The propositional character of belief
It can appear mysterious that the content of epistemic
attitudes (belief
and opinion) is conveyed by clauses introduced by that: “I believe that the
dog is in his house.” If beliefs were causes of behavior, our success in denoting
them gives rise to an apparently insurmountable problem: how do propositions—if
they exist at all—exist independently of human conduct, so as to be fit for
causally explaining it?
While belief ascriptions figure prominently in many behavioral
explanations, their propositional form indicates that they pertain to states of
information. My belief that my dog is in his house consists of the reliable use
of the information that he’s there. Not only will I reply accordingly if asked
about his location; in directing other my conduct, I may use that information.
If I want the dog to come, I will yell in the direction of his house rather
than toward his sofa. Yet, I won’t always
use this information: I might absent-mindedly call to my dog on the sofa
despite knowing (hence believing) that he is in his house. Believed information
can be mistakenly disregarded.
Belief “that p” is a propensity
to take p into rational account when p is relevant to the agent’s goals. But
taking certain information into account involves also various skills, and it must
be facilitated by the appropriate habits. The purposeful availability of
believed information is also affected by, besides skills, inhibitions, habits,
and desires.
What becomes striking on recognizing beliefs as propensities
to use particular information is that behavior can be so successfully explained,
when we know something of an agent’s purposes, by reference to the information
on which we can predict the agent’s reliance.
Is this successful reliance a unique feature of human
cognition? We can use belief ascriptions to describe nonhuman behavior, but we
can do the same for machines. The concept of belief, however, isn’t essential
to describing nonintelligent machine behavior. When my printer’s light
indicates that it is out of paper, I might say it believes it is, particularly
if, in fact, the tray is full. The printer’s “belief” that it is out of paper is expressed
in two ways: it refuses to print and a light turns on, and I can refer to these
directly, without invoking the concept of belief. Compare it to what is true of me when I
run out of paper, where my belief that I have exhausted my supply can explain
an indefinitely large set of potential behaviors, from purchasing supplies to
postponing work to expressing frustrated rage—in any of an indefinitely large
variety of manners.
Applying the concept of belief to nonhuman animals is
intermediate between applying it to machines or to humans; it can be applied to
animals more robustly than to machines. It isn’t preposterous to say that a dog
believes his bone is buried at a certain location, particularly if it’s been removed
and he still tries to retrieve it from the old location. What can give us pause
about saying the dog believes arises
from the severely limited conduct that’s influenced by the dog’s information
about the bone’s location, as is apparent when the dog fails, except when
hungry, to behave territorially toward the bone’s burial place.
Humans differ from canines in our capacity to carry the
information constituting a belief’s propositional content to indefinitely many
contexts. This makes belief indispensable in forecasting human behavior:
without it, we could not exploit the predictive power of knowing what
information a human agent is likely to rely on in new contexts.
This cross-contextual consistency in use of information
seems to rest on our having language, which permits (but does not compel!) the
insertion of old information into new contexts.
The social representation of abstractions
Explaining our cross-contextual capacities is the problem
(in the theory of knowledge) of how we manage to mentally represent
abstractions. In Kripke’s version of Wittgenstein’s private-language argument,
the problem is expressed in the dependence of concepts on extensions that are
not rule-governed. The social consensus engendered by how others apply words
provides a standard against which to measure one’s own word usage.
Abstraction relies, ultimately, on the “wisdom of crowds” in
achieving the most instrumentally effective segmentations. The source of
abstraction—a form of social coordination—lies in our capacity to intuit (but
only approximately) how others apply words.
The capacity to grasp the meanings of others’ words underlies
the fruitfulness of using believed propositions to forecast human behavior.
With language we can represent the information that another human agent is also
able to represent and can transfer to all manner of contexts. But this linguistic
requirement for full-fledged belief does not mean that people’s beliefs are always
the beliefs they claim (or believe) they have. Language allows us our
propositional knowledge about abstract informational states, but that doesn’t imply
that we have infallible access to those states—obviously not pertaining to
others but not even about ourselves. Nor does it follow that nonlinguistic
animals can have full-fledged beliefs limited only by concreteness.
Nonlinguistic animals lack full-fledged beliefs about even concrete matters
because linguistic representation is the only available means for representing
information in a way allowing its introduction to indefinitely varied contexts.
This account relies on a weakened private-language argument
to explain abstraction as social consensus. But I reject Wittgenstein’s
argument that private language is impossible: we do have propositional states
accessible only privately. Wittgenstein’s argument proves too much, as it would
impugn also the possibility of linguistic meaning, for which there is no fact
of the matter as to how society must extend the meaning to new information. The
answer to the strong private-language argument is the propositional structure
of perception itself. (See T. Burge, Origins of Objectivity (2010).) What language provides is a consensual standard against
which one’s (ultimately idiosyncratic) personal standard can be compared and
modified. (Notice that this invokes a dialectic between what I’ve
termed “opinion” and “belief.”)
This account language's role in abstraction
justifies the early 20th-century Russian psychologist Vygotsky’s view
that abstract
thought is fundamentally linguistic.
