Do Belief Reports Report Beliefs

Abstract: The traditional puzzles about belief reports puzzles rest on a certain seemingly innocuous assumption, that 'that'-clauses specify belief contents. The main theories of belief reports also rest on this Specification Assumption, that for a belief report of the form 'A believes that p' to be true,' the proposition that p must be among the things A believes. I use Kripke's Paderewski case to call the Specification Assumption into question. Giving up that assumption offers prospects for an intuitively more plausible approach to the semantics of belief reports. But this approach must confront a puzzle of its own: it turns out that every case is a Paderewski case, at least potentially.     

关系推理中信念偏差效应的研究

采用结论评估范式,考察时向和空间关系推理中信念偏差效应的表现形式,以及心理模型理论对关系推理中信念偏差效应的解释力。研究结果表明,关系推理中信念偏差效应的表现形式与三段论有所不同,不论是时间推理还是空间推理中都存在信念主效应,但没有发现信念与逻辑的交互作用;心理模型理论不能对关系推理中信念偏差效应作出合理解释。     

A Study of Belief in the Accuracy of Newspaper Reports

An examination of the relationship of scores on Siegel's Manifest Hostility Scale (MHS) to Verbal Hostility, Fantasy Hostility, and Hostile Feeling responses to cartoon situations was undertaken, while controlling for sex of subject, sex of experimenter, and the social desirability (So-R) and ego strength/defensiveness (K) scales of the MMPI. MHS scores were significantly related to the three modes of hostility response, while sex of subject and sex of experimenter were not. Adjustment of the dependent variable means for So-R did not cancel MHS effects on Verbal or Fantasy Hostility, but adjustment for K cancelled the significant relationship between MHS scores and Fantasy Hostility and Hostile Feeling responses. Covariation of both K and So-R out of Verbal Hostility cancelled its relationship to MHS scores. Ego strength/defensiveness thus may be more significantly related to hostile responding than social desirability.     

Attempting to Analyze Perspective-Taking with a False Belief Vignette Using the Implicit Relational Assessment Procedure

The Psychological Record - Cognitive perspective-taking research has primarily been conducted under the rubric of theory of mind (ToM), with the core skill believed to involve the correct...     

Factors Related to Mentor Reports of Mentoring Functions Provided: Gender and Relational Characteristics

In this study we examined the relationship between mentor gender, protégé gender, mentorship characteristics (e.g., mentorship type, mentorship duration, mentor experience), and mentoring functions provided as reported by mentors. Drawing on research regarding diversified mentorships and interpersonal relationships, we proposed that mentoring effectiveness would vary as a function of the gender of the mentorship participants and the characteristics of the relationship. As hypothesized, several interesting gender differences emerged from the data. Male mentors reported providing more career mentoring to their protégés, whereas female mentors reported providing more psychosocial mentoring. Contrary to expectations, mentors in informal mentorships did not report providing more mentoring than did mentors in formal mentorships. The findings demonstrate the importance of examining mentoring from the perspective of the mentor.     

Relational Complexes

A theory of relations is presented that provides a detailed account of the logical structure of relational complexes. The theory draws a sharp distinction between relational complexes and relational states. A salient difference is that relational complexes belong to exactly one relation, whereas relational states may be shared by different relations. Relational complexes are conceived as structured perspectives on states ‘out there’ in reality. It is argued that only relational complexes have occurrences of objects, and that different complexes of the same relation may correspond to the same state.     

Relational Services

Recent research projects have looked for social innovations, i.e., people creating solutions outside the mainstream patterns of production and consumption. An analysis of these innovations indicates the emergence of a particular kind of service configuration—defined here as relational services—which requires intensive interpersonal relations to operate. Based on a comparative analysis between standard and relational services, we propose to the Service Design discipline an interpretative framework able to reinforce its ability to deal with the interpersonal relational qualities in services, indicating how these qualities can be understood and favored by design activities, as well as the limits of this design intervention. Martin Buber’s conceptual framework is presented as the main interpretative basis. Buber describes two ways of interacting (“I-Thou” and “I-It”). Relational services are those most favoring “I-Thou” interpersonal encounters.

Requesting Belief

Requests belong to a family of forms of social influence on action that appear problematic when employed in the attempt to directly influence belief. Explaining why this is so is more difficult than it might at first appear. The fact that belief is not directly subject to the will can only be part of the explanation. It must also be the case that requests are incapable of providing epistemic reasons in a way that parallels that in which they provide practical reasons. I propose an account of the nature of requests that is in a position to explain why requests are incapable of doing this.     

信念的组合性与信念的形而上学

20世纪以来,关于信念的形而上学研究,主要有表征主义和倾向论两条基本路径。基于对信念的组合性特征的阐明,一方面,组合性是信念的构成性条件;另一方面,组合性不是信念的构成性条件,因为典型的物理倾向和心理倾向都不具有组合性,而且,一个组合性的倾向谓词不必然谓述一个组合的倾向。因此,在形而上学上,信念不是倾向。进而,考虑到表征主义能够为信念的组合性提供最佳解释,论文主张,信念的组合性特征是支持信念表征主义的有力理由。     

Belief and believing

Conclusion This essay has been somewhat programmatic in quality but that is not accidental. It has tried to identify some elements, historical and philosophical, that might provide a context within which an adequate discussion of the concept of belief and its recent diverse employment might be measured. Not very much has been solved, but perhaps some issues have become clearer.     

Reasons for Belief

Davidson claims that nothing can count as a reason for a belief except another belief. This claim is challenged by McDowell, who holds that perceptual experiences can count as reasons for beliefs. I argue that McDowell fails to take account of a distinction between two different senses in which something can count as a reason for belief. While a non-doxastic experience can count as a reason for belief in one of the two senses, this is not the sense which is presupposed in Davidson's claim. While 1 focus on McDowell's view, the argument generalizes to other views which take experiences as reasons for belief.     

Belief and aims

Does belief have an aim? According to the claim of exclusivity, non-truth-directed considerations cannot motivate belief within doxastic deliberation. This claim has been used to argue that, far from aiming at truth, belief is not aim-directed at all, because the regulation of belief fails to exhibit a kind of interaction among aims that is characteristic of ordinary aim-directed behaviour. The most prominent reply to this objection has been offered by Steglich-Petersen (Philos Stud 145:395?C405, 2009), who claims that exclusivity is in fact compatible with belief??s genuinely having an aim. I argue, based on consideration of what is involved in pursuing an aim, that Steglich-Petersen??s reply fails. I suggest that the defender of the idea that belief has an aim should instead reject the claim of exclusivity, and I sketch how this can be done.     

Gricean Belief Change

One of the standard principles of rationality guiding traditional accounts of belief change is the principle of minimal change: a reasoner's belief corpus should be modified in a minimal fashion when assimilating new information. This rationality principle has stood belief change in good stead. However, it does not deal properly with all belief change scenarios. We introduce a novel account of belief change motivated by one of Grice's maxims of conversational implicature: the reasoner's belief corpus is modified in a minimal fashion to assimilate exactly the new information. In this form of belief change, when the reasoner revises by new information p ∨ q their belief corpus is modified so that p∨q is believed but stronger propositions like p∧q are not, no matter what beliefs are in the reasoner's initial corpus. We term this conservative belief change since the revised belief corpus is a conservative extension of the original belief corpus given the new information.     

Rethinking Relational Autonomy

John Christman has argued that constitutively relational accounts of autonomy, as defended by some feminist theorists, are problematically perfectionist about the human good. I argue that autonomy is constitutively relational, but not in a way that implies perfectionism: autonomy depends on a dialogical disposition to hold oneself answerable to external, critical perspectives on one's action‐guiding commitments. This type of relationality carries no substantive value commitments, yet it does answer to core feminist concerns about autonomy.     

Revocable Belief Revision

Krister Segerberg proposed irrevocable belief revision, to be contrasted with standard belief revision, in a setting wherein belief of propositional formulas is modelled explicitly. This suggests that in standard belief revision is revocable: one should be able to unmake (‘revoke’) the fresh belief in the revision formula, given yet further information that contradicts it. In a dynamic epistemic logical setting for belief revision, for multiple agents, we investigate what the requirements are for revocable belief revision. By this we not merely mean recovering belief in non-modal propositions, as in the recovery principle for belief contraction, but recovering belief in modal propositions: beliefs about beliefs. These requirements are almost never met, a surprising result.