Abstract
This essay attempts to clarify the nature and structure of aliefs. First I distinguish between a robust notion of aliefs and a deflated one. A robust notion of aliefs would introduce aliefs into our psychological ontology as a hitherto undiscovered kind, whereas a deflated notion of aliefs would identify aliefs as a set of pre-existing psychological states. I then propose the following dilemma: one the one hand, if aliefs have propositional content, then it is unclear exactly how aliefs differ from psychological states we already countenance, in which case there is no robust notion of aliefs; on the other, if aliefs just contain associative content, then they cannot do the explanatory work set out for them, in which case there is no reason to posit aliefs at all. Thus, it appears that we have little reason to posit the novel category of robust aliefs.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
The reader might be wondering what the difference between propositional and associative content amounts to. To a first approximation, (states that take) propositional contents can have satisfaction conditions, whereas (states that only take) associative contents cannot. Satisfaction conditions are presumably determined by the syntax and meanings of contents, whereas associative contents are (relations among) mental representations that lack any syntactic structure. Accordingly, propositional contents can play a role as a premise in valid inferences, whereas associative contents never play such a role, but rather only enter into associative chains of thought (where such chains cannot be valid or invalid).
NB: With regard to the present argument, it does not matter whether the putative properties of aliefs apply to beliefs per se; all that matters is that there is some set of mental states that can have these properties, in which case the explicit characterization of aliefs does not provide a unique distinguishing set of properties. That said, since I suspect that beliefs do happen to have all the properties give to aliefs, they will serve as the main example in the text. Of course, this is not meant to show that the properties of alief are sufficient for something to be a belief; it’s not even necessary that they be necessary. The argument against the robust notion of alief simply requires that the properties of alief are not uniquely distinctive when compared to more familiar mental states.
Small caps will be used throughout to denote structural descriptions of concepts. The structural descriptions are stipulated, but the stipulations will not affect the arguments in the text. If, for example, it turns out that tiger is a complex concept, then one can substitute one’s preferred simple concept in for tiger.
Of course, such tokenings need not be conscious (as can be seen by the efficacy of subliminal priming).
Importantly, microvalences are purported to be applicable to not only singular concepts, but also concepts covering general categories (i.e., so it’s not that microvalences just apply to this mug ; they can also apply to mug full-stop). Of course, the evidence in favor of microvalences is still reasonably scant, so any inference about the scope of microvalences is far from apodictic.
Moreover, if the essential properties of beliefs are tied to the actual properties of beliefs in this world, perhaps something could not count as a belief unless it too had an associated valence and motor routine.
If you assume that other propositional attitudes (imaginings, supposing, etc.) are also constructed out of concepts, then, if the microvalence hypothesis holds, all of our attitudes come with attached valences and motor responses. The consequence is so much the worse for the robust notion of alief.
In most versions of cognitive dissonance people are attributed core unconscious beliefs (such as: i am a morally good person ); see Thibodeau and Aronson 1992. Additionally, some promising explanations of implicit bias may also need the notion of unconscious belief: one way to attempt explain the workings of implicit racism is to posit that the implicit racist harbors an unconscious belief that, e.g., Caucasians are superior to African Americans. Lastly, vision science often posits unconscious beliefs (generally termed ‘assumptions’ for though they do appear to underwrite inferences from shading to shape, they aren’t globally inferentially promiscuous), such as the belief that there is a single overhead light source (e.g., Ramachandran 1988; Scholl 2006); for arguments that such intramodular propositional states are indeed beliefs see Dwyer and Pietrowski (1996).
NB: My use of ‘binding’ is not quite the use at play in cognitive neuroscientific discussions of the ‘binding problem’ in visual perception. Although it risks confusion to employ the term in another way, I find the word ‘binding’ to be helpful for getting at the underlying idea. Additionally, there is precedent for my usage: Adina Roskies sees the problem I will describe and the traditional binding problem as structurally similar (see Roskies 1999). Nevertheless, I apologize for any confusion my usage might cause.
Gendler addresses this experiment directly in Gendler (2008a).
The locution ‘alieve that’ might strike one’s ears as odd. If aliefs are associative in content it’s difficult to see how they can be propositional attitudes (even if aliefs can take propositional content, it’s not necessarily clear that they would be propositional attitudes). Nevertheless, it is the locution that Gendler adopts; for example, in describing Rozin’s subjects who are looking at a pile of vomit-shaped rubber, Gendler writes, “they alieve that it is vomit” (2008a, p. 653). Even though I adopt this locution I remain agnostic as to whether aliefs could count as propositional attitudes.
Of course, they could just think that is cyanide , with cynanide being linked to dangerous, which itself would be linked to avoidance behaviors.
NB: This problem cannot be fixed by adding a fourth element to the content, such as an iconic representation of the bottle. Say the alief had the content cyanide, dangerous, avoid, picture (where ‘picture’ stands in for an iconic representation of the bottle). In such a situation it would still be a mystery why anyone would avoid the bottle, because these would be four separate thoughts, albeit thoughts that sequentially followed one another. If you are having trouble seeing the difference perhaps the following example will prove illuminating. Imagine we have two cognizers, one who tokens the thought sexy wildebeest (a single thought with an adjective noun structure) and the other who tokens sexy followed by a tokening of wildebeest (two separate thoughts). These are two very different cognizers; the first one clearly has some odd sexual proclivities, whereas the second one just appears to be someone lost in a stream of consciousness. We can predict a decent amount of the first person’s behavior from knowing that the person tokened sexy wildebeest (for example, you probably would not want to let him pet-sit your wildebeest), but we cannot predict much of anything at all about the second cognizer. If aliefs were essentially associative (meaning no propositional content allowed), then alief contents would parallel our second cognizer. But this cannot be right, because we can predict the behavior of the participants in Rozin’s experiments: we know they are apt to avoid the poison.
For a related argument applied to Hume’s associationism, see Fodor (2003).
For the locus classicus on inferential promiscuity, see Stich (1978).
The following objection was raised by a very helpful anonymous reviewer, to whom I am much indebted.
Thinking that subjects would draw such a conclusion is quite reasonable; after all subjects in much more opaque setups tend to be able to predict the (less than fully rational) behavior of how other subjects would act (for a paradigmatic example of such subject based prediction, see Bem (1967)).
It is important to note that in other experiments that have subjects predicting how others would perform, the predictors do not themselves first take part in the study (i.e., they do not first choose a bottle) rather they just have the experiment explained to them and then infer how others would respond. Thus, they are not just projecting from their past behavior to other people’s future behavior. This is an important caveat because it blocks one possible response: participants who haven’t partaken in the study could not reason that since they were in fact hesitant to taste sugar from the bottle labeled sodium-cyanide others would be too. Thanks to Ian Evans for raising this issue.
If so, then the alief theorist would want to posit that even imagination can serve as the stimulus for forming an alief, in which case the alief story would have to be amended to add that aliefs are activatable in imagination. But this seems a bit odd, for aliefs are supposed to preserve a certain amount of ecological validity—they are fitness enhancing precisely because in perception they trade off speed for accuracy in potentially dangerous situations. It is unclear why such states would appear in imagination too where they would lose their fitness enhancing qualities. No doubt, such an explanation is possible, but would be a serious amendment to the alief picture.
See the ‘sterilization condition’ in the internal replication (ibid. p. 224).
The reader might be wondering what type of state can explain such behavior. I suspect it’s just old run-of-the-mill beliefs, albeit unconscious and a rationally acquired one’s that do the explaining. Of course, this would mean that people harbor contradictory beliefs, a conclusion that arises in surprisingly numerous facets of psychology (and one very much goes against the motivation for positing aliefs in the first place). For an expanded theory of a rationally acquired and contradictory beliefs of this sort see Mandelbaum (2010); for other evidence that people hold contradictory beliefs, see Ripley (forthcoming); Strickland et al. (2011).
For a thorough defense of the claim that beliefs are essentially responsive to evidence, a claim that Gendler is sympathetic to, see Adler (2002).
Of course, sometimes it is just the name of a positive test search (such as in Klayman and Ha (1987)); that use of the phrase is orthogonal to our purposes and should be set aside.
This can happen in different ways: sometimes by discounting the new evidence, other times by merely avoiding it (as in the ‘selective exposure’ literature).
References
Adler, J. (2002). Belief’s own ethics. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Bem, D. (1967). Self-perception: The dependent variable of human performance. Organizational Behavior and Human Performance, 2, 105–121.
Boudry, M., & Braekman, J. (2011). How convenient! The epistemic rationale of self-validating belief systems. Philosophical Psychology. doi:10.1007/s11406-010-9254-9.
Damasio, A. (1994). Descartes error: Emotion, reason, and the human brain. New York: Grosset/Putnam.
Dwyer, S., & Pietrowski, P. (1996). Believing in language. Philosophy of Science, 63(3), 338–373.
Festinger, L. (1957). Theory of cognitive dissonance. Palo Alto: Stanford University Press.
Festinger, L., Riecken, H., & Schacter, S. (1956). When prophecy fails. MN: University of Minnesota Press.
Fodor, J. (1983). The modularity of mind. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Fodor, J. (2003). Hume variations. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Galinsky, A. D., Stone, J., & Cooper, J. (2000). The reinstatement of dissonance and psychological discomfort following failed affirmations. European Journal of Social Psychology, 30, 123–147.
Gendler, T. (2008a). Alief and belief. Journal of Philosophy, 105(10), 634–663.
Gendler, T. (2008b). Alief in action (and reaction). Mind and Language, 23(5), 552–585.
Huddleston, A. (2011). Naughty beliefs. Philosophical Studies. doi:10.1007/s11098-011-9714-5
Klayman, J., & Ha, Y. (1987). Confirmation, disconfirmation, and information in hypothesis testing. Psychological Review, 94(2), 211–228.
Lebrecht, S., & Tarr, M. (2010). Defining an object’s microvalence through implicit measures. Journal of Vision, 10(7), 966.
Lebrecht, S. Bar, M., Feldman-Barrett, L., & Tarr, M. (in press). Micro-valences: Affective valence in “neutral” everyday objects. Journal Frontiers in Perception Science.
Lord, C., Ross, L., & Lepper, M. (1979). Biased assimilation and attitude polarization: The effect of prior theories on subsequently considered evidence. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 37(11), 2098–2109.
Mandelbaum, E. (2010). The architecture of belief: an essay on the unbearable automaticity of believing, PhD dissertation. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina.
Nemeroff, C., & Rozin, P. (1994). The contagion concept in adult thinking in the United States: Transmission of germs and interpersonal influence. Ethos, 22(2), 158–186.
Newman, G., Diesendruck, G., & Bloom, P. (2011). Celebrity contagion and the value of objects. The Journal of Consumer Research, 38, 215–228.
Ramachandran, V. (1988). Perception of shape from shading. Nature, 331, 163–166.
Ripley, D. (Forthcoming). Contradictions at the borders. In R. Nouwen, R. van Rooij, H.-C. Schmitz, & U. Sauerland (Eds.), Vagueness in Communication. Heidelberg: Springer LNCS.
Roskies, A. (1999). The binding problem. Neuron, 24(1), 7–9.
Rozin, P., Millman, L., & Nemeroff, C. (1986). Operation of the laws of sympathetic magic in disgust and other domains. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 50, 703–712.
Rozin, P., Markith, M., & Ross, B. (1990). The sympathetic magical law of similarity, nominal realism, and neglect of negatives in response to negative labels. Psychological Science, 1(6), 383–384.
Scholl, B. (2006). Innateness and (Bayesian) visual perception. In P. Carruthers, S. Laurence, & S. Stich (Eds.), The innate mind: Structure and contents. New York: Oxford University Press.
Stich, S. (1978). Beliefs and subdoxastic states. Philosophy of Science, 45, 499–518.
Strickland, B., Fisher, M., Peyroux, E., & Keil, F. (2011). Syntactic biases in intentionality judgments. In XXXIII Proceedings of the cognitive science society. Boston: Cognitive Science Society
Thibodeau, R., & Aronson, E. (1992). Taking a closer look: Reasserting the role of the self-concept in dissonance theory. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 18(5), 591–602.
Tumminia, D. (2005). When prophecy never fails: Myth and reality in a flying saucer cult. New York: Oxford University Press.
Williams, L., & Bargh, J. (2008). Experiencing physical warmth promotes interpersonal warmth. Science, 322, 606–607.
Acknowledgments
This paper was written while the author was receiving funding from the American Council of Learned Societies, who is hereby thanked for its generous support. Institutional support was also provided through fellowships held at Oxford University and Yale University during the writing of the essay. The essay has been much improved by conversations with Tamar Gendler, Ian Evans, Adam Lerner, Alex Madva, Fred Dretske, and the St. Catherine’s Philosophy of Mind Reading Group. Special thanks to Joshua Knobe and Susanna Siegel for their extended discussions on this topic.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Mandelbaum, E. Against alief. Philos Stud 165, 197–211 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-012-9930-7
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-012-9930-7