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ABSTRACT
David Hunter’s On Believing is a rich and worthwhile defense of a distinctive view about the objects and nature of belief. In these comments, I discuss three aspects of the book. I agree with Hunter that the objects of belief are properties or (as I prefer to refer to them) states of affairs. But I argue that he has too narrow a view of the range of possible objects of belief. I defend the idea that belief is in part a matter of representing the world, an idea Hunter appears to criticize. And I defend the idea that one or another truthy property provides a norm for evaluating beliefs.
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Notes
1 Richard ( Citation2013b) sketches an account of structured properties, which is in some ways a generalization of the account given in Richard (Citation2001).
2 For readability’s sake I speak this way instead of speaking of members of singletons instantiating members of singletons.
3 There are limits to the sorts of ‘closure’ on properties on which we can insist, of course. No matter what relation H we pick there is no property F such that for any property G: G bears H to F just in case F doesn’t instantiate itself. This, as they say, is the lesson of Russell’s paradox. (In a draft of these remarks, I managed to type ‘this is the lesion of Russell’s paradox.’) I don’t see that this affects the point that our thought and talk presupposes, for example, that in general when we can say of something is F and say of something is G, we can say of something that it is both F and G.
4 A reductive definition of epistemic possibility strikes me as impossible. What one can try to do is construct a model of what it is for a state of affairs to be epistemically possible relative to a stage of inquiry. One then finds that one needs to think of inquiry and evidence in terms of states of affairs being presented in particular ways, so that talk about what one thinks, believes, or rejects must be understood as talk which invokes both the state of affairs towards which one has an attitude and the way one apprehends it. Many of the essays in Richard (Citation2013a) develop this picture of the attitudes and their ascription.
5 Again, see the essays in Richard (Citation2013a).
6 Hunter makes various other comments about inquiry and impossibility, one of which I should at mention. He observes, correctly, that we need to say how people reason in inquiry, which requires saying what they think. But to do that ‘is to say how things would be if they were right. But an impossible belief cannot be right, so there is no way to’ do that (Hunter Citation2022, 86–87). To the obvious response that in the inquiry about the relation between Elliot and Evans, we might describe someone who thinks they are distinct as thinking – well, that they are distinct, Hunter says the reply is ‘no good … that is not a coherent way to describe anything.’ (Hunter Citation2022, 87) But surely that is a perfectly coherent, rational thought to have if, for example, one has been misinformed, told that Evans died sometime after Elliot. There a perfectly good quasi-logical, quasi-evidential notion of coherence to be had, one we can elucidate in terms of the ways people ‘apprehend’ or ‘take’ or ‘represent’ states of affairs.
7 I’ve gussied up the objection that Hunter discusses a tad, but I’m sure his response to this version would be the same as the one quoted in the text.
8 We want to be able to identify, for example, the property of <a, b> instantiating <P, Q> so: the first member of <a,b> instantiates the first member of <P,Q> while its second member instantiates <P,Q>’s second member with the property of <b, a> instantiating <P, Q> so: the second member of <a,b> instantiates the first member of <P,Q> while its first member instantiates <P,Q>’s second member. This is a technological problem that can be solved in many ways.
9 I’m assuming that identifying and distinguishing impossibilities is something that’s done once we’ve given necessary and sufficient conditions for two of them to be the same, and that identifying impossibilities is not a matter of giving a recipe for saying of an arbitrary state of affairs whether it is possible or impossible.
10 Wedgwood (Citation2013) proposes that the normative property is one he calls ‘correctness’, which he takes to be normatively more fundamental than truth.
11 Hunter argues that things are not improved when we compare beliefs, one of which is false, the other true because it is hard to see what could be done to make the false belief ‘a better instance of believing.’
12 ‘Belief state’ is not just philosopher’s jargon, by the way. The phrase is used in psychology and computer science, generally for probability distributions over a field of possible alternative states of the environment.
13 Wedgwood (Citation2013) provides one such measure. One might wonder whether two systems of belief can always be compared for correctness; couldn’t there be cases in which they might be incommensurable so far as correctness goes? I suspect the answer is: Indeed. But even if there are, surely there are cases in which a straightforward relative judgment is warranted. A simple example: if p and q are true and r is false, representing the world as being one in which p, q and -r are true will be better overall than representing it as a p, q, and r world.
14 Joyce (Citation2009) discusses a way of thinking about belief on which one can make such judgments. I acknowledge that it is a delicate matter, how one is to adapt this way of thinking about belief to accommodate the idea that impossibilities are epistemically possible. Fortunately for me, I was told I had only 5000 words for these comments.