Belief’s minimal rationality

Abstract

Many of our beliefs behave irrationally: this is hardly news to anyone. Although beliefs' irrational tendencies need to be taken into account, this paper argues that beliefs necessarily preserve at least a minimal level of rationality. This view offers a plausible picture of what makes belief unique and will help us to set beliefs apart from other cognitive attitudes (e.g., imagination, acceptance).In philosophy and cognitive science, mental attitude types (e.g., imagination, belief, and desire) are often defined in terms of their input and output (Fodor, 1985;Nichols and Stich, 2003). When applied to belief, it has long been argued that -on the output side -belief is inferentially promiscuous and action-guiding. On the input side, evidence is usually that which motivates one to form and revise one's beliefs. This means that for an attitude to count as a belief it must be prone to react to the evidence establishing the truth of its content, as well as to any counter-evidence disproving it. These core tendencies are also usually linked to belief's standards of doxastic rationality. Piggybacking on this mainstream view, which I call Traditionalism, many philosophers maintain that beliefs are in fact expected to behave rationally. This is Strong Traditionalism. Contrary to the strong version of Traditionalism, however, a group of Revisionist philosophers have recently argued that it is not necessary for a belief to have a significant and widespread impact on our theoretical and practical reasoning, and/or to appropriately respond to the relevant evidence. On a popular version 4 4 Strong Traditionalism: mental attitude A is a belief only if A is mostly doxastically rational, in the sense that it is (i) sensitive to the relevant evidence, (ii) inferentially integrated with other beliefs and intentional attitudes, and it (iii) causes actions (when coupled with the appropriate conative attitude, in the right circumstances).2The term 'rational' is used for any belief conforming to standards of rationality, whereas 'irrational' beliefs subvert those standards. Roughly, a belief is epistemically irrational if held in the face of insufficient, available evidence.3 Also, a belief is procedurally irrational if it does not produce inferential effects to preserve coherence with other attitudes.4 Finally, a belief is practically irrational if it does not produce behavioral/emotional effects, and does not enjoy the role of guiding our practices of practical reasoning.5

The signaling function of sharing fake stories

“…This is because sincerely feeling that something is true is not necessarily the same as believing it proper. While it may be true that people superficially assent to absurd stories, it is not always obvious that this mark of approval really expresses a belief or genuine persuasion (as argued, e.g., by Bergamaschi Ganapini, 2020; Levy, 2017). 18 Therefore, I believe the jury is still out on whether people genuinely believe the fake stories to which they give attention and/or gleefully disseminate.…”