Keeping track of what others believe is a central part of human social cognition. However, the social relevance of those beliefs can vary a great deal. Some belief attributions mostly tell us about what a person is likely to do next. Other belief attributions tell us more about a person's social identity. In this paper, I argue that we cope with this challenge by employing two distinct concepts of belief in our everyday social interactions. The epistemic concept of belief is (...) primarily used to keep track of what other people take to be true, and this informs how we predict and interpret their behaviors. The symbolic concept of belief, in contrast, is primarily used as a means of signaling one's social identity to other members of one's community. In turn, community members closely monitor each other's symbolic beliefs as a means of enforcing social norms. (shrink)

Historical Discourse’s Truth Matrix was first posited by Michel Foucault to describe the emergence of a discourse of historical events subsequent to the cessation of war and established by the most powerful arbiters of those events. This paper adapts the implements of Foucault’s toolbox to conceptualise the dimensions of subjectivity that historical events pass through from the original event to the subsequent depictions of those events in historical writing or other media. The Corpus of Irish Historical Narratives (COIHN) is a (...) one-million-word representative corpus of oral-history witness testimonies taken from the Bureau of Military History Archive (BMH) which depict the events surrounding the Irish struggle for independence from the lead up to the 1916 rising to the signing of the Anglo-Irish treaty in 1921. The archive provides a rich source of both historical, social and cultural data and has been the source of many publications pertaining to events of this pivotal time in Irish history. This study takes a hybrid corpus-driven and corpus-based approach to the analysis of epistemic modality in these statements through hedged expressions using mental process verbs and, in doing so, offers a framework for the analysis of a core dimension of historical discourse’s truth matrix. The notion of ‘paradoxical authority’ is proposed, stating that the authority of a witness is boosted rather than mitigated by expressing weak commitment to the truth of a proposition. (shrink)

Much linguistic evidence supports the view believing something only requires thinking it likely. I assess and reject a rival view, based on recent work on homogeneity in natural language, according to which belief is a strong, demanding attitude. I discuss the implications of the linguistic considerations about ‘believe’ for our philosophical accounts of belief.

Open Dialogue is an approach to working with mental health problems that emphasises promoting dialogue between multiple perspectives within an individual person and between all the people present, including the therapists. Therapists’ own perspectives are often introduced during conversations called reflections, which present a potential source of different perspectives. Using conversation analysis we analysed 14 hours of video-recorded Open Dialogue sessions with a focus on therapists’ reflections. We noticed that therapists did not display explicit agreement with each other’s reflections. This (...) absence of explicit agreement was displayed through a variety of verbal and non-verbal forms. Eliding agreement facilitated deference to the epistemic authority of the client, assertion of epistemic rights from second position, emphasis of a positive perspective or to voice multiple perspectives. Therapists avoided consensus and thus presented multiple perspectives to the family while also attending to issues of contingency. The implications of epistemic primacy and asymmetry connected to sequential structures in talk pose a challenge to the generation of collaborative reflective dialogues. (shrink)