe that facts about rationality supervene on facts about the mind. For, this morning, my mind was in order; it was my action that (...)
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  • Immersion is Attention / Becoming Immersed.Shen-yi Liao - manuscript
    Children sometimes lose themselves in make-believe games. Actors sometimes lose themselves in their roles. Readers sometimes lose themselves in their books. From people's introspective self-reports and phenomenological experiences, these immersive experiences appear to differ from ordinary experiences of simply playing a game, simply acting out a role, and simply reading a book. What explains the difference? My answer: attention. -/- [Unpublishable 2007-2017. This paper was referenced in Liao and Doggett (2014).].
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  • XV-The Limits of Normative Detachment.Nishi Shah - 2010 - Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 110 (3pt3):347-371.
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  • From Skepticism to Paralysis.Suzanne Obdrzalek - 2012 - Ancient Philosophy 32 (2):369-392.
    This paper analyzes the apraxia argument in Cicero’s Academica. It proposes that the argument assumes two modes: the evidential mode maintains that skepticism is false, while the pragmatic claims that it is disadvantageous. The paper then develops a tension between the two modes, and concludes by exploring some differences between ancient and contemporary skepticism.
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  • Why Alief is Not a Legitimate Psychological Category.Hans Muller & Bana Bashour - 2011 - Journal of Philosophical Research 36:371-389.
    We defend the view that belief is a psychological category against a recent attempt to recast it as a normative one. Tamar Gendler has argued that to properly understand how beliefs function in the regulation and production of action, we need to contrast beliefs with a class of psychological states and processes she calls “aliefs.” We agree with Gendler that affective states as well as habits and instincts deserve more attention than they receive in the contemporary philosophical psychology literature. But (...)
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  • What is Reasoning?Conor McHugh & Jonathan Way - 2018 - Mind 127 (505):167-196.
    Reasoning is a certain kind of attitude-revision. What kind? The aim of this paper is to introduce and defend a new answer to this question, based on the idea that reasoning is a goodness-fixing kind. Our central claim is that reasoning is a functional kind: it has a constitutive point or aim that fixes the standards for good reasoning. We claim, further, that this aim is to get fitting attitudes. We start by considering recent accounts of reasoning due to Ralph (...)
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  • Teleology and Normativity.Matthew Silverstein - 2016 - Oxford Studies in Metaethics 11:214-240.
    Constitutivists seek to locate the metaphysical foundations of ethics in nonnormative facts about what is constitutive of agency. For most constitutivists, this involves grounding authoritative norms in the teleological structure of agency. Despite a recent surge in interest, the philosophical move at the heart of this sort of constitutivism remains underdeveloped. Some constitutivists—Foot, Thomson, and Korsgaard (at least in her recent *Self-Constitution*)—adopt a broadly Aristotelian approach. They claim that the functional nature of agency grounds normative judgments about agents in much (...)
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  • Disagreement and Attitudinal Relativism.Jack Spencer - 2016 - Mind 125 (498):511-539.
    Jacob Ross and Mark Schroeder argue that invariantist accounts of disagreement are incompatible with the phenomenon of reversibility. In this essay I develop a non-standard theory of propositional attitudes, which I call attitudinal relativism. Using the resources of attitudinal relativism, I articulate an invariantist account of disagreement that is compatible with reversibility.
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  • Reconstructed Empiricism.Finnur Dellsén - 2017 - Acta Analytica 32 (1):95-113.
    According to Bas van Fraassen, scientific realists and anti-realists disagree about whether accepting a scientific theory involves believing that the theory is true. On van Fraassen’s own anti-realist empiricist position, accepting a theory involves believing only that the theory is correct in its claims about observable aspects of the world. However, a number of philosophers have argued that acceptance and belief cannot be distinguished and thus that the debate is either confused or trivially settled in favor of the realist. In (...)
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  • The Varieties of Normativity.Derek Clayton Baker - 2018 - In Tristram Colin McPherson & David Plunkett (eds.), The Routledge Handbook of Metaethics. New York: Routledge. pp. 567-581.
    This paper discusses varieties of normative phenomena, ranging from morality, to epistemic justification, to the rules of chess. It canvases a number of distinctions among these different normative phenomena. The most significant distinction is between formal and authoritative normativity. The prior is the normativity exhibited by any standard one can meet or fail to meet. The latter is the sort of normativity associated with phenomena like the "all-things-considered" ought. The paper ends with a brief discussion of reasons for skepticism about (...)
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  • Desires without Guises: Why We Need Not Value What We Want.Sabine Döring & Bahadir Eker - 2017 - In Federico Lauria & Julien Deonna (eds.), The Nature of Desire. New York, USA: Oxford University Press.
    Evaluativism about desire, the view that desires just are, or necessarily involve, positive evaluations of their objects, currently enjoys widespread popularity in many philosophical circles. This chapter argues that evaluativism, in both of its doxastic and perceptual versions, overstates and mischaracterises the connection between desires and evaluations. Whereas doxastic evaluativism implausibly rules out cases where someone has a desire, despite evaluating its object negatively, being uncertain about its value, or having no doxastic attitude whatsoever towards its evaluative status at all, (...)
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  • Evaluating Williamson’s Anti-Scepticism.Tony Cheng - 2008 - Sorites 21:06-11.
    Timothy Williamson’s Knowledge and its Limits has been highly influential since the beginning of this century. It can be read as a systematic response to scepticism. One of the most important notions in this response is the notion of «evidence,» which will be the focus of the present paper. I attempt to show primarily two things. First, the notion of evidence invoked by Williamson does not address the sceptical worry: he stipulates an objective notion of evidence, but this begs the (...)
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  • What is reliance?Facundo M. Alonso - 2014 - Canadian Journal of Philosophy 44 (2):163-183.
    In this article I attempt to provide a conceptual framework for thinking about reliance in a systematic way. I argue that reliance is a cognitive attitude that has a tighter connection to the guidance of our thought and action than ordinary belief does. My main thesis is that reliance has a ‘constitutive aim’: namely, it aims at guiding our thought and action in a way that is sensible from the standpoint of practical or theoretical ends. This helps explain why reliance (...)
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  • Reflection and Responsibility.Pamela Hieronymi - 2014 - Philosophy and Public Affairs 42 (1):3-41.
    A common line of thought claims that we are responsible for ourselves and our actions, while less sophisticated creatures are not, because we are, and they are not, self-aware. Our self-awareness is thought to provide us with a kind of control over ourselves that they lack: we can reflect upon ourselves, upon our thoughts and actions, and so ensure that they are as we would have them to be. Thus, our capacity for reflection provides us with the control over ourselves (...)
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  • How Expressivists Can and Should Explain Inconsistency.Derek Clayton Baker & Jack Woods - 2015 - Ethics 125 (2):391-424.
    Mark Schroeder has argued that all reasonable forms of inconsistency of attitude consist of having the same attitude type towards a pair of inconsistent contents (A-type inconsistency). We suggest that he is mistaken in this, offering a number of intuitive examples of pairs of distinct attitudes types with consistent contents which are intuitively inconsistent (B-type inconsistency). We further argue that, despite the virtues of Schroeder's elegant A-type expressivist semantics, B-type inconsistency is in many ways the more natural choice in developing (...)
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  • Active belief.Matthew Boyle - 2009 - Canadian Journal of Philosophy Supplementary 35 (S1):119-147.
    I argue that cognitively mature human beings have an important sort of control or discretion over their own beliefs, but that to make good sense of this control, we must reject the common idea that it consists in a capacity to act on our belief-state by forming new beliefs or modifying ones we already hold. I propose that we exercise agential control over our beliefs, not primarily in doing things to alter our belief-state, but in holding whatever beliefs we hold. (...)
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  • The Nought Belief Paradox.Nicholas Shackel - 2014 - Erkenntnis 79 (3):523-529.
    A paradox is presented that the poses new problems for both the truth norm and the knowledge norm of belief.
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  • Belief and Desire in Imagination and Immersion.Susanna Schellenberg - 2013 - Journal of Philosophy 110 (9):497-517.
    I argue that any account of imagination should satisfy the following three desiderata. First, imaginations induce actions only in conjunction with beliefs about the environment of the imagining subject. Second, there is a continuum between imaginations and beliefs. Recognizing this continuum is crucial to explain the phenomenon of imaginative immersion. Third, the mental states that relate to imaginations in the way that desires relate to beliefs are a special kind of desire, namely desires to make true in fiction. These desires (...)
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  • Semantic Normativity and Naturalism.José L. Zalabardo - 2012 - In Manuel Garcia-Carpintero & Max Kolbel (eds.), The Continuum companion to the philosophy of language. New York: Continuum International.
    The paper addresses the question whether semantic naturalism is undermined by the thought that semantic concepts are normative.
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  • (1 other version)Imagination.Tamar Szabó Gendler - 2012 - In Ed Zalta (ed.), Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
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  • Delusions and Dispositionalism about Belief.Maura Tumulty - 2011 - Mind and Language 26 (5):596-628.
    The imperviousness of delusions to counter-evidence makes it tempting to classify them as imaginings. Bayne and Pacherie argue that adopting a dispositional account of belief can secure the doxastic status of delusions. But dispositionalism can only secure genuinely doxastic status for mental states by giving folk-psychological norms a significant role in the individuation of attitudes. When such norms individuate belief, deluded subjects will not count as believing their delusions. In general, dispositionalism won't confer genuinely doxastic status more often than do (...)
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  • The Heterogeneity of the Imagination.Amy Kind - 2013 - Erkenntnis 78 (1):141-159.
    Imagination has been assigned an important explanatory role in a multitude of philosophical contexts. This paper examines four such contexts: mindreading, pretense, our engagement with fiction, and modal epistemology. Close attention to each of these contexts suggests that the mental activity of imagining is considerably more heterogeneous than previously realized. In short, no single mental activity can do all the explanatory work that has been assigned to imagining.
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  • Naughty beliefs.Andrew Huddleston - 2012 - Philosophical Studies 160 (2):209-222.
    Can a person ever occurrently believe p and yet have the simultaneous, occurrent belief q that this very belief that p is false? Surely not, most would say: that description of a person’s epistemic economy seems to misunderstand the very concept of belief. In this paper I question this orthodox assumption. There are, I suggest, cases where we have a first-order mental state m that involves taking the world to be a certain way, yet although we ourselves acknowledge that we (...)
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  • Reasons for action: Internal vs. external.Stephen Finlay & Mark Schroeder - 2008 - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
    Often, when there is a reason for you to do something, it is the kind of thing to motivate you to do it. For example, if Max and Caroline are deciding whether to go to the Alcove for dinner, Caroline might mention as a reason in favor, the fact that the Alcove serves onion rings the size of doughnuts, and Max might mention as a reason against, the fact that it is so difficult to get parking there this time of (...)
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  • The reasons of trust.Pamela Hieronymi - 2008 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 86 (2):213 – 236.
    I argue to a conclusion I find at once surprising and intuitive: although many considerations show trust useful, valuable, important, or required, these are not the reasons for which one trusts a particular person to do a particular thing. The reasons for which one trusts a particular person on a particular occasion concern, not the value, importance, or necessity of trust itself, but rather the trustworthiness of the person in question in the matter at hand. In fact, I will suggest (...)
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  • Doxastic deliberation.Nishi Shah & J. David Velleman - 2005 - Philosophical Review 114 (4):497-534.
    Believing that p, assuming that p, and imagining that p involve regarding p as true—or, as we shall call it, accepting p. What distinguishes belief from the other modes of acceptance? We claim that conceiving of an attitude as a belief, rather than an assumption or an instance of imagining, entails conceiving of it as an acceptance that is regulated for truth, while also applying to it the standard of being correct if and only if it is true. We argue (...)
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  • (1 other version)Alief and Belief.Tamar Gendler - 2008 - Journal of Philosophy 105 (10):634-663.
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  • The product of self-deception.Neil Van Leeuwen - 2007 - Erkenntnis 67 (3):419 - 437.
    I raise the question of what cognitive attitude self-deception brings about. That is: what is the product of self-deception? Robert Audi and Georges Rey have argued that self-deception does not bring about belief in the usual sense, but rather “avowal” or “avowed belief.” That means a tendency to affirm verbally (both privately and publicly) that lacks normal belief-like connections to non-verbal actions. I contest their view by discussing cases in which the product of self-deception is implicated in action in a (...)
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  • Consciousness, belief, and the group mind hypothesis.Søren Overgaard & Alessandro Salice - 2019 - Synthese 198 (2):1-25.
    According to the Group Mind Hypothesis, a group can have beliefs over and above the beliefs of the individual members of the group. Some maintain that there can be group mentality of this kind in the absence of any group-level phenomenal consciousness. We present a challenge to the latter view. First, we argue that a state is not a belief unless the owner of the state is disposed to access the state’s content in a corresponding conscious judgment. Thus, if there (...)
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  • Reasons: Wrong, Right, Normative, Fundamental.Kurt Sylvan & Errol Lord - 2019 - Journal of Ethics and Social Philosophy 15 (1).
    Reasons fundamentalists maintain that we can analyze all derivative normative properties in terms of normative reasons. These theorists famously encounter the Wrong Kind of Reasons problem, since not all reasons for reactions seem relevant for reasons-based analyses. Some have argued that this problem is a general one for many theorists, and claim that this lightens the burden for reasons fundamentalists. We argue in this paper that the reverse is true: the generality of the problem makes life harder for reasons fundamentalists. (...)
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  • Fictional Persuasion and the Nature of Belief.Asbjørn Steglich-Petersen - 2017 - In Ema Sullivan-Bissett, Helen Bradley & Paul Noordhof (eds.), Art and Belief. Oxford: Oxford University Press. pp. 174-193.
    Psychological studies on fictional persuasion demonstrate that being engaged with fiction systematically affects our beliefs about the real world, in ways that seem insensitive to the truth. This threatens to undermine the widely accepted view that beliefs are essentially regulated in ways that tend to ensure their truth, and may tempt various non-doxastic interpretations of the belief-seeming attitudes we form as a result of engaging with fiction. I evaluate this threat, and argue that it is benign. Even if the relevant (...)
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  • Introduction: Cognitive attitudes and values in science.Daniel J. McKaughan & Kevin C. Elliott - 2015 - Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 53:57-61.
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  • Dissonance and Doxastic Resistance.Cristina Borgoni - 2015 - Erkenntnis 80 (5):957-974.
    This paper focuses on the puzzling situation of having beliefs that are resistant to one’s own critical reasoning. This phenomenon happens, for example, when an individual does not succeed in eliminating a belief by evaluating it as false. I argue that this situation involves a specific type of irrationality—not yet properly identified in the literature—which I call ‘critical doxastic resistance’. The aim of this paper is to characterize this type of irrationality. Understanding such a phenomenon sheds light on the type (...)
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  • Epistemic Instrumentalism and the Too Few Reasons Objection.Charles Côté-Bouchard - 2015 - International Journal of Philosophical Studies 23 (3):337-355.
    According to epistemic instrumentalism, epistemic normativity arises from and depends on facts about our ends. On that view, a consideration C is an epistemic reason for a subject S to Φ only if Φ-ing would promote an end that S has. However, according to the Too Few Epistemic Reasons objection, this cannot be correct since there are cases in which, intuitively, C is an epistemic reason for S to Φ even though Φ-ing would not promote any of S’s ends. After (...)
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  • Pseudoscience and Idiosyncratic Theories of Rational Belief.Nicholas Shackel - 2013 - In Massimo Pigliucci & Maarten Boudry (eds.), Philosophy of Pseudoscience: Reconsidering the Demarcation Problem. University of Chicago Press. pp. 417-438.
    I take pseudoscience to be a pretence at science. Pretences are innumerable, limited only by our imagination and credulity. As Stove points out, ‘numerology is actually quite as different from astrology as astrology is from astronomy’ (Stove 1991, 187). We are sure that ‘something has gone appallingly wrong’ (Stove 1991, 180) and yet ‘thoughts…can go wrong in a multiplicity of ways, none of which anyone yet understands’ (Stove 1991, 190). Often all we can do is give a careful description of (...)
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