Belief Alief And Discordant Behavior

The interpretation of discordant behaviors is a relatively important issue in the philosophy of action,the philosophy of mind,and the philosophy of cognition.In the discordant behavior,the agent produced an action that was discordant with belief,so the traditional theory of action which is based on the theory of belief-desire could not provide an explanation for it.At present,there are three main explanation strategies for discordant behaviors:the strategy of alternative information states views that the psychological state that affects the discordant behaviors is an arational and autonomous association,but there are not a particular concept can match those properties in common psychology,so they proposed to establish a new concept which called alief and use it to explain discordant behaviors;the strategy of belief-saving views that the concept of alief cannot be distinguished from the concept of belief in essence,and the explanatory effect of alief also relies on the theory of belief-desire,so they proposed to expand and enrich the concept of belief to make it capable of providing explanations for discordant behaviors;the strategy of sub-personal automatic mechanisms not only views that traditional action explanation theory can not explain discordant behaviors,but also views that alief can not provide an universal effects on the interpretation of discordant behaviors,so they proposed the interpretation of discordant behaviors should resort to the sub-personal automatic mechanisms.The controversy between different interpretation strategies is whether alief can be distinguished from beliefs in essence,and whether alief have universal interpretation effects on discordant behaviors.The strategy of alternative information states holds that the representation-affection-behavior association content of alief accurately grasps all the characteristics of discordant behaviors and can provide the best explanation for them.But this has been opposed by the strategy of belief-saving who believe that the representation-affection-behavior association is just a hodgepodge between multiple mental states,so alief is not an atomic concept;at the same time,alief is based on habits and experience which can be affected by evidence,it means that alief can be reduced to beliefs because they are sensitive to evidence,so alief cannot be distinguished from beliefs;furthermore,the behavior interpretation effects of alief cannot be distinguished from the theory of beliefs-desires by following the representation and motivation interpretation strategies.So alief cannot replace the theoretical role of belief.The strategy of sub-personal automatic mechanisms believes that alief has no universal explanatory effect because it cannot provide a priming effect on some discordant behaviors.But I think the reason for these disputes is that they do not really understand the characteristics and properties of discordant behavior and the new concept of alief.Discordant behavior is not simply discordant with beliefs.Its production is to some extent prior to the rational thinking of the evidence by the agent.The agent usually automatically generates an association after receiving specific internal or external representation stimuli.Even if the agent defends and confirms the beliefs again,the discordant behaviors cannot be controlled by the beliefs.From the perspective of the alief researchers,the internal and external environmental stimuli which is received by the agent through visual and other cognitive organizations cannot accurately reflect the essence of things at some time.It only represents the external image or appearance of the things,and the stimuli in brain has activated a solidified association,in the meantime,the brain automatically generated a particular affection and behavioral output associated with the stimuli.The entire process is autonomous and has nothing to do with rational,and does not contain any motivating components.Based on sorting out the concepts of discordant behaviors and the concept of alief,I will argue that alief is essentially different from beliefs because of the representational content with shallow processing mechanism.The representational content of alief cannot be integrated with any other representational content;And the representation-affection-behavior association also show that it does not contain motivational factors or propositional features,which is clearly different from the theory of belief-desire;Later then,I will respond to the queries about the concept of alief;In the end my conclusion is that alief is a robust concept in common psychology.