Symbolic Belief in Social Cognition

The post today is by Evan Westra (Purdue University) on his recent paper "Symbolic Belief in Social Cognition" (Philosophical Perspectives, 2023).

 Evan Westra

If you go up to an ordinary person on the street and ask them to tell you about their beliefs, they’ll probably start telling you about their religious, moral, or ideological attitudes: Trans rights are human rights; God created the universe; Black lives matter; Abortion is wrong; Trump won 2020. These are generally interesting answers that tell you a lot about who that person is.  

If you ask a philosopher for an example of their beliefs, on the other hand, you’re likely to get something terribly boring: today is Wednesday; it’s raining outside, the cat is on the mat (or, if they’re feeling particularly boring: p). This makes perfect sense from the philosopher’s perspective: they simply are giving you examples of mental states that function as “the map by which we steer,” that is, states that aim at an accurate representation of the world, are generally coherent, responsive to evidence, and that the pursuit of our goals and desires.  

This doesn’t seem to be what the non-philosopher is doing when they’re telling you about their beliefs. Instead, they’re telling you about attitudes that matter to them, that express what they stand for. These are not the kind of attitudes that one readily updates in response to evidence; indeed, if we were presented with counterevidence to these beliefs, we’d probably do our best to explain it away. Unlike the philosopher’s mundane “beliefs,” these “beliefs” are the kind of attitude one might express to signal one’s identity and affirm one’s status as a member one’s community. They’re also the kind of attitude that we might look for when deciding whether or not a person belongs to one’s ingroup or outgroup, and perhaps even enforce as a criterion for group-membership.

The non-philosopher also has attitudes about whether today is Wednesday, or whether the cat is on the mat, of course. And they’d probably find the philosopher’s way of using the word belief perfectly sensible (albeit somewhat formalistic and weird – much like philosophers in general). Nevertheless, they’re much more likely to express such mundane attitudes using more common attitude verbs like think or know. But for some pragmatic or semantic reason, the term belief is much more likely to be used to express religious, moral, and ideological attitudes.  

Here's my question: in cases like these, are the philosopher and non-philosopher talking about the same type of mental state? That is, are they both employing the same basic folk psychological concept of belief?  

In my recent paper in Philosophical Perspectives, “Symbolic belief and social cognition,” I suggest that the answer to this question is no. Drawing on several different lines of evidence, I argue that in our day-to-day lives, we regularly employ two distinct concepts of belief, each with a distinct folk psychological profile and socio-cognitive function. The epistemic concept of belief corresponds roughly to what the philosopher means by “belief,” though it is more commonly expressed by the verb to think. This concept is used primarily for mindreading – that is, to keep track of what other people take to be true, and this informs how we predict and interpret their behaviors. The symbolic concept of belief is more commonly expressed by the verb to believe. It describes a very different kind of mental state, with a strong affective and volitional dimension, and well as preference-like characteristics and limited sensitivity to evidence or updating. I argue that the primary function of this concept is mindshaping: we express symbolic beliefs in order to signal our identities and thereby regulate how others behave towards us, and we also monitor and normatively enforce certain symbolic beliefs in others. Along the way, I touch on the ways that questions about the folk psychology of belief intersect with questions about the ontology of belief, and how each debate might inform the other.