You meta believe it |
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| Authors: | Neil Levy |
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| Institution: | 1. Department of Philosophy, Macquarie University, Sydney, NSW, Australia;2. Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK |
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| Abstract: | 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. |
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