Pascal Engel

Believing, Holding True, and Accepting

Belief is not a unified phenomenon. In this paper I argue, as a number of other riters argue, that one should distinguish a variety of belief-like attitudes: believing proper - a dispositional state which can have degrees - holding true - which can occur without understanding what one believes - and accepting - a practical and contextual attitude that has a role in deliberation and in practical reasoning. Acceptance itself is not a unified attitude. I explore the various relationships and differences between these doxastic attitudes, and claim that although acceptance is distinct from belief, it rests upon it, and is therefore a species of belief.

Believing and accepting

Introduction: the Varieties of Belief and Acceptance P. Engel. The Possibility of Acceptance Without Belief D. Clarke. Why Acceptance that P Does Not Entail Belief that P J. Cohen. Moores Paradox L. Goldstein. On Moores Paradox R. Stalnaker. On Wanting to Believe M. Losonsky. Choosing to Intend, Wanting to Believe J.-P. Dupuy. Transformations of Belief R. Jeffrey. Belief and Acceptance: A Logical Point of View J. Dubucs. Scientific Objectivity and the Aims of Belief P. Railton. Belief and Acceptance Revisited K. Lehrer. Commitments Defined with the Help of Public Concepts A. Woodfield. Concepts, Beliefs and Metarepresentations D. Sperber. The Simulation of Belief F. Recanati.

The False Modesty of the Identity Theory of Truth

The identity theory of truth, according to which true thoughts are identical with facts, is very hard to formulate. It oscillates between substantive versions, which are implausible, and a merely truistic version, which is difficult to distinguish from deflationism about truth. This tension is present in the form of identity theory that one can attribute to McDowell from his views on perception, and in the conception defended by Hornsby under that name

Introduction: The Varieties of Belief and Acceptance

The notion of belief is ubiquitous in contemporary philosophy: it occurs in epistemology, when one discusses questions about the rationality of belief and the difference between belief and knowledge, in the philosophy of mind when one raises questions about the nature of mental states and contents and about our various ways of ascribing them to people through a “folk psychology”, and in the philosophy of language, when one deals with “the semantics of propositional attitudes” and with the logic of “belief sentences” of the form “X believes that p”. The ramifications of these questions and their interconnections are numerous, and here, as elsewhere in philosophy, it is not obvious that one field of inquiry or one angle of approach dominates the others and deserves to be taken as primary or basic. Questions about what beliefs really are, metaphysically, cannot be easily divorced from epistemological questions about what differentiates belief from knowledge, nor from questions about the meanings of the sentences through which we attribute beliefs to other people or to ourselves, and the latter cannot be separated from the former. A good example of these interconnections is provided by “Moore’s paradox”: “It rains, but I do not believe that it rains” (or “It does not rain, but I believe that it rains”). According to Wittgenstein1, Moore made a point, through such sentences, about “the logic of assertion”, namely that it makes no sense, in ordinary talk, to say that p, and to say, in the same breath, that one does not believe that p. This simple “logical” point, however, does not pertain only to the “logic” of assertion and belief talk. For, if Wittgenstein is right to say that “I believe that p ” is not a description by the speaker of one of her mental states, but the expression of it, it is difficult to evade the question of what constitutes a genuine description of a mental state, in contrast to a mere expression of it. If there is a real contrast between such forms as “I believe that p ” and “He believes that p ” (for “p, but he does not believe that p ” does not give rise to a paradox), then any theory of belief which gives a uniform account of the meaning of “believes” when used in the first person and in the third person is bound to be false. For instance the functionalist account of belief according to which “believes” means in both cases “is a state apt to cause behaviour” is threatened by this contrast.2 Hence this simple “logical” point is not innocuous with respect to what belief actually is. It is not innocuous either with respect to the difference between belief and knowledge, for a related simple “logical” point is that, unlike in the case of belief, a genuine contradiction emerges when ones says, “I know that it rains, but it does not rain”: for knowledge implies the truth of the proposition known, which is thus incompatible with the assertion of its falsity. The Moorean sentences invite us to reflect on this difference, which is, at bottom, an epistemological one. It also invites us to reflect on the difference between ascribing a belief content to oneself and ascribing a belief content to others: when I ascribe a belief to myself, I know what I believe, whereas there is, one the face of it, no such knowledge when I ascribe a belief to someone else. This raises the question whether there is a single notion of belief content apt to be used in both cases. Moore’s paradox is a good way of thinking about the interconnections between the psychology, the epistemology, and the semantics of belief. But it is not the only way.

Epistemic responsibility without epistemic agency

This article discusses the arguments against associating epistemic responsibility with the ordinary notion of agency. I examine the various ‘Kantian’ views which lead to a distinctive conception of epistemic agency and epistemic responsibility. I try to explain why we can be held responsible for our beliefs in the sense of obeying norms which regulate them without being epistemic agents.

In What Sense Is Knowledge the Norm of Assertion

The knowledge account of assertion (KAA) is the view that assertion is governed by the norm that the speaker should know what s/he asserts. It is not the purpose of this article to examine all the criticisms nor to try to give a full defence of KAA, but only to defend it against the charge of being normatively incorrect. It has been objected that assertion is governed by other norms than knowledge, or by no norm at all. It seems to me, however, that a number of these criticisms are based on a number of misunderstandings of the notion of a norm and of the way it can regulated a given practice. Once we spell out in what sense knowledge can play a normative role in this context, the KAA appears much more plausible.

The Norm of Truth: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Logic

This book is an introduction to the philosophy of logic and an attempt to assess its scope and philosophical significance. The author deals with the nature of proposition, connectives, quantifiers, truth, modality, propositional attitude, and vagueness and deals with the more general questions of realism versus antirealism in logic and of the nature of logical constants. He defends a form of realism based on the idea of logic as a normative discipline setting the general standards of rationality.

Wherein Lies the Normative Dimension in Meaning and Mental Content

This paper argues that the normative dimension in mental and semantic content is not a categorical feature of content, but an hypothetical one, relative to the features of the interpretation of thoughts and meaning. The views of Robert Brandom are discussed. The thesis defended in this paper is not interpretationist about thought. It implies that the normative dimension of content arises from the real capacity of thinkers and speakers to self ascribe thoughts to themselves and to reach self knowledge of their own thoughts.

The Norms of Thought: Are They Social?

A commonplace in contemporary philosophy is that mental content has normative properties. A number of writers associate this view to the idea that the normativity of content is essentially connected to its social character. I agree with the first thesis, but disagree with the second. The paper examines three kinds of views according to which the norms of thought and content are social: Wittgenstein’s rule following considerations, Davidson’s triangulation argument, and Brandom’s inferential pragmatics, and criticises each. It is argued that there are objective conceptual norms constitutive of mental content, but that these are not essentially social.

Epistemic Norms and the Limits of Epistemology

I raise a dilemma for an epistemology based on the idea that there are hinge propositions or primitive certainties: either such propositions are norms or rules in the “grammatical” sense, but they cannot regulate our inquiries since they are not genuine propositions obeying truth or evidential standards, or they are epistemic norms, but compete with the classical norms of belief and knowledge. Either there are hinges, but they have nothing to do with epistemology, or hinges are part of our knowledge, and their epistemology is part of ordinary epistemology.