Belief as the Power to Judge
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Belief as the Power to Judge Nicholas Koziolek1
© Springer Nature B.V. 2018
Abstract A number of metaphysicians of powers have argued that we need to distinguish the actualization of a power from the effects of that actualization. This distinction, I argue, has important consequences for the dispositional theory of belief. In particular, it suggests that dispositionalists have in effect been trying to define belief, not in terms of its actualization, but instead in terms of the effects of its actualization. As a general rule, however, powers are to be defined in terms of their actualizations. I thus argue that belief has just one actualization, and that that actualization is a particular kind of mental act that I call a judgment. I explain the resulting view—that belief is the power to judge—and argue that it has some important advantages, not only over other dispositional theories of belief, but also over categorical theories of belief. Since these options are apparently exhaustive, it thus has important advantages over all other theories of belief. Keywords Belief · Dispositional theories of belief · Judgment · Mental powers
1 Introduction It is as well to reserve ‘belief’ for the notion of a far more sophisticated cognitive state: one that is connected with (and, in my opinion, defined in terms of) the notion of judgment, and so, also, connected with the notion of reasons. Gareth Evans, The Varieties of Reference Recently, a number of metaphysicians of powers have argued, persuasively, that we need to be careful—more careful than we usually are—to distinguish the actualization of a power from the mere effects of its actualization.1 This point, it turns out, has important consequences for the dispositional theory of belief. Simply put: since a power is to be defined in terms of its actualization, we can create illusory difficulties for ourselves, in our attempts to define a given power, if we mistake a mere effect of its actualization for its actualization itself. But this is precisely what has happened to many defenders of the dispositional theory of belief. According to what I will call the simple dispositional theory, to believe something is to be disposed to behave in * Nicholas Koziolek [email protected] 1
Department of Philosophy, Washington University in St. Louis, One Brookings Drive, St. Louis, MO 63130, USA
a certain way. For example, to believe that it’s going to rain is to be disposed to carry an umbrella. One familiar problem for this theory is that your belief that it’s going to rain won’t lead you to carry an umbrella if you don’t care to stay dry—or, for that matter, if you don’t have an umbrella, or you prefer rainjackets, or any of an endless number of other things. So it seems that the belief that it’s going to rain is no more the disposition to carry an umbrella than it is the disposition to get wet, or to wear a rainjacket, and so on. Dispositionalists have tended to react to this problem by liberalizing their theory of belief, concluding that each belief is to be identified, not
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