Category: Belief
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Eliminative Materialism and Belief: Another Wrinkle
I've made it clear that I think eliminative materialism (EM) is a "lunatic philosophy of mind" to borrow a phrase from A. W. Collins. Peter Lupu basically agrees though he may not care to put the point in such an intemperate way. What follows is an excerpt from a recent e-mail of his. Since I…
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No Beliefs? Then No Truths Either!
Peter Lupu e-mails: A comment to mull over regarding your premise (A) in your recent post about Eliminative Materialism. A. If a proposition is true, then it is possibly such that it is believed by someone. Premise (A) says that in order for a proposition to be true, it is a necessary condition that it…
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Eliminative Materialism: Can You Believe It?
In an earlier post, I provided a rough characterization of eliminative materialism (EM). Here is a more technical exposition for the stout of heart. If EM is true, then there are no beliefs. But what about the belief that EM is true, a belief that one would expect eliminative materialists to hold? If we exfoliate…
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Hume on Belief and Existence
Section VII of Book I of David Hume's A Treatise of Human Nature is relevant to recent investigations of ours into belief, existence, assertion, and the unity of the proposition. In this section of the Treatise, Hume anticipates Kant's thesis that 'exists' is not a real predicate, and Brentano's claim that the essence of judgment…
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On Belief
I have been thinking about belief and whether it is under the control of the will. This question is important since it lies at the foundation of the very possibility of an 'ethics of belief.' People believe all sorts of things, and it is quite natural to suppose that some of the things they believe they…
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Knowledge Without Belief: A Dallas Willard-Josef Pieper Connection
A commenter on the Pieper post notes that Dallas Willard has a understanding of the belief-knowledge relation (or lack of relation) similar to that of Pieper. A little searching brought me to the following passage in Willard's Knowledge and Naturalism which substantiates the commenter's suggestion (I have bolded the parts relevant to my current concerns):
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A Pieperian Argument for Doxastic Voluntarism
Josef Pieper (1904-1997) is a 20th century German Thomist. I read his Belief and Faith as an undergraduate and am now [December 2007] re-reading it very carefully. It is an excellent counterbalance to a lot of the current analytic stuff on belief and doxastic voluntarism. What follows is my reconstruction of Pieper's argument for doxastic…
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Against William Alston Against Doxastic Voluntarism
The following remarks are based on the first two sections of Chapter Four, "Deontological Desiderata," of William P. Alston's Beyond "Justification": Dimensions of Epistemic Evaluation (Cornell UP, 2005), pp. 58-67. 1. It makes sense to apply deontological predicates to actions. Thus it makes sense to say of a voluntary action that it is obligatory or…
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Are There Any Beliefs Over Which We Have Direct Voluntary Control? Doxastic Voluntarism and Epoché
I suppose I am a limited doxastic voluntarist: though I haven't thought about this question in much depth my tendency is to say that there are some beliefs over the formation of which I have direct voluntary control. That is, there are some believable contents — call them propositions — that I can bring myself…
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Are Any Beliefs Acquired At Will? Any Room for an ‘Ethics of Belief’?
William P. Alston boldly maintains that "no one ever acquires a belief at will." (Beyond Justification, Cornell 2005, 67) This blanket rejection of doxastic voluntarism — the view that some belief-formation is under the control of the will — sounds extreme. What about beliefs that one acquires as a result of reasoning? Are not some of…