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| title | chunk | source | category | tags | date_saved | instance |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Belief | 3/10 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belief | reference | science, encyclopedia | 2026-05-05T13:43:50.348166+00:00 | kb-cron |
=== Interpretationism === According to interpretationism, the beliefs of an entity are in some sense dependent on, or relative to, someone's interpretation of this entity. Daniel Dennett is an important defender of such a position. He holds that we ascribe beliefs to entities in order to predict how they will behave. Entities with simple behavioral patterns can be described using physical laws or in terms of their function. Dennett refers to these forms of explanation as the "physical stance" and the "design stance". These stances are contrasted with the intentional stance, which is applied to entities with a more complex behavior by ascribing beliefs and desires to these entities. For example, we can predict that a chess player will move her queen to f7 if we ascribe to her the desire to win the game and the belief that this move will achieve that. The same procedure can also be applied to predicting how a chess computer will behave. The entity has the belief in question if this belief can be used to predict its behavior. Having a belief is relative to an interpretation since there may be different equally good ways of ascribing beliefs to predict behavior. So there may be another interpretation that predicts the move of the queen to f7 that does not involve the belief that this move will win the game. Another version of interpretationism is due to Donald Davidson, who uses the thought experiment of radical interpretation, in which the goal is to make sense of the behavior and language of another person from scratch without any knowledge of this person's language. This process involves ascribing beliefs and desires to the speaker. The speaker really has these beliefs if this project can be successful in principle. Interpretationism can be combined with eliminativism and instrumentalism about beliefs. Eliminativists hold that, strictly speaking, there are no beliefs. Instrumentalists agree with eliminativists but add that belief-ascriptions are useful nonetheless. This usefulness can be explained in terms of interpretationism: belief-ascriptions help us in predicting how entities will behave. It has been argued that interpretationism can also be understood in a more realistic sense: that entities really have the beliefs ascribed to them and that these beliefs participate in the causal network. But, for this to be possible, it may be necessary to define interpretationism as a methodology and not as an ontological outlook on beliefs.
=== Origins === Biologist Lewis Wolpert discusses the importance of causal beliefs and associates the making and use of tools with the origin of human beliefs.
=== Historical === In the context of Ancient Greek thought, three related concepts were identified regarding the concept of belief: pistis, doxa, and dogma. Simplified, Pistis refers to "trust" and "confidence," doxa refers to "opinion" and "acceptance," and dogma refers to the positions of a philosopher or of a philosophical school such as Stoicism.
== Types == Beliefs can be categorized into various types depending on their ontological status, their degree, their object or their semantic properties.
=== Occurrent and dispositional === Having an occurrent belief that the Grand Canyon is in Arizona involves entertaining the representation associated with this belief—for example, by actively thinking about it. But the great majority of our beliefs are not active most of the time: they are merely dispositional. They usually become activated or occurrent when needed or relevant in some way and then fall back into their dispositional state afterwards. For example, the belief that 57 is greater than 14 was probably dispositional to the reader before reading this sentence, has become occurrent while reading it and may soon become dispositional again as the mind focuses elsewhere. The distinction between occurrent and dispositional beliefs is sometimes identified with the distinction between conscious and unconscious beliefs. But it has been argued that, despite overlapping, the two distinctions do not match. The reason for this is that beliefs can shape one's behaviour and be involved in one's reasoning even if the subject is not conscious of them. Such beliefs are cases of unconscious occurrent mental states. On this view, being occurrent corresponds to being active, either consciously or unconsciously. A dispositional belief is not the same as a disposition to believe. We have various dispositions to believe given the right perceptions; for example, to believe that it is raining given a perception of rain. Without this perception, there is still a disposition to believe but no actual dispositional belief. On a dispositionalist conception of belief, there are no occurrent beliefs, since all beliefs are defined in terms of dispositions.