Beliefs as dispositions

Believing seems the most "mental thing" we do, the thing most remote from what is done by mere matter. The whole intellectual life consists of beliefs, and of the passage from one belief to another by what is called, "reasoning." Beliefs give knowledge and error; they are the vehicles of truth and falsehood. Psychology, theory of knowledge and metaphysics, revolve around belief, and on the view we take of belief our philosophical outlook largely depends.1;What is it to believe something? That is, for example, when Tony believes that Eric Clapton is a gifted guitarist, what exactly is it about Tony in virtue of which he believes what he does? Another way to put this is: What exactly is the nature of the state of mind or mental attitude that Tony has about Eric Clapton? In this dissertation I shall defend an account of belief called the dispositional account of belief. According to this account, to believe something is to have an appropriate cluster of dispositions. For example, my believing that there is a bottle of water in my refrigerator consists, among other things, in my being disposed: (i) to say "There is a bottle of water in my fridge" in appropriate circumstances; (ii) to go to the fridge when I want some water, or when a guest requests some water; (iii) to feel surprised, and perhaps disappointed, when I find that there is no water in the fridge; (iv) to draw a variety of conclusions entailed by the proposition that there is water in my fridge (e.g., that the fridge has something in it, that there is water in close proximity to me, etc.). Sadly, this account has either been treated derisively or simply ignored in the philosophical literature. I hope to show that this view (at the least) deserves deferential treatment, and that the dispositional account actually holds a great deal of promise.;In Chapter One I develop the dispositional account of belief in detail, and contrast it with a rather infamous ancestor, namely behaviorism . I argue that because dispositions to have certain subjective states are among those associated with the dispositional account, it does not succumb to the problems associated with behaviorism. In this chapter I also briefly discuss how the dispositional account fits into the contemporary philosophical literature regarding the nature of belief as taken as a propositional attitude.;There is a great deal of disagreement regarding the nature of dispositions. In Chapter Two, I consider various accounts of dispositions. I begin with examining a variety of problems raised against the traditional analysis of dispositions as characterized by means of straightforward subjunctive conditionals. According to this view, x is disposed to phi when C if and only if, if C were to obtain, then x would phi. Following this, I consider more sophisticated analyses of dispositions that hold that dispositions are to be analyzed in terms of more complicated subjunctive conditionals. These more complicated analysans involve a qualification of the traditional subjunctive conditional in terms of "ideal conditions" or ceteris paribus clauses. I argue that such analyses are not vacuously uninformative as some have alleged. This is because staged empirical investigation can progressively delineate ceteris paribus conditions, allowing for testability and consequent increase in predictive value. In the final section of this chapter I settle upon an account of dispositions that seems to hold the most promise for the dispositional account of belief.;In Chapter Three, I consider a potential problem for the dispositional account of belief involving the idea that beliefs play a causal role in explaining behavior. It seems, for example, that my belief that it is raining causes me (at least in part) to retrieve my umbrella before leaving home. However, a number of philosophers have argued that dispositions are not the sorts of things that can be satisfactorily taken to be causes. Thus, if beliefs are simply dispositions, then there is an issue as to whether we can make sense of them playing a causal role. I argue that dispositional explanations serve as good causal explanations if they are offered in response to (as van Fraassen would put it) certain "why questions.";In Chapter Four I consider how the dispositional account of belief might be applied to resolve a certain set of puzzles associated with belief attribution (e.g., Kripke's puzzle about belief, self-deception puzzles, and puzzles involving an agent that is "on the fence" about whether a particular proposition is true). In response to these puzzles, various strong positions have been taken in regard to definite ascription or withholding of attribution of belief. It seems to me that the debate turns on a mistaken conception of belief as "all-or-nothing." I argue that these puzzles may be resolvable given a conception of belief that appreciates the diverse and mixed dispositions that agents in such cases have.;1Bertrand, Russell, The Analysis of Mind , MacMillan Company, New York, p. 231, 1949.