Hinge commitments as arational beliefs

Today's post is by Aliosha Barranco Lopez (Bowdoin College) on her recent paper  "Hinge commitments as arational beliefs" (Synthese, 2023).

Aliosha Barranco Lopez

We all have a worldview—an understanding of the world. Our beliefs shape this worldview allowing us to perceive the world as inhabited by mind-independent objects, where concepts like love hold value, gravity governs, etc. One important claim I argue for is that some of our beliefs, which I call hinge commitments, inform our worldview at a fundamental level by providing meaning to the rest of our beliefs in a particular realm.

Let me explain, we all share the belief that there is an external world populated by mind-independent physical objects, which causally produce our experience in much the way we normally suppose. Let’s abbreviate this belief as ‘there is an external world’. This belief is a hinge commitment because it gives meaning to all our perceptual beliefs. 

When I believe that there is a computer in front of me, for example, part of what I believe is that there is a mind independent object—a computer—that is causing a particular perceptual experience in me. If, somehow, I were to lose the hinge commitment that there is an external world (without replacing it), my belief about the computer—along with all my perceptual beliefs—would lose their meaning.

One consequence of this view is that our hinge commitments are arational beliefs, meaning they are neither rational nor irrational. The reason for this is that hinge commitments, given the fundamental role they play in our understanding of experiences (e.g., as perceiving mind-independent objects in the world), determine what counts as empirical evidence for specific propositions.

For instance, the belief that it seems like there is a computer in front of me only counts as evidence for the belief that there is a computer in front of me because I hold the hinge commitment that there is an external world. Without hinge commitments, we would lack a sense of what qualifies as empirical evidence for various propositions. This entails that no evidence can support our hinge commitments because they exist outside the realm of beliefs that can be rationally evaluated. 

One might think that hinge commitments are not beliefs but rather some other mental state. This is because agents who hold them have dispositions to give up their beliefs when they judge that their evidence does not sufficiently support them, but they do not have such dispositions when they judge the same about hinge commitments—think about how philosophers keep believing that there is an external world even after agreeing that we do not have evidence for this belief. 

What I argue is that our beliefs inform our worldview with different degrees of importance. The more important the belief is in our worldview—like our hinge commitments or political beliefs—the harder is to give them up. This diagnosis not only gives us a reason to believe that hinge commitments are beliefs, but it also aligns with how people actually manage their beliefs. 

The resulting view is that hinge commitments are arational beliefs. This view also broadens our understanding of epistemic rationality: some beliefs must be arational for the rest to be either rational or irrational.