Abstract
A number of metaphysicians of powers have argued that we need to distinguish the actualization of a power from the effects of that actualization. This distinction, I argue, has important consequences for the dispositional theory of belief. In particular, it suggests that dispositionalists have in effect been trying to define belief, not in terms of its actualization, but instead in terms of the effects of its actualization. As a general rule, however, powers are to be defined in terms of their actualizations. I thus argue that belief has just one actualization, and that that actualization is a particular kind of mental act that I call a judgment. I explain the resulting view—that belief is the power to judge—and argue that it has some important advantages, not only over other dispositional theories of belief, but also over categorical theories of belief. Since these options are apparently exhaustive, it thus has important advantages over all other theories of belief.
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Notes
See Cartwright (2009, p. 151), Corry (2009, pp. 174–179), and Molnar (2003, pp. 194–195). The terminology I employ in the text is my own: Cartwright and Corry say that we need to distinguish the exercise of a capacity from its manifest (“occurrent”) results, while Molnar says that we need to distinguish the manifestation of a power from the effects of a power. But the underlying idea is the same.
Or with a “multi-track” disposition; see Ryle (1949)—though, for arguments that multi-track dispositions can be reduced to sets of single-track dispositions, see Bird (2007, pp. 21–24), Lowe (2010, pp. 11–12), and Molnar (2003, pp. 198–199). I should also note that Schwitzgebel (2001, 2002, 2012, 2013) has liberalized simple dispositionalism even further, arguing that each belief is to be identified—or, rather, associated—with a set of behavioral, cognitive, and phenomenal dispositions. In my terms, this, too, will count as a version of classical dispositionalism.
Or rather—because I think that desires and intentions, too, are powers—their actualizations. (We might call them practical judgments.).
The contrast is with Strong Closure, according to which, if you believe the premises of any valid inference, then you also believe the conclusion.
In other words, there’s no reason to accept Strong Closure (see note 4 above).
I take the inference to have the form \(\langle a\) is F; \(a = b\); therefore, b is \(F\rangle\). In particular, I don’t think that the presence of indexicals (‘today’, ‘[this] Friday’) complicates the inference.
It isn’t entirely clear that our ordinary practices of “belief”-ascription commit us even to Weak Closure*. For some relevant examples and discussion, see Schwitzgebel (2001). I will, however, ignore these issues in what follows, since my interest here isn’t in our ordinary practices of “belief”-ascription, but in the metaphysical nature of (what I’m here calling) belief.
Cf. note 7 above. Again, my interest here isn’t in our ordinary practices of belief-ascription, and so I don’t actually want to commit myself to any particular account of those practices, including the account I suggest in the text. The function of that account here is merely illustrative.
On these issues, cf. Audi (1994). I should note that my argument here implicitly assumes (as does Audi) that you can be disposed to acquire the disposition to \(\phi\) without being disposed to \(\phi\). There may be conceptions of dispositions on which this assumption is false, and any dispositional theory of belief constructed on the basis of such a conception will entail (at least) Weak Closure. There are, however, other conceptions of dispositions on which the assumption is true. I have thus argued, in effect, that dispositional theorists of belief ought to adopt a conception of dispositions on which the assumption is true. (I’m grateful to Josh Mendelsohn for pressing me to make this assumption explicit.)
The qualifier “causal-explanatory” is crucial here. If the content of a belief is essential to it, then there may be essential logical connections between beliefs, even on the categorical theory. The connections between beliefs that I have in mind here are thus not those that hold merely in virtue of the beliefs’ contents.
On real definition see, e.g., Rosen (2015).
This is implied by the contingency of natural laws, which most categoricalists (and most others, for that matter) accept. For relevant (critical) discussion of categoricalism and the contingency of natural laws, see Bird (2007).
Note that the reference to dispositions here is inessential; the same point could be made instead in terms of laws.
I borrow the term from Bird (2007, pp. 43–46).
You might try to capture all of those different things under a single formula, by saying, for example, that to believe that p is to be disposed to act in ways that will tend to satisfy your desires just in case p. (I owe this suggestion to an anonymous referee for Topoi.) Such a formula, however, specifies the defining dispositions only by description; the specification is merely de dicto, not de re. The resulting definition of belief is thus similar to a definition of a descriptive name, like Evans’s (1982) well-known stipulation that ‘Julius’ is to refer to the inventor of the zipper, whoever that is. So, just as there’s an important sense in which the descriptive definition of ‘Julius’ fails to tell you who Julius is, so there’s an important sense in which the descriptive definition of the belief that p fails to tell you what the belief that p is. The result is that a realist dispositional theory of belief needs to specify each defining disposition—and hence its actualization—de re, and not merely de dicto.
On the distinction between sparse and abundant properties, see, e.g., Schaffer 2004 (and the other works cited there). As he describes the basic idea behind the distinction: “The abundant properties provide the semantic values of meaningful predicates, while the sparse properties carve out the joints of nature on which the causal powers hinge” (2004, p. 92). Thus, there’s an abundant property for every predicate (and so a disposition for every dispositional predicate), but there are many fewer sparse properties (and so many fewer powers).
Vetter (2015), for example, argues that the whole, quite general, class of what she calls potentialities are to be characterized in terms of their manifestations alone.
For a defense of this view of powers, see, e.g., Lowe (2010, pp. 11–12) and Molnar (2003, pp. 198–199). Vetter’s (2015) view seems to be a bit more complicated (see especially section 2.6), but is at least in the same spirit; and, in any case, I don’t think that the additional complications are relevant to the case of belief.
With the exception, of course, of the one definitive actualization of the belief—namely, in the case of the belief that p, the judgment that p.
And on display in, e.g., Mill (1891).
For an account of the genus of inference in terms of its epistemically successful species, see Koziolek (2017).
It’s often said that perceptual knowledge essentially rests on background knowledge, for example about things like appropriate lighting conditions (in which case acts of perceiving would necessarily involve judgments as active components). I think that this is a mistake. What perceptual knowledge does require is (only) that appropriate background conditions obtain—they need not be known to obtain. Lighting conditions, for example, need to be normal (which is to say: they need to be such that, in them, the thinker in question could, given her actual cognitive capacities, acquire knowledge of the fact in question). The role of background knowledge is to allow sophisticated thinkers to acquire knowledge and avoid error in environments in which normal conditions don’t always obtain—in which, for example, lighting conditions vary in ways that render the perceiver susceptible to perceptual error. (These claims are, of course, controversial; I plan to defend them in future work.)
I thus reject the view that an epistemic act is merely the transition from one state to another. Epistemic acts are, rather, metaphysically and ontologically real “entities” (specifically, events) in their own right.
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Koziolek, N. Belief as the Power to Judge. Topoi 39, 1167–1176 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11245-018-9614-9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11245-018-9614-9