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Varieties of belief

Mar 06, 2023

Friday and Saturday, there was a pretty cool conference, the conference of the Moral Psychology Research Group. I only attended the 2nd day, but it was a blast. But the highlight for me was Tania Lombrozo's talk on a dual account of "to believe".

Moral Psychology Research Group

Recording of the entire 2nd day

I think it's worthwhile to give a bit of background. "Belief" is hardly anything new in philosophy of mind and in epistemology. It was the epistemic branch of the old "belief/desire/intention" account of propositional attitudes. It's probably the first verb that comes to an epistemologist's mind when you ask for an epistemic verb besides "know". There's tons and tons of work on it. And everybody knows, say, that belief with regards to religious faith had little to do with beliefs formed from observation. *But*, something's changed recently.

See, for a while now, we've suspected that knowledge might be more fundamental than belief. It came in initially as a bit weird, because philosophers in the 20th century had become accustomed to consider belief as an analytic component of knowledge. But empirical approaches seemed to suggest this was the other way round: knowledge seemed more fundamental. A few years ago, a survey article in *Brains and Behavioural Science* kind of closed this question, in my opinion:

The evidence indicates that nonhuman primates attribute knowledge but not belief, that knowledge representations arise earlier in human development than belief representations, that the capacity to represent knowledge may remain intact in patient populations even when belief representation is disrupted, that knowledge (but not belief) attributions are likely automatic, and that explicit knowledge attributions are made more quickly than equivalent belief attributions.

Philips et al. 2022, Knowledge before belief

So where does it leave belief? Well, belief has to be more complex. And Lombrozo's taking the first serious stab at it (to my knowledge).

She does so by drawing a line between, on the one hand, epistemic beliefs—those that express an essentially epistemic attitude to a proposition, and that are in principle solely responsive to epistemic concerns—and the non-epistemic beliefs—that respond to other concerns, like loyalty, self-interest, diplomacy or faith.

I'm not going to go over the evidence she gathered, although it's very interesting, because I want to segway into something else: it feels to me like much of this non-epistemic belief thing is actually about relations. (Of course, there are exceptions: believing for self-interest or to avoid cognitive dissonance isn't relational, but one could argue these are defective attitudes. Or maybe it's another type of belief altogether? The whole point here is that the notion of belief is still largely unmapped.)

One idea I've been pondering about for a few years now is the idea of an epistemology of orality. The starting point would be An Antane Kapesh's *Je suis une maudite sauvagesse*. As a child and young women, Kapesh lived a traditional hunter-gatherer life, and then lived through the brutal forced transition towards sedentarism under what is essentially a land theft system. At one point, Kapesh points out that settlers have even appropriated the discovery of the resources they eventually exploited. To bring evidence that these "discoverers" actually got their information from indigenous informants, she tells about the man whom informed, and brings to bear testimonials from people of her community, mentioning how she is related to those people. Obviously, we would never see that in a scientific document, but it makes a lot of sense: when we present something as true to someone, our relationship serves as collateral. If we misrepresent an important truth to someone we love and they discovered, they would be justified if they were angry and chose to be less trustful of us.

The flip side of that coin is, of course, that belief can become the collateral of our relationship. If we value the relationship more than the truth, then we might adopt a belief in order to avoid confronting a friend and damaging the relationship. And this logic can be extended to the point that beliefs might become a signifier of a relationship: something like "my believing you despite the lack of evidence (or even against all evidence!) is a sign of the strength of my love". It is exactly how catholic faith was presented to me, although here I suspect the signifier, despite being ostensibly destined to the deity, might very well be destined to the community of believers.

I think there is an interesting thread here, hopefully I can find time to follow it.

🏷 epistemology, orality, belief

To share a thought or add a comment: locha at rawtext dot club.

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