A Puzzle about Logical Analysis

In this paper, I will present a puzzle for logical analyses, such as Russell’s analysis of definite descriptions and Recanati’s analysis of ‘that’-clauses. I will argue that together with Kripke’s disquotational principles connecting sincere assent and belief such non-trivial logical analyses lead to contradictions. Following this, I will compare the puzzle about logical analysis with Frege’s puzzle about belief ascriptions. We will see that although the two puzzles do have similarities, the solutions to Frege’s puzzle cannot be applied mutatis mutandis to the puzzle about logical analysis. Hence, to say it with Kripke, the main thesis of this paper is that the puzzle is a puzzle. A complete solution to the puzzle promises a better understanding of both logical analyses and belief ascriptions.

Small procedural differences matter: Conceptual and direct replication attempts of the communication-intervention effect on infants’ false-belief ascriptions

The current replication crisis in experimental psychology has also called into question findings regarding infants’ early false-belief understanding. It is, however, debated whether non-replications might be due procedural differences between replication attempts and original studies. The current set of studies aimed to shed light on this question by trying to replicate a violation-of-expectation study by Song, Onishi, Baillargeon and Fisher (2008). This task seemed especially important since it addressed not only the question whether or not infants hold false-belief assumptions but whether they update them given informative verbal input. Studies 1a and 1b failed to replicate the original findings conceptually. Study 2 – which followed the original procedure more closely – replicated the original finding regarding informative interventions. However, the same effect was found with so-called uninformative statements. We argue that theoretically, children should update their expectations when communication takes place and that other, more subtle features of a task might influence infants’ performance. Overall, the current set of studies emphasizes that direct replication attempts for single studies need to follow the original design and procedure as closely as possible.

Determinacy of Content

Few arguments against intentional states in animals have stood the test of time. But one objection by Stich and Davidson has never been rebutted. In my reconstruction it runs: Ascribing beliefs to animals is vacuous, unless something counts as an animal believing one specific “content” rather than another; Nothing counts as an animal believing one specific content rather than another, because of their lack of language; Ergo: Ascribing beliefs to animals is vacuous. Several attempts to block the argument challenge the first premise, notably the appeals to “naked” belief ascriptions and alternative representational formats. This essay defends the first premise and instead challenges the second premise. There are non-linguistic “modes of presentation”; these can be determined by attributing to animals specific needs and capacities—a “ hermeneutic ethology” based on lessons from the debate about radical translation/interpretation in the human case. On that basis we can narrow down content by exclusion. What remains is an “imponderability of the mental” which does not rule out attributions of intentional states to animals.

Should we worry about belief?

Suspicion of the concept of belief is now widely held among anthropologists. To determine whether this suspicion is justified, we must understand what belief is. Yet the question of how we are to reach an understanding of belief has not received much attention among anthropologists, who tend to assume that they know what belief-ascriptions entail whenever they criticize the use of the concept. But is this assumption warranted? This paper addresses this question by going back to a central text in the history of anthropological debate about belief, Rodney Needham’s Belief, Language, and Experience. It focuses particularly on Needham’s use of the later philosophy of Wittgenstein, arguing that Needham systematically misunderstands Wittgenstein’s work and misses the challenge that Wittgenstein poses to his own guiding assumptions about psychological concepts. The author argues that the failure of Needham’s critique of belief has broader implications. Although recent critics of belief are not motivated by Needham’s concerns, their understanding of belief-ascriptions, and so of the nature of belief, is continuous in important respects with the understanding that structures Needham’s work. If this is really a misunderstanding of belief, as Wittgenstein’s discussions of the concept suggest, then it follows that their criticisms are no more compelling than Needham’s. More specifically, it suggests that, like Needham, they are not really talking about belief at all. The author develops this argument with a discussion of the critiques of belief in the work of Joel Robbins and of Eduardo Viveiros de Castro and Martin Holbraad.

Thinking alone and thinking together

The central observation of this paper is that belief ascriptions with plural subjects can be interpreted non-distributively, so that beliefs can be truthfully attributed to a plurality that cannot be attributed to any of the individuals that it comprises. Moreover, the beliefs of a plurality appear to be predictable from the beliefs of its associated individuals. Two potential analyses are offered for the relationship between the beliefs of individuals and those of pluralities. Both of these analyses, which are meant to negotiate the agreements and disagreements between individual experiencers, run into issues differentiating between relevant and irrelevant disagreement. To resolve these issues I invoke a notion of "aboutness", which filters out contextually irrelevant beliefs.

What Structure Lurks in the Minds of Men?

An idea of Wittgenstein’s: Given the questions (e.g.) belief ascriptions speak to, there is no reason to expect what they ascribe to correspond in any interesting or significant way with any identifiable intracranial states or happenings. There is a viewpoint from which this seems at best perverse. It is incarnated in something known as the Representational Theory of Mind. After setting out that theory, this chapter works to make Wittgenstein’s idea plausible, or at least reasonable; correspondingly, RTM becomes less plausible, or at least less reasonable. It works in this direction by borrowing, and working out, some ideas of Frege’s—very broadly speaking, ideas on what is, what not, a psychological question; in large part ideas on the generality of thought and the particularity of what thought is about. Later Wittgenstein is generally much indebted to Frege. Here is one area where the debt shows.

Belief

This chapter develops and defends a relevant-alternatives contextualist semantics for belief ascriptions, similar to that proposed in the book for knowledge ascriptions. The view is a metasemantic generalization from Roger Clarke's infallibilist approach to belief. The result explains the sense in which belief is a kind of full commitment, consistent with humans' possession of many beliefs. It is also, in the context of the book's broader approach to knowledge, able to explain and predict the sense in which there is a knowledge norm of belief.