Imperfect Cognitions

Today's post is by Neil Van Leeuwen who talks about his recent research with Larisa Heiphetz on the differences in meanings between "think" and "believe". For related research by Heiphetz and Van Leeuwen, see  here ,  here , and  here .  Neil Van Leeuwen Do “think” and “believe” mean the same thing? Consider two sentences: Jill believes that God exists. Jill thinks that a lake bigger than Lake Michigan exists. Both sentences attribute mental states to Jill. And each breaks down into an  attitude  (thinks/ believes) and a  content  (that God… / that a lake…). So we can sharpen our question: if we set the contents aside, do the words “thinks” and “believes” convey the same attitude type (or manner of processing)? Many philosophers and cognitive scientists talk and write as if the answer were  yes —as if the words “think” and “believe” were interchangeable, at least in propositional attitude reports (i.e., as if “thinks that...

Neil Levy (pictured above) is Professor of Philosophy at Macquarie University (Sydney) and Senior Research Fellow at the Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics, University of Oxford. Here, he replies to last week's post by  Neil Van Leeuwen .   Neil Levy's post draws on themes from his  paper   recently published  in Cognition. There are two central strands to Neil Van Leeuwen’s post (hereafter NVL). One is the claim that there is a class of representational state (in the post he focuses on religious belief, but in his paper in Cognition he suggests that ideological beliefs belong to this class too) which fail to be evidentially vulnerable in the same way as more mundane beliefs. The second strand is the one developed in his paper in Philosophical Explorations , arguing that we best understand the limited signs of evidence responsiveness exhibited by these beliefs in terms of a kind of imaginative play. People who respond to evidence with regard to thei...

This post is by Neil Van Leeuwen  (pictured above), Assistant Professor in the Department of Philosophy and Associate of the Neuroscience Institute at Georgia State University. What follows is a synopsis of his new paper , which is forthcoming in a special issue of Philosophical Explorations on false but useful beliefs. The special issue is guest edited by Lisa Bortolotti and Ema Sullivan-Bissett and is inspired by project PERFECT's interests in belief. One might argue that the answer to my title question is just blindingly obvious. Religious “beliefs” don’t respond to evidence, because no beliefs do! After all, human belief formation processes are a motley crew, including such ignobles as confirmation bias, cognitive dissonance, wishful thinking, the availability heuristic, post hoc ergo propter hoc, the base rate fallacy, the genetic fallacy, ad hominems, prestige bias, framing effects, and many, many…many more. This cynical view, however, grows out of a diet of ...

Neil Van Leeuwen I would like to thank Anna for her insightful  response  to my latest  blog . I’m delighted to respond to her response. The dialectic so far is this. I maintain that psychology and epistemology should posit a cognitive attitude I call religious credence. This attitude is not the same as ordinary, mundane factual belief. But it is also not the same as fictional imagining, the attitude that underlies pretend play and cognition of fiction. I hold this position for a number of reasons. But the motivation I gave in my blog is that most ordinary religious 'believers' are not full-blown fanatics (like Joan of Arc), nor are they fakers, who merely pretend to be religiously committed. Since ordinary religious people are in-between (that is a rough way of speaking), we should posit an attitude that captures their underlying mental state; so I posit religious credence. (See the  full paper  for a more thorough set of empirical and theoretical motivatio...

Neil Van Leeuwen This post is by Neil Van Leeuwen , Assistant Professor at Georgia State University.  Between the fanatics and the fakers lie the normal religious 'believers'. That is the view I defend in my recent paper, ' Religious credence is not factual belief'. Joan of Arc, a fanatic, heard spiritual voices throughout her life. For her, the existence of these voices as external entities was, as far as we can tell, regarded with the same attitude of factual belief as, say, the voices of her baker or next-door neighbor. She took these voices as part of the furniture of the world around her. The unbelieving clergy studied by Dan Dennett , on the other hand, are fakers. They are, in point of fact, atheists who, because of the momentum of their social circumstances, continue to pretend God exists. These fakers have fictional imaginings to the effect that Christ performed miracles—among other propositions. These imaginings guide their pretense in church every S...