Abstract
This paper attempts to revisit how ‘acquaintance’ could bring about belief and how belief becomes knowledge in our language system due to the credential undertaking of truth, justification, evidence, and causal or conceptual preservation. My quest in this paper is to interrogate belief and the cessation of belief (I call this the ‘death of belief’) from the perspective of the doxastic approach of externalism and internalism in the philosophy of language and philosophy of mind. I will attempt to make sense of the nominal appeal (an approach that conserves the process of continuing belief through evidence and conceptualization) to both of these ideas in a sophisticated manner. The linguistic form of using words seems allied to the context sensitivity of the speakers involved in social practices. A tripartite structure pivots the model of linguistic belief, where minds are causally entrenched in a world that stimulates conceptual or internal states, representing how objectivity works. The entanglements of concepts with pictures hinge on conceptual prerequisites to impact the world.
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Notes
Stalnaker writes, ‘To be acquainted with an object, according to Russell, is to be “have a direct cognitive relation to that object, i.e. [to be] directly aware of the object itself.” The paradigm of objects of acquaintance, for Russell, were sensory experiences, but this same epistemic relation that connects us to our experience is supposed to connect us to the constituents of our thought…’ (Stalnaker, 2008, 107).
Here, you can discuss Kripke’s A Puzzle about Belief (1979) and his marvelous example of the monolingual French speaker (Pierre) who once believed ‘Londres est jolie’ (London is pretty) and, later, when he came to know (during his visit in England) ‘London is not pretty,’ but he was ignorant about the fact that the city (London) about which he learned earlier and the city that he visited now are the same. So his beliefs regarding London sound decisive. Moreover, please keep in mind David Lewis’s brilliant analysis on the same puzzle of belief and his strategy in defense of attributing knowledge of the essence. Lewis believes that the contradiction arises from the ignorance of the essential properties of a particular thing (it may be a city like London) of the speaker Pierre rarely had during his two beliefs about the same city (Lewis, 1981, 283–289).
In the internalist framework, since language is viewed as a mental organ, it looks at the relationship between the mind and the world regarding certain mental mechanisms. An internalist believes that mental proprieties are intrinsic only if they preserve across-world identity of internal replicas. The internalists’ concern is about how an agent goes beyond these to form a conception of an external world, and how we are able to know that the world beyond us answers to the ideas that we structure.
Reliabilism, a version of externalism, vindicates that the causal process invades an account of cognitive reliability to induce the epistemic justification of one’s beliefs. Bonjour clarifies, ‘But what makes the view a version of externalism is that, as we have seen, reliabilism does not require that the believer in question have any sort of cognitive access to the fact that the belief-producing process is in this way reliable in order for his or her belief to be justified. All that matters for justification is that the process in question in fact be reliable, whether or not the person believes or has even the slightest inkling that this is so or the slightest understanding of what specific sort of process is involved’ (Bonjour, 2002, 227).
I am personally indebted to Frank Jackson for this valuable point.
For externalist (physical externalist), one can get the meaning of the term that is causally related to the objective world. Externalist challenges the semantic rules and the semantic markers that represent the knowledge, which every competent speaker has already in their mind. The terms that conceptually exist are not under the discussion of externalism. Language is a social phenomenon, and even the conventional meaning and propositional attitudes cannot be grasped through mentalese approach. Semantic externalism vindicates that the concept that is important for knowledge becomes meaningless if it has no causal connection to the referent or external world.
Even if one may consider a way in which this false belief might entail an epistemic utility in a systematic manner for the speaker as introduced by Pritchard (2017), my explanation does not put forward any significance to uplift epistemically useful false beliefs rather prioritizing the notion of cessation of beliefs.
I am personally indebted to Hilary Putnam for his valuable comments.
Dretske and Yourgrau emphasize how belief could cease to be knowledge. The justification of the belief or the epistemic certification may somehow lose, but the simple continuation of the belief is possible by depending on something else as a supporting role. Though it sounds a paradoxical tune, we can believe in this way from an externalist’s ground. Dretske and Yourgrau argue, ‘There is simply the continued existence of the belief, a belief that at some earlier stage of its career was knowledge. Unless one is prepared (as we are not) to say that the epistemic status (as knowledge) of a belief is hereditary, that there is some principle of cognitive inertia (once a belief acquires an epistemic momentum, it retains it even after removal of its cognitive impetus), it seems that this type of case must be taken to show that the relationship that converts a belief into knowledge is an extrinsic relationship: a belief can acquire it (thereby becoming knowledge) or lose it (thereby ceasing to be knowledge) without altering in the slightest its identity as a belief’ (1983, 360–361).
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Acknowledgements
Special thanks are due to the anonymous reviewers, Professor Robin Le Poidevin, Sree, and Meghan Carron who read the paper carefully and made helpful suggestions. As always, my greatest debt is to my mentor, late Hilary Putnam, with whom I had shared my understanding of past beliefs and tenseless sentences, added depth, and zest to philosophical explorations (see, http://putnamphil.blogspot.com/2014/12/reply-to-question-from-sanjit.html).
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Chakraborty, S. Pursuits of Belief: Reflecting on the Cessation of Belief. SOPHIA 60, 639–654 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11841-021-00882-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11841-021-00882-0