Some Varieties of Belief (Sketchy Preview)
What is the scope for intellectual explanations of human behavior? Should we give intellectual explanations of, for example, dog behavior?
Boring Types of Belief:
1) Occurrent Belief: conscious acts of judgment... you say to yourself "P". [How far can we take the thought that these are really inner speech acts?] These are events, rather than states. 2) Dispositional Belief: non-conscious dispositions to conscious acts of judgment. These are states, rather than events.
Non-Boring:
1) Non-conscious judgment: Invoked in cases like the slip of the tongue. It is as if you said to yourself "P", but without having done so. There must be an mental event (hence, this is judgment-like) in order to actuate behavior, but there is no consciousness of it.
2) (?) Semi-Conscious judgment: Invoked in cases in which you do not say to yourself "P", but in which something event-like has occurred, but which event is not exactly non-conscious.
Example: you're checking problem sets for logic. You move quickly, glancing to match answers with the key. You look at an answer, you think "OK" and move on. I think there is a belief here -- something like "this answer matches the answer provided in the key". However, do you not say to yourself "this answer matches the answer provided in the key." Is this just a case of non-conscious judgment?
Another case: you perform an inference (in inner speech) that turns on Modus Ponens -- though you do not say to yourself the content of the rule. It seems that something like a belief in Modus Ponens has actuated your inference -- if so there is reason to suppose that something judgment-like has occurred. Are cases like this just cases in which we want to postulate non-conscious judgments?
Boring Types of Belief:
1) Occurrent Belief: conscious acts of judgment... you say to yourself "P". [How far can we take the thought that these are really inner speech acts?] These are events, rather than states. 2) Dispositional Belief: non-conscious dispositions to conscious acts of judgment. These are states, rather than events.
Non-Boring:
1) Non-conscious judgment: Invoked in cases like the slip of the tongue. It is as if you said to yourself "P", but without having done so. There must be an mental event (hence, this is judgment-like) in order to actuate behavior, but there is no consciousness of it.
2) (?) Semi-Conscious judgment: Invoked in cases in which you do not say to yourself "P", but in which something event-like has occurred, but which event is not exactly non-conscious.
Example: you're checking problem sets for logic. You move quickly, glancing to match answers with the key. You look at an answer, you think "OK" and move on. I think there is a belief here -- something like "this answer matches the answer provided in the key". However, do you not say to yourself "this answer matches the answer provided in the key." Is this just a case of non-conscious judgment?
Another case: you perform an inference (in inner speech) that turns on Modus Ponens -- though you do not say to yourself the content of the rule. It seems that something like a belief in Modus Ponens has actuated your inference -- if so there is reason to suppose that something judgment-like has occurred. Are cases like this just cases in which we want to postulate non-conscious judgments?
posted by Idris at 2:26 PM
5 Comments:
Are dispositional beliefs really best described as states? I am in the state of being alive, I guess. I am in the state of being rather hairy. But am I in the state of believing that "2+2=4"? I suppose there is some warrant for this; what states of a person seem to have in common is being passive (or is this not true? Am I, say, in the state of actively typing this comment?), and dispositional beliefs are passive. But it seems like dispositional beliefs are best characterized as, well, dispositions--being disposed to act in certain ways on the basis of a belief, and so on. (Of course, I seem to remember Kripke coming down hard on this in Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language, but I don't know any other way to characterize a non-occurrent belief.)
This is just a picky point about ontology, I guess.
As for the rest of your post:
(1) I don't know how far we can take the thought that stuff like thinking "p" is an inner speech act, but it seems clear to me that there must be some inner speech acts, at least sometimes. For instance, sit down right now and think, "I am a person." Seems to me like a "speech act" (unless by "speech acts" you mean stuff like promising, marrying, etc. Maybe there's still, "I promise myself I shall exercise today").
(2) Would conversation count as an example of non-conscious judgment? I don't usually think about what I'm going to say before saying it. I just find myself saying it. I don't recall mental events preceding my saying such stuff, or at least not very well developed stuff. If someone says something dumb, I might have emotional responses, but I won't think to myself, "that's dumb because .." and then say, "that's dumb because". This probably has nothing to do with what you're talking about.
(3) As for the "another case": I don't know whether I want to say that my belief in modus ponens in this case is an example of a non-conscious judgment; acceptance (which, I suppose, is a kind of judgment) of MP structures the way I think. Is that all you mean by non-conscious judgments?
Two Matters:
First: States and Dispositions
I guess dispositions are states... I don't have much of a theory of states, and it doesn't matter to me much how such a theory works out. Here are some notes:
What matters to describing some class as non-conscious beliefs as states is just this:
1) States are capable of persisting. They don't happen (and so aren't events), though they may be instantiated at moments.
2) States are not actions -- only events are actions -- though one might count as being in a state in virtue of acting.
Second: Kripke and Dispositions
Dispositions are funny things, there is some relation between being disposed to x and its being true that were triggering conditions to obtain you would x. On the other hand, dispositions also involve categorical grounds for the patterns of counterfactual dependence to which they're related.
Consider the absorbativity (wrd?) of the cotton washcloth. Because it has this disposition -- being absorbant -- there is some set of counterfactuals true of it. This might be because dispositions just are sets of counterfactual dependencies. Sometimes, when philosophers use the term 'disposition' they just mean to refer to some such set.
But as far as I can tell, the project of reducing dispositions to sets of counterfactual dependence has not panned out. At least, if dispositions consist in patterns of countrfactual dependence no-one can tell a story about which among the actual patterns of counterfactual dependence count as fixing the disposition. A cotton washcloth is such that were it placed on a spot of wetness it would absorb it -- but we need to waive funny business. The washcloth won't absorb the water if its on fire, or if the water is frozen, or if a wizard is altering its constitution in response to its being placed on wet spots... etc. But as far as I can tell, there is no way of giving a theory of what counts as funny business and so which patterns of counterfactual dependence constitute the disposition. So you might think the following: the patterns of counterfactual dependence obtain because the disposition exists and do not constitute it. They are conceptually posterior to dispositions... [hand waive about what _that_ means.]
Anyway: Kripke's complaints about dispositions rest on considering facts like those above. Only he seems to identify dispositions with actual patterns of counterfactual dependence, and conclude: so much the worse for the utility of disposition talk. I figure: so much the worse for counterfactual analyses of dispositions. Not that it matters much... Once this kind of point is made you can reformulate Kripke's complaints in other terms and reapply them. But don't be immediately scared of disposition talk.
1) I think you can take the thought that a lot of thinking consists in speaking silently to yourself. Of course, you are right that certain kinds of speech acts won't appear in our thinking (if marrying is a speech act, then, since it requires being addressed to someone distinct, one cannot marry inwardly).
You can promise and command inwardly -- these seem to be the sorts of things one can direct at oneself. You can question inwardly. I hypothesize inwardly.
Of course, not every inner speech act counts as a judgment... only the assertive ones.
Ryle was right insofar as he claimed that in many ways (ahem) our inner lives are internalized reflections of our social practices.
2) Would conversation count as an example of non-conscious judgment? I suspect that it involves lots of non-conscious judgment. Though it seems a little odd to count the actual external speech acts as judgments... but, anyway, why not? Anyway, external speech acts are usually things of which we are aware and so if they do count as judgments, then they'll usually count as conscious ones.
(phenomenology is sometimes constituted by events "out there"!)
3)Of course, we do often catch ourselves about to say the wrong thing (I do anyway). So there is a kind of inner rehearsal. Interestingly, I can report being aware of these events of inner rehearsal only when I catch myself about to say the wrong thing and not when what I have said is unproblematic. This suggests that the inner rehearsal is only conscious when it catches something going wrong.
4) Cases like accepting MPs are interesting for the following reason: a merely dispositional belief seems like the wrong kind of thing to actuate behavior -- being a mere potentiality. So if a belief in MP is to be invoked to explain why I consciously infer in an MP-structured kind of way, then it needs to be judgment-like -- at least insofar as it must be more than mere potentiality. It needs to be something event-ish...
But there might be regress worries here -- in fact there are. At some point the intellectual explanation will come to an end and the only event-ish explanation for why we go on as we do will be in terms of neural activity. I am not convinced, though that cases of reliance on MP are the place where this has to happen. So then, in the conscious inference cases, we'll want to postulate something mental, belief-y (truth-aiming), judgment-y (event-ish), semi-conscious (?).
Final Note on cat turds: Why when you are considering what to eat for dinner, don't you consider eating the cat turds from the sand-box behind your house? Presumably it is because you believe that cat turds are not tasty and probably deadly. But it seems alright not to postulate event-ish belief-y things in this case... of course, it is here a question of why something didn't happen... and cases of non-occurence are always spooky.
Enough of this philosophy crap.
What is new with Grak?!
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