Ideas as Thick Beliefs: Spinoza on the Normativity of Ideas
The question of whether beliefs are normative is often treated with regard to the fact that beliefs can be true or false. If I say something false, I seem to break a rule or deviate from a standard of semantic correctness. Accordingly, the contemporary di
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Ideas as Thick Beliefs: Spinoza on the Normativity of Ideas Martin Lenz
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Introduction
In contemporary philosophy, the question whether beliefs are normative is often treated with regard to the fact that beliefs can be true or false. If I believe or say something false, I seem to break a rule or deviate from a standard of semantic correctness. Accordingly, the dispute is about whether there is some sort of social normativity involved here or whether we just happen to deviate from the facts. Normativists tend to argue that the correctness standards are implemented by social practices according to which our linguistic utterances and beliefs are sanctioned; by contrast, naturalists tend to argue are that we’re just deviating from facts or that the belief producing mechanisms are not properly functioning.1 One might be unhappy about the state of this discussion for at least two reasons. Firstly, it seems to rely on a controversial gap between nature and normativity, according to which believing is either a normative affair in that it involves social standards or it is something explicable in naturalist terms without any recourse to normative vocabulary. Secondly, it ties the analysis of beliefs too exclusively to truth and falsity, thereby neglecting other factors relevant to the explanation of beliefs. This is why it might be rewarding to look at Spinoza’s theory of ideas2 for a
Previous versions of this paper have been presented at different workshops in Berlin and Nijmegen. I am particularly grateful to Johannes Haag, Martin Kusch, Dominik Perler, Ursula Renz, Eric Schliesser, Stephan Schmid and Anik Waldow for their insightful comments. 1
See Engel (2008) for an overview. Fruitful interpretations of Spinoza’s theory of ideas that point in similar directions are proposed by Della Rocca (2003), Steinberg (2005) and Schmid (2013). 2
M. Lenz (*) Department of the History of Philosophy, University of Groningen, Oude Boteringestraat 52, 9712GL Groningen, The Netherlands e-mail: [email protected] M. Lenz and A. Waldow (eds.), Contemporary Perspectives on Early Modern Philosophy: Nature and Norms in Thought, Studies in History and Philosophy of Science 29, DOI 10.1007/978-94-007-6241-1_3, © Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2013
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richer, metaphysically grounded and perhaps even more plausible account of the normativity of beliefs. In portraying ideas as complex propositional attitudes, Spinoza’s theory of ideas avoids the shortcomings I mentioned. As we will see, he achieves this by employing a notion of nature which easily integrates normative properties and by depicting beliefs not only as truth evaluable but as the thick states that they probably are: namely as states not only “aiming at truth”, but as inherently intertwined with motivating emotions and guiding evaluations. This is why I’d like to call Spinoza’s ideas not only beliefs, but – with a nod to Bernard Williams – thick beliefs.3 Before looking more closely at Spinoza’s account of ideas, I’d like to start the following section wit
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