ON WILLIAMSON'S ARGUMENTS THAT KNOWLEDGE IS A MENTAL STATE

In Knowledge and Its Limits, Timothy Williamson argues that knowledge is a purely mental state, that is, that it is never a complex state or condition comprising mental factors and non‐mental, environmental factors. Three of his arguments are evaluated: arguments from (1) the non‐analyzability of the concept of knowledge, (2) the ‘primeness’ of knowledge, and (3) the (alleged) inability to satisfactorily specify the ‘internal’ element involved in knowledge. None of these arguments succeeds. Moreover, consideration of the third argument points the way to a cogent argument that knowledge is not a purely mental state.     

ALSTON ON BELIEF AND ACCEPTANCE IN RELIGIOUS FAITH1

In this paper, I shall examine William Alston's influential view that the cognitive element in religious faith should be identified with ‘acceptance’ rather than ‘belief’. Although I am sympathetic to Alston's reluctance to regard belief as essential to faith, I shall argue that one can redescribe the cases that Alston invokes in support of his claim in terms of the standard notion of degrees‐of‐belief without loss. It will be further argued that, given Alston's constraints, his notion of acceptance, if not identical to belief, is at least a species of belief.     

FIXING PERCEPTUAL BELIEF

In specifying the sensory evidence for perceptual belief, thinkers have either chosen a common perceptual idiom or have invented one of their own as a starting-point for their enquiries. It is becoming clearer that the choice harbours crucial, often disputable, assumptions. I compare two sorts of constructions, a variety of propositional ones and an objectual one, and I argue that the objectual idiom is indispensable in order to explain how a perceptual belief can arise out of what is not already a belief. This has implications not only for the question of how belief is generated from perceptual evidence, but also for various other controversies. I discuss two of these implications: the character of inferences from evidence, and basic belief.