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Culture War Roundup for the week of December 26, 2022

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I think you need to clarify much more what you mean by "belief" before your thesis becomes well-formed, because most beliefs our brains have are of the form "There is a white metallic water bottle 12 inches to the right of my hand", "there is a chair under my butt", "my wife will come home in 40 minutes", "the cursor will move if I move the mouse", etc. These are all beliefs about the state of the world, and people most definitely have them: you wouldn't be able to function in the world without millions of these beliefs. But these sorts of boring, useful factual beliefs are not internally labelled "beliefs" in your mind, what I think you're more interested in are "beliefs as a signaling tool", rather than "beliefs as expectations about the state of the world". Human brains probably carefully separate the part that deal with "beliefs" needed to signal tribal membership from the part that needs to actually plan their days, like "sure I told Bob that 2+2=5 to prove my group membership, but two 1$ bananas still sum to 2$ on my groceries receipt".

As I'm using the term "belief", I'm gesturing towards a class of representational mental states that are governed by a distinctive set of norms, e.g., serving as components of knowledge, things that can be more or less justified, things that we have a special sort of duty to update on the basis of evidence, that we have a duty to make coherent, etc.. That may sound narrow and specific, but I think it's a fairly clearly identifiable cross-culturally valid concept running through a wide range of philosophical and scientific concepts, from Greek, Chinese, and Indian philosophy to a wide range of religious traditions. I think the concept has been problematised a bit by modern psychology and cognitive science, with compelling evidence for things like unconscious beliefs, subdoxastic representations involved in things like early vision and language, etc.. Moreover, a lot of modern cogsci (though not all) draws a fairly bright line between perceptual and cognitive states, with beliefs falling clearly on the latter side, so some of your examples would be classified as perceptual expectations or affordances rather than beliefs proper.

All that said, one thing that's (very helpfully) becoming clear from this discussion is that I shouldn't phrase the thesis in comparative terms as "most of what we consider beliefs are S-dispositions"; that's problematic for a lot of the reasons you and others have pointed out, and needlessly complicates things. My core point is rather that a significant subset of what we unreflectively classify as beliefs (e.g., casual opinions) are best understood as a different kind mental entity all together.