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jlive_PHIL_430_syllabus_fall_2024.pdf

• Thought experiment
  • Recognize that the author is inviting a judgement (that you don’t have to accept)
  • Check whether your intuition is the same as the author’s.
  • Is it detailed enough. Is detail important.
  • Turn the knobs: What can you change about the situation and how would the judgement be different.
• A priori and a posteriori
  • Hume: two kinds of reasoning: reasoning about matters of fact (by a posteriori experience) and reasoning about relations of ideas (by a priori reasoning alone).
  • Leibniz: the first goes along with synthetic truth, and the second goes along with analytic truth. Analytic iff subject is contained already in the predicate, e.g. “Socrates is moral.”
  • Kant: “7+5” is a priori but synthetic
  • necessary facts vs. contingent facts
• Knobe effect [experimental philosophy]: the moral character of an action’s consequences also seems to influence how non-moral aspects of the action – in this case, whether someone did something intentionally or not – are judged.

Clifford (Evidentialism) v.s. James (Pragmatism)

Clifford “The Ethics of Belief” (This piece is written to people who are not skeptical enough to their belief.)

• Clifford
  • “It is wrong always, everywhere, and for anyone to believe anything on insufficient evidence.”
  • Strong version: need solid evidence
  • Hedge version: need adequate evidence
  • Claim: If a belief is wrong, the person holding it for bad reasons is blameworthy for the bad belief.
  • Belief suggests action

James “The Will to Believe”

• James
  • S may believe that p even if S does not have sufficient evidence that p, given:
    • not always “Genuine options” → permitted to believe at will
      • Live: You can imagine worlds where you believe and not believe
      • Momentous
      • Forced (to make a choice)
    • Intellect vs. Passion
    • Balance of interests
      • Believe truths
      • Avoid errors
    • Degrees of Belief/Evidence
  • S should believe that p iff S has sufficient all-things-considered reasons for p.
  • [Attack sufficiency] Evidentialism + what makes evidence adequite depends on practical context.
  • Tie to the truth
    • Hard pragmatism: “what about cases where if you don’t take a leap, you can’t get the truth?”

What is Belief

Schwitzgebel “Belief”

• Representational theory of belief: An agent S believes that p only if S has a mental representation with the content that p is true.
• Dispositional view of belief: An agent S believes that p only if S is disposed to act as if p is true.
• Interpretaional account of belief: An agent S believes that p only if S behaves in a way that fits a reliable theory that says S believes that p. IOW, S can be usefully interpreted as believing that p. For example, attributing beliefs might make predicting behavior much simpler.
• Functional view: An agent S believes that p only if S has or is in a state or states that satisfy the causal-functional … IOW, the beliefs one holds are those that are intended to and potentially serve particular functions and achieve particular goals.
• Eliminative view. There are no such things as beliefs.

Bernard Williams “Deciding to Believe” in Problems of the Self

• Belief has an aim
  • Belief aims at the truth
    • “I believe that p” as assertion (not as lying) → p is true to you. But if lying, it is not. You can in principle utter anything.
    • Belief demands more commitment than uttering.
    • Having a wrong belief is subject to critic
• Voluntariness
  • Clifford
    • For an ethics of belief to make sense, belief has to be under voluntary control.
    • A belief p is voluntary iff
      • you have control over whether you believe p
      • I believe that p given that I want/try to
  • Williams:
    • The aim argument.
      • It is conceptually impossible to believe at will, exactly because that belief aims at the truth. One cound not adopt a belief with indifference to its truth while having full conscious awareness that one had adopted the belief in that way.
    • The connexion argument.
      • P1: If we think a mental state is not aiming at properly connected to the world, then it is not a thing we ought to keep.
      • P2: If a mental state is acquired at will, then we know it is not properly connected to the worold.
      • C. If a mental state is acquired at will, then it is not a belief.