Belief as an Act of Reason

Abstract

Most philosophers assume (often without argument) that belief is a mental state. Call their view the orthodoxy. In a pair of recent papers, Matthew Boyle has argued that the orthodoxy is mistaken: belief is not a state but (as I like to put it) an act of reason. I argue here that at least part of his disagreement with the orthodoxy rests on an equivocation. For to say that belief is an act of reason might mean either (i) that it's an actualization of its subject's rational capacities or (ii) that it's a rational activity (hence, a certain kind of event). And, though belief is not an act of reason in the second sense, it may nonetheless be one in the first: it may be a static actualization of its subject's rational capacities.

The Normative/Agentive Correspondence

“…24 Now, McDowell has wavered over the years on how exactly the distinction between intuitions and concepts is to be understood. 25 Here, I'll offer my own way of articulating this distinction, principally employing the statuses of 23 This, Brandom thinks, is what it is for Kant's distinction between intuitions and concepts to be a "hylomorphic" one, a distinction between non-conceptual "matter" and conceptual "form". But this is not the only way to construe the distinction between matter and form.…”

“…It is not that they are exercised on an extraconceptual deliverance of receptivity," (1994,9). 25 For two main points of contrast, see McDowell (1994) and McDowell (2009). In the former, McDowell insists that the only form of content that experience has is propositional content, and, for every judgment that such and such is the case that one is able to make in having an experience, one's experience has the content that such and such is the case.…”

“…See also Rödl (2007Rödl ( , 2019 and Boyle (2009) for a related account. Notably, Koziolek (2018aKoziolek ( , 2018b) pushes back against this sort of account, arguing that it glosses over an important agentive modal (as well as temporal) distinction to be made between the notion of judgment and the notion of belief. On Koziolek's account, a belief is not an act but a capacity, specifically, the capacity to judge.…”

The Activity of Reasoning: How Reasoning Can Constitute Epistemic Agency

“…For such engagement, refer to Setiya (2013, sect. 4) and Koziolek (2018). The proposal advanced here is that there is no need to make sense of the idea that belief itself is a kind of exercise of agency in order to save the idea that we are capable of epistemic agency.…”