Interpretative expressivism: A theory of normative belief

Metaethical expressivism is typically characterised as the view that normative statements express desire-like attitudes instead of beliefs. However, in this paper I argue that expressivists should claim that normative statements express beliefs in normative propositions, and not merely in some deflationary sense but in a theoretically robust sense explicated by a theory of propositional attitudes. I first argue that this can be achieved by combining an interpretationist understanding of belief with a nonfactualist view of normative belief content. This results in a view I call ‘interpretative expressivism’. I then argue that traditional arguments employed by expressivists that normative statements express noncognitive attitudes can just as well support the claim that normative statements express nonfactual or nonrepresentational beliefs. Finally, I argue that this view has a number of advantages to versions of expressivism that deny that normative statements express non-deflationary normative beliefs.

The Central Characteristic of Religiosity Is Integration into a Moral Community, not Supernaturalism

Researchers often define religion according to the presence (vs. absence) of supernaturalism. This has several serious shortcomings: (1) it construes religion narrowly as a historical/anthropological phenomenon, (2) it ignores the underlying evolved cognitive mechanisms facilitating tight group membership, which operate regardless of belief content and (3) it ensures that the study of religion will be obsolete if secularization continues. Instead of a slavish adherence to the criteria of supernaturalism, I suggest here a broader and more evolutionarily-informed definition of religion (and secularity): religion is what emerges when individuals become highly (perhaps overly-) integrated into a moral community; secularity is what emerges when individuals are moderately (perhaps under-) integrated into a moral community.

Weathering the Storm: Supernatural belief and cooperation in an insecure world

Religious and supernatural beliefs may facilitate social life by promoting and sustaining cooperation, but the specific cooperation problems each society faces may lead to unique belief systems adapted to local socio-ecological conditions. As societies mix and belief systems spread, local and introduced belief systems may present conflicting solutions to the same social problem. How do we choose among these different solutions? The present study recruits participation from villagers living on Yasawa Island, Fiji (N=179), who espouse both Christian and traditional beliefs that promote different expectations about local and distant others. This study focuses on the relationships among existential/ resource insecurity and supernatural beliefs across these belief systems using an experimental priming procedure and a dictator game to allocate food resources. Though reminders of insecurity had no impact on allocations, the effects of being reminded of Christian or Traditional belief depended on (was moderated by) how worried participants were about resource availability and beliefs about the Christian God’s tendency toward punishment or forgiveness. Analyses of interview data suggest Christian and Traditional imagery may evoke different conceptions of Gods as either supportive (Christian) or authoritarian (Traditional). Results highlight belief content as key for sustaining different social support networks and traditional belief/ knowledge systems as a source of community resilience against threats like natural disasters.

Holism: mental and semantic

Mental (or semantic) holism is the doctrine that the identity of a belief content (or the meaning of a sentence that expresses it) is determined by its place in the web of beliefs or sentences comprising a whole theory or group of theories. It can be contrasted with two other views: atomism and molecularism. Molecularism characterizes meaning and content in terms of relatively small parts of the web in a way that allows many different theories to share those parts. For example, the meaning of ‘chase’ might be said by a molecularist to be ‘try to catch’. Atomism characterizes meaning and content in terms of none of the web; it says that sentences and beliefs have meaning or content independently of their relations to other sentences or beliefs. One major motivation for holism has come from reflections on the natures of confirmation and learning. As Quine observed, claims about the world are confirmed not individually but only in conjunction with theories of which they are a part. And, typically, one cannot come to understand scientific claims without understanding a significant chunk of the theory of which they are a part. For example, in learning the Newtonian concepts of ‘force’, ‘mass’, ‘kinetic energy’ and ‘momentum’, one does not learn any definitions of these terms in terms that are understood beforehand, for there are no such definitions. Rather, these theoretical terms are all learned together in conjunction with procedures for solving problems. The major problem with holism is that it threatens to make generalization in psychology virtually impossible. If the content of any state depends on all others, it would be extremely unlikely that any two believers would ever share a state with the same content. Moreover, holism would appear to conflict with our ordinary conception of reasoning. What sentences one accepts influences what one infers. If I accept a sentence and then later reject it, I thereby change the inferential role of that sentence, so the meaning of what I accept would not be the same as the meaning of what I later reject. But then it would be difficult to understand on this view how one could rationally – or even irrationally! – change one’s mind. And agreement and translation are also problematic for much the same reason. Holists have responded (1) by proposing that we should think not in terms of ‘same/different’ meaning but in terms of a gradient of similarity of meaning, (2) by proposing ‘two-factor’ theories, or (3) by simply accepting the consequence that there is no real difference between changing meanings and changing beliefs.

In Praise of Outsourcing

What explains the context sensitivity of some (apparent) beliefs? Why, for example, do religious beliefs appear to control behaviour in some contexts but not others? Cases like this are heterogeneous, and we may require a matching heterogeneity of explanations, ranging over their contents, the attitudes of agents and features of the environment. In this paper, I put forward a hypothesis of the last kind. I argue that some beliefs (religious and non-religious) are coupled to cues, which either trigger an internal representation or even partially constitute the beliefs. I show that such coupling will give rise to the context-sensitivity, without entailing that religious believers take a different attitude to belief content.

Believing God: an account of faith as personal trust

The affective view of faith, as opposed to the doxastic or cognitive view, giving more importance to goodwill than to belief content, has received much support in recent philosophy of religion, including from Richard Swinburne. Swinburne's concept of faith is no less rational than his concept of religious belief, but its rationality is that of an action or of a practically oriented attitude, aiming at the goals of religion, compatible with religious disbelief (belief that the religious content one has faith in is probably false) and even with atheism. I argue that this paradoxical stance, which hardly squares with the Christian tradition, can be avoided, while keeping to an affective view of faith, if we give more weight to the idea that faith is first an answer given to a telling, on the basis of personal trust of the hearer in the authority of the teller – a personal account as opposed to a propositional account of faith.