Abstract
In “Against alief”, Mandelbaum (Philos Stud 165(1):197–211, 2013) argues that if aliefs—a sui generis kind of mental states originally posited by Gendler (J Philos 105(10):634–663, 2008a; Mind Lang 23(5):552–585, 2008b; Analysis 72(4):799–811, 2012)—are to play the explanatory role that is usually ascribed to them, their contents must be propositionally structured. However, he contends, if aliefs have propositional contents, it is unclear what distinguishes them from beliefs. I find Mandelbaum’s arguments in favour of the idea that aliefs must have propositional contents to be compelling. However, I think aliefs should only be credited with a deflated kind of propositional content that I will baptize as “semi-structured propositional contents”, since they are composed by representational units that are neither fully un-detachable nor fully re-combinable. As I will argue, this way of understanding the content of aliefs not only allows us to accommodate all the worries raised by Mandelbaum regarding the nature of their contents, but it also it helps explain why aliefs have some of the peculiar features that Gendler ascribes to them. Consequently, it gives to the advocates of aliefs new tools to defend, against Mandelbaum, that these are sui generis mental states with their distinctive functional role in our cognitive lives.
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Notes
At least not in a direct way. One may try to change our experience-originated aliefs, for example, by slowly changing our habits or our conditioned responses.
Alief theorists might try to solve this difficulty by adding to the associative chain a demonstrative standing for the bottle and its content. In such a case, the content of the alief would be something like that, dangerous, cyanide, avoid (cf. Mandelbaum 2013, p. 203). However, since this would still be a mere succession of representations with no internal relationship between them, one could ask: why do the participants in the experiment avoid that particular bottle? Surely, the participants are tokening a demonstrative referring to a particular bottle and they are also representing cyanide, etc. But they are not attributing to that bottle the property of containing dangerous cyanide. So, it remains a mystery why they react as they do to the bottle, rather than responding to other objects, or merely giving a general and vague response to their surroundings. In brief: it seems that to explain the participants’ behaviour, it is not sufficient to add a new separate element to a bunch of associated representations (as if one added a new item to a supermarket list). What is needed is the new representational element—the demonstrative—to be represented as being dangerous.
Mandelbaum (2019) carefully examines different kinds of research against the malleability of beliefs in light of new evidence. Some studies show, for example, that people tend to maintain their beliefs despite having relevant evidence against them, that they scrutinize the evidence in favor or against their previous beliefs in a biased way and that, in some cases, they even strengthen their original beliefs after being presented with findings against them. All these suggest that we are not ideal rational believers promptly revising our beliefs in light of new information. However, there are also some contrasting results suggesting that people shift their beliefs when they are given a clear and congruent pattern of findings against them (Anglin 2019). In a similar vein, it seems to me that we have many everyday experiences of belief change that should not be overlooked. When I hear on the radio that buses will be on strike tomorrow, I look for a new way to go to work; when a friend tells me that she has divorced, I update my beliefs regarding her marital status, etc. This kind of ordinary doxastic adjustment seems to be more or less frequent and it starkly contrasts with the immutability of aliefs.
There are many complex debates on the requirements that something must satisfy to be a concept that I will not be able to deal with here. I am not claiming that the representations that constitute aliefs fulfill all these requirements. All I want to defend is the possibility, and the heuristic value, of crediting aliefs with contents composed by basic representational units that suffer from specific kinds of detachability and re-combinability limitations. So, an eventual change in the way in which we name these representations is not so relevant—we may, for example, call them “proto-concepts” instead of concepts—as long as we are clear on which their main features are.
From now onwards, I will use small, bold letters to refer to particular entities, capital bold letters to refer to properties, small letters in italics to refer to concepts of particulars, and capital letters in italics to refer to property concepts.
Strictly speaking, nothing precludes S from representing a as having other properties G, H, etc., different from F, but only if, at the same time, she also thinks that a is F. What she cannot do is to think about a as having a different property from F, while not thinking about it as also being F.
I am focusing here on what I consider to be the most basic cases of propositional contents: those in which properties are attributed to particulars. It seems to me, however, that it must be possible to extend this proposal to other propositional contents that have other kinds of subjects.
These suggestions complement Gendler’s remarks on the combinatoric nature of beliefs and the non-combinatoric nature of aliefs (Gendler 2012, pp. 800 and 806). Beliefs, Gendler tells us, are fully combinatoric because they can connect with any other mental states in all kinds of ways leading to widely different behavioral responses. Due to the fact that they are clusters of pre-packaged representational, affective and behavioral elements, aliefs do not admit such combinations. Moreover, the representational content of an alief is “processed in a relatively shallow way”, since “it is not fully integrated with other representational content that may be simultaneously triggered by features of the subjects’ internal or external environment” (Gendler 2012, p. 800). I think that these limitations can be better explained if we take the representational contents of aliefs to be not fully combinatoric either. Although I will come back to this later on in more detail, let me briefly anticipate why this is so. Remember that some of the concepts that constitute the content of an alief, like a, are rigidly linked to others, like F, in such a way that alief owners cannot help alieving that a is F whenever they perceive a. The basic idea is that this prevents alief owners from changing content a is F for a different one (in which a is combined with another property concept G or H, instead of F), even if they should do so based on other (external or internal) stimuli impinging on them. I thank a Synthese anonymous reviewer for calling my attention to this point.
Following Mendelovici (2018), I am distinguishing here between the deep metaphysical nature of propositional contents and their superficial characters. When we focus on the metaphysical nature of propositional contents, we can claim that they consist of sets of possible worlds, concrete worldly objects and properties, etc. Alternatively, if we understand propositional contents in a superficial sense, we can focus on the fact that these contents represent things as being in a certain way or on the kind of cognitive abilities involved in thinking them. My distinction between fully-structured and semi-structured contents is not based on their deep metaphysical nature but, rather, on their superficial features. My main claim is that these two sub-types of propositional contents differ in how flexible or rigid the conceptual abilities used to think these contents are.
Hopefully, focusing on the rigidity of some of the conceptual abilities deployed by aliefs’ owners will put us in a better position to understand not only what having semi-structured propositional contents consists in, but also how this particular feature impacts on the automatic, inflexible, and impenetrable way in which aliefs, as well as their representational contents, are formed and maintained. Nevertheless, someone may still find this kind of account insufficient and require an explanation of semi-structured contents in terms of the specific vehicles that instantiate them. I believe there might be enlightening explanations to offer in such terms, even though I will not be able to provide one of them here. Yet, I think that there is a possibility that we should not overlook: that several different vehicles may instantiate the same kind of conceptual un-detachability. If such were the case, a high-level explanation in terms of contents and abilities would be particularly well-suited to help us identify and characterize, at an adequate level of generality, what is common to all those creatures that one attributes aliefs to.
As is well known, Damasio (1994, 1999) has extensively defended the claim that emotions can “mark” the relevant alternatives when we are making rational decisions. I want to remain non-committal here regarding the details of his proposal and just stick to the general idea that emotions can mark those representational contents that are especially relevant for us and require a particular kind of cognitive response.
Stricto sensu, an alief that a is F and a belief that a is F not only have in common the fact that they both have truth conditions, they also share the same truth conditions (i.e., they represent the same particular as having the same property). Thus, even if there are some differences between these contents, they lie not on what they represent. Rather, these contents differ in the kind of diachronic transformations that one of them could eventually suffer and the other could not (because of how their constituent concepts can or cannot be detached and recombined). But then, it seems fair to say that the contents of these mental states share the same “synchronic” representational properties since they represent the same things as being in the same way. This allows to explain why we would be inclined to say that these mental states are about the same things or, if we use the notion in a deflated sense, that they share the same content. It also allows to explain why something is normatively wrong when a subject S, who alieves that a is F, cannot change her alief despite believing, based on good evidence, that a is not F.
Because of their propositional nature, the semi-structured contents of aliefs can function as premises of inferences, just like the propositional contents of “descriptive” propositional attitudes (beliefs, expectations, etc.,) do. However, aliefs also have prescriptive and motivational components that push their owners to act in certain ways. This raises the question: do these components also play an inferential role as premises in practical inferences? Imagine that I alieve that a nicely presented piece of cake in front of me is delicious. Let us also suppose that I believe my sister likes cake and I want to give her a present. Strictly speaking, this seems sufficient to lead me to infer that I should buy the cake for my sister. However, it also seems to me that my positive emotional reaction to the cake and my behavioral tendency to approach it myself, may well give me an additional “push” towards buying the cake. I doubt, however, that these positive emotional responses and behavioral inclinations count as premises in a rational practical inference, playing a role analogous to the one of prescriptive or motivational propositional attitudes. The reason for my doubts is the following one: it is not clear to me how the fact that I feel compelled to eat the cake, or that I have a good emotional reaction toward it can be reasons to buy the cake for my sister. Rather, it seems to me that these components might be operating in a causal way, giving me a general extra impulse to follow that course of action.
Notice, by the way, that this seems to be the kind of situation in which subjects of Rozin’s experiments are put. One may expect the subjects facing a cyanide labelled bottle to be inclined to represent it as dangerous. However, what happens in the experiment is that the subjects also perceive how the bottle is filled with sugar. So, why don´t they, as a result of this additional perceptual information, recombine their concept of the bottle with other property concepts like “filled with sugar” or “innocuous”? Moreover, if such were the case, why doesn’t the perception of the same external object –the cyanide labelled bottle—trigger a different alief with a content like the cyanide labelled bottle is innocuous? If aliefs are mental states formed in response to external (and internal) experienced stimuli, why don´t these differences in the perceptual stimuli lead to the formation of different aliefs, especially if we agree that aliefs’ contents are composed by fully-detachable and re-combinable concepts?.
I am not claiming that whenever a subject S is in front of the same entity de re, she will always have the same alief. On the contrary, S has to detect some specific aspectual features of an entity, leading her to categorize it in some particular ways, before forming any alief about it. Thus, she has to detect the transparency of the Grand Canyon’s floor, the cyanide label on the bottle, or the perceptual features typical of, say, a wolf, before alieving that any of these entities is dangerous. What I am claiming is that, in the case of aliefs, whenever S categorizes an entity as a cyanide bottle, a wolf, etc., she rigidly attributes to it a specific property – like that of being dangerous- and that no other additional perceptual information will change that. This is the fact that needs to be explained.
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Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Eric Mandelbaum, Daniel Kalpokas and the participants of the Workshop “Fronteras en Filosofía y Ciencias de la Mente (Valparaiso, Chile, 2019) for their insightful comments on previous versions of this paper.
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Funding was provided by Secretaria de Ciencia y Tecnología - Universidad Nacional de Córdoba.
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Danón, L. The content of aliefs. Synthese 198, 8503–8520 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-020-02583-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-020-02583-6