Philosophy

In this paper I show that Davidson held that intentional action requires an agent to have two beliefs, a general one that causes and rationalizes the action, and a singular one that constitutes the agent's awareness of the action. I show that Davidson was confused about this distinction in his early work. I also discuss how this singular belief relates to the problem of wayward causal chains and to what Davidson called the 'all-out' judgment that, in certain cases, can be identified with the action.

To understand belief directives it is helpful to start with knowledge directives. For they can be unspecific in an important way, are not as puzzling from a first person point of view, and are viewed by common sense as more fundamental. A person’s duties, personal obligations and rights are, common sense holds, relevant but not decisive to what they ought to know, and so to what they ought to believe. It further holds that people ought in general to know what they ought to do and even, to some extent, what they are doing. And it allows that a person may be required to know something for which they have no evidence. All of this poses difficulties for the philosophical view that facts about a person’s evidence are relevant to what they ought to believe.

In this paper I argue that while practical reasoning is essentially first personal it does not require having essentially first personal thoughts. I consider a case of reasoning and argue that it is both practical and good. I then argue that it does not involve essentially first personal thoughts. I conclude by responding to two objections, one concerning the explanation of action and another concerning a supposed skeptical possibility.

This article considers Christine Tappolet's view, developed in her book Emotions, Values and Agency (OUP 2016), that emotions are perceptions of value. I sketch a friendly suggestion: that emotions are capacities to do, feel or think something for the reason that the object of the emotion has a certain value.

A good deal of contemporary philosophy of mind grants mental states like believing and desiring a life of their own, and it is a very rich life indeed. Mental states are treated (i) as particulars, with (ii) semantic and normative properties, that (iii) we attend to and act upon in deliberation, and (iv) with causal lives of their own. This, in turn, has made the characteristic forms of responsibility we have in believing and desiring seem mysterious. In response, Matt Boyle and Pamela Hieronymi have urged that we think of believing as an act or activity. In this paper, I argue that their response fails to fully reject the standar\d view of mental states, and I sketch a conception of the metaphysics of believing that places the believer at its heart.

This is a spirited and very engaging book. It develops and defends a pragmatic philosophical conception of belief. In fact, it is pragmatic in two senses. It is substantively pragmatic, in that it conceives of belief as fundamentally a practical attitude. This sort of account is familiar, though Zimmerman adds important insights. But the conception is also methodologically pragmatic, in that it holds that our conception of belief ought to be influenced by our social concerns. This is an original and intriguing idea and Zimmerman's discussion is valuable. In this review, I will outline the book and offer some brief assessments along the way. The first three chapters articulate the pragmatic conception of belief and compare it to alternatives. The leading idea is that to believe something " is to be so disposed that you would use that information to guide those relatively attentive and self-controlled activities you might engage in " (1). Zimmerman confesses that he won't analyse the key notions of " action', 'control' and 'attention' (26), instead relying on our intuitive grasp of when a person's actions are controlled and attentive. Most of Chapter 1 concerns how acting from a belief differs from acting from instinct, a distinction any pragmatist about belief needs to admit. The distinction is especially subtle when we act on what we believe without having to pay careful attention to what we are doing. To illustrate, Zimmerman discusses recent psychological studies suggesting that we have less control over our actions than we might have thought. He argues that a pragmatic account of belief predicts a spectrum of cases with no sharp line between acting on information that is " highly assimilated " and acting from instinct. I found this discussion thoughtful and persuasive. In Chapter 2, Zimmerman contrasts the pragmatic conception with three closely related ideas. He starts by distinguishing degrees of 'assimilation' from degrees of belief. Assimilation measures a person's ability to act on believed information without having to pay attention to it, whereas degrees of belief measures confidence in the information's accuracy. A person might have highly assimilated information that she is relatively uncertain about, and be still assimilating information in which she has full confidence. Zimmerman then contrasts the pragmatic conception with the distinction psychologists have drawn between system 1 and system 2 cognitive processes, and then with the somewhat related philosophical distinction between believing and accepting. Here too, the discussion is informed and convincing. Zimmerman does not discuss the contrast between believing and knowing, which is a bit surprising, since if you know something, then you also are in position to use what you know to guide your controlled and attentive activities. One difference, of course, is that unlike knowledge, a belief can be mistaken. But it is hard to capture this difference if belief is defined in terms of 'information,' which, intuitively anyway, is a factive notion. So more on this would have been helpful. (One minor complaint: there are too many extremely long quotations, especially from Alexander Bain.) The most interesting philosophical work in this part of the book occurs in Chapter 3, where the pragmatic conception is contrasted with what Zimmerman calls 'Intellectualism' about belief. He considers Williams 1970 and Velleman 2000 to be Intellectualists, but to be honest, the contrast is more than a little elusive. Both sides agree, I take it, that a person who believes something is in position to rely on what they believe in their controlled and attentive actions. So, the contrast must lie elsewhere. Sometimes, Zimmerman implies that Intellectualists, but not Pragmatists, see a connection between belief and truth (43 and 78). But do Pragmatists deny that beliefs are by their nature correct or incorrect depending on how things are? Surely all sides agree that anyone who believes that Trump is a stable genius is mistaken, and isn't this enough to get some essential connection between belief and truth? Sometimes, Zimmerman suggests that Intellectualists but not Pragmatists take propositions to be the objects of belief (44; 46 n. 7), but he does not spell out an alternative account of those objects. And his own account of Pragmatism invokes the notion of information, which one might have thought is pretty close to that of a proposition. There is a lengthy discussion of the difficulties involved in ascribing beliefs to animals and to young children, and while the discussion is persuasive and draws on interesting empirical studies, it is hard to see why an Intellectualist need deny any of it. At the end of the day, then, I was left wishing a clearer contrast had been drawn between Pragmatism and Intellectualism. (A second minor complaint: too much of the important philosophical work in Chapter 3 is done in lengthy footnotes, especially notes 7, 22 and 40.) Chapter 4 considers two related objections to Pragmatism: if it is true, then why can't we believe at will, and how can we distinguish believing from pretending. In response to the first objection, Zimmerman relies on the idea that beliefs are states, not actions, to explain why one cannot believe at will (85). This is fine, so far as it goes, but does not take account of recent philosophical work by Pamela Hieronymi (2009) and Matt Boyle (2009), both of whom

Philosophical accounts of the nature of belief, at least in the western tradition, are framed in large part by two ideas. One is that believing is a form of representing. The other is that a belief plays a causal role when a person acts on it. The standard picture of belief as a mental entity with representational properties and causal powers merges these two ideas. We are to think of beliefs as things that are true or false and that interact with desires, intentions, and emotions to bring about rational action. Both ideas, I think, are ill-founded. One effect of abandoning them is a further blurring of the distinction between what is inside and what is outside our minds. Another is a shift towards a less mentalistic picture of the roots of rational action.