If You Can't Change What You Believe,You Don't Believe It

I develop and defend the view that subjects are necessarily psychologically able to revise their beliefs in response to relevant counter-evidence. Specifically, subjects can revise their beliefs in response to relevant counter-evidence, given their current psychological mechanisms and skills. If a subject lacks this ability, then the mental state in question is not a belief, though it may be some other kind of cognitive attitude, such as a supposition, an entertained thought, or a pretense. The result is a moderately revisionary view of belief: while most mental states we thought were beliefs are beliefs, some mental states which we thought were beliefs are not beliefs. The argument for this view draws on two key claims: First, subjects are rationally obligated to revise their beliefs in response to relevant counter-evidence. Second, if some subject is rationally obligated to revise one of her mental states, then that subject can revise that mental state, given her current psychological mechanisms and skills. Along the way to defending these claims, I argue that rational obligations can govern activities which reflect on one's rational character, whether or not those activities are under one's voluntary control. I also show how the relevant version of epistemic ‘ought’ implies ‘can’ survives an objection which plagues other variants of the principle.     

Every Breath You Take,Every Move You Make

Slow Reckoning: The Ecology of a Divided Planet by Tom Athanasiou, published by Seeker &; Warburg, London, 1997, 385 pp., £12.99 (published in the United States as Divided Planet: The Ecology of Rich and Poor, by Little, Brown &; Company, New York, 1996, $25).     

How to Use Cognitive Faculties You Never Knew You Had

Norman forms the belief that the president is in New York by way of a clairvoyance faculty he doesn’t know he has. Many agree that his belief is unjustified but disagree about why it is unjustified. I argue that the lack of justification cannot be explained by a higher‐level evidence requirement on justification, but it can be explained by a no‐defeater requirement. I then explain how you can use cognitive faculties you don’t know you have. Lastly, I use lessons from the foregoing to compare Norman's belief, formed by clairvoyance, with Sally's theistic belief, formed by a sensus divinitatis.     

迷信,迷信,一"迷"就信

何谓迷信?词书上开列的含义有两条:①信仰神仙鬼怪等;②盲目的信仰和崇拜.这在中国恐怕早已是家喻户晓的了.可是,如果再问一句为什么要信迷信,也许就不是三言两语就能解释清楚的,要不,为什么词书上也没有加以说明呢?然而,在一次与神汉、巫婆的偶然相遇中,他们对迷信一词的解释,却不禁使我莫名惊诧起来.     

The You Turn

This introductory paper sets out a framework for approaching some of the claims about the second person made by the papers collected in the special edition of Philosophical Explorations on The Second Person (2014, 17:3). It does so by putting centre stage the notion of a ‘bipolar second person relation’, and examining ways of giving it substance suggested by the authors of these papers. In particular, it focuses on claims made (and denied) in these papers (a) about the existence and/or nature of second person thought, second person reasons for action and second person reasons for belief and (b) about possible connections among thought-theoretical, ethical and epistemological issues and debates in this area.     

You and me

Are there distinctively second-personal thoughts? I clarify the question and present considerations in favour of a view on which some second-personal thoughts are distinctive. Specifically, I suggest that some second-personal thoughts are distinctive in also being first-personal thoughts. Thus, second-personal thinking provides a way of sharing another person's first-personal thoughts.     

What You Don’t Know Can Hurt You1

This boy is Ignorance. This girl is Want. Beware them both, and all of their degree, but most of all beware this boy, for on his brow I see that written which is Doom... —Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol     

What You Know When You Know an Answer to a Question

A significant argument for the claim that knowing‐wh is knowing‐that, implicit in much of the literature, including Stanley and Williamson (2001), is spelt out and challenged. The argument includes the assumption that a subject's state of knowing‐wh is constituted by their involvement in a relation with an answer to a question. And it involves the assumption that answers to questions are propositions or facts. One of Lawrence Powers’ counterexamples to the conjunction of these two assumptions is developed, responses to it are rebutted, and the possibility of rejecting the second rather than the first of these assumptions is explored briefly.     

The Five Assessment Issues You Meet When You Go to Heaven

In this article, based on an invited Master Lecture to the Society for Personality Assessment, I describe my wishes and predictions for the future of assessment. These include an outline and elaboration of the optimally written psychological report, use of actuarial procedures, treatment planning, model for a revised Rorschach, and use of higher technology procedures. I present a case to illustrate how the various issues can be translated into a client evaluation.     

You meta believe it

Because of the privileged place of beliefs in explaining behaviour, mismatch cases—in which agents sincerely claim to believe that p, but act in a way that is inconsistent with that belief—have attracted a great deal of attention. In this paper, I argue that some of these cases, at least, are at least partially explained by agents believing that they believe that p, while failing to believe that p. Agents in these cases do not believe that ~p; rather, they have an indistinct first‐order, beliefy, representation that p. The indistinctness of this first‐order representation provides the leeway for the inconsistency seen in their behaviour.