Distinguishing belief and imagination

Pacific Philosophical Quarterly

Volumn 94, Issue 2, 2013, Pages 152-165

  Sinhababu, Neil ^a  

^a NATIONAL UNIVERSITY OF SINGAPORE   (Singapore)

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 84876838946     PISSN: 02790750     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1111/j.1468-0114.2012.01449.x     Document Type: Article

References (27)

1. If application of a truth norm doesn't explain why belief is subject to a norm of truth, what does? I'd suggest that truth is the norm of belief not because of any mental state we have toward belief, but as a mind-independent normative fact.
2. This is the standard way to understand moral norms. What it's right to do depends on objective moral facts, not on what we judge to be right.
3. Urmson, J. (1967). 'Memory and Imagination,' Mind 76(301), pp. 83-91.
4. Humberstone, I. L. (1992). 'Direction of Fit,' Mind 101(401), pp. 59-83.
5. Shah, N. and Velleman, D. (2005). 'Doxastic Deliberation,' Philosophical Review 114(4), pp. 497-534.
6. Shah, N. (2003). 'How Truth Governs Belief,' Philosophical Review 112(4), pp. 447-482.
7. Gibbard, A. (1990). Wise Choices, Apt Feelings. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
8. Shah and Velleman suggest that pragmatic considerations are appropriate for determining whether to apply a norm of truth.
9. They write: 'The question whether to apply the concept [of belief] appears to hang on pragmatic considerations of the sort that would determine whether to apply a noncognitive norm' (p. 514).
10. How, then, should we make sense of assuming a contradiction in order to see whether everything follows from it? Does one actually have to imagine the contradictory state of affairs that the contradiction describes?
11. I think one usually just imagines the contradictory sentence having the property of truth, without unpacking this to imagine the described state of affairs.
12. This sort of imagining permits the syntactic operations involved in logical deduction.
13. For empirically informed work on this issue, see Nichols, S. (2006).
14. 'Just the Imagination: Why Imagining Doesn't Behave Like Believing,' Mind & Language 21, pp. 459-474
15. Gendler, T. (2006). 'On the Relation Between Pretense and Belief,' in M. Kieran and D. M. Lopes (eds) Imagination, Philosophy, and the Arts. New York: Routledge, pp. 125-141.
16. These authors don't address the norm-application theory, but the differences between believing and imagining which they describe suggest functional differences that would allow the distinction to be drawn without help from the norm-application theory.
17. These are drawn from Schwitzgebel, E. (2006). 'Belief,' in E. Zalta (ed.) Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, available at http://plato.stanford.edu/ entries/belief.
18. The fourth condition seems to be reducible to the third, since assertions are actions, but I won't address this here.
19. Velleman, D. (2000). 'On the Aim of Belief' in His The Possibility of Practical Reason. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
20. O'Brien, L. (2005). 'Imagination and the Motivational View of Belief,' Analysis 65(1), pp. 55-62
21. Similar comments along these lines appear in Noordhof, P. (2001). 'Believe What You Want,' Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 101, pp. 247-265.
22. The view in Van Leeuwen, D. S. (2009). 'The Motivational Role of Belief,' Philosophical Papers 38(2), pp. 219-246
23. Early functionalists who analogized the mind to a Turing machine may have had a non-normative sense of 'function' in mind.
24. They understood mental states like mathematical functions, producing particular outputs in response to particular inputs.
25. Unlike behaviorists, they allowed the outputs to be effects on other mental states rather than outward behavior.
26. Sober, E. (1990). 'Putting the Function Back Into Functionalism,' in W. Lycan (ed.) Mind and Cognition. Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 63-70.
27. While I (unlike Sober) am inclined towards a non-normative form of functionalism, I argue here that even those attracted to normative functionalism shouldn't require a further normative attitude to be applied to a representation for it to be a belief.