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I know this may not be the usual place to get feedback on academic research, but there's a paper idea I've been mulling over for a while that I wanted to run past the community, since it dovetails nicely with many of your interests (and I'm sure you'll have some interesting things to say). In short, I'm increasingly thinking that genuine beliefs may be a lot rarer than people think.
The inspiration for this came about partly through conversations I've had with friends and family members, and I've noticed that people sincerely say and profess to believe shit all the time while simultaneously failing to exhibit most or all of the conventional features we'd expect in cases of genuine belief. Consider my sister, who is a staunch activist in the domain of climate change, yet recently bought a new gas guzzling car, has never given any serious thought to reducing her meat consumption, and takes 12+ international flights a year. Or consider my dad, who says extremely negative things about Muslims (not just Islam), yet who has a large number of Muslim friends who he'd never dream of saying a bad word about. Or consider me, who claims to believe that AI risk is a deep existential threat to humanity, yet gets very excited and happy whenever a shiny new AI model is released.
I'm not saying that any of the above positions are strictly contradictory (and people are very good at papering over apparent tensions in their beliefs), but they all have more than a whiff of hypocrisy to me. There are a lot of famous cases like this in the heuristics and biases literature, and to be fair, psychologists and philosophers have been investigating and theorising about this stuff for a while, from Festinger's famous cognitive dissonance framework to contemporary belief fragmentation and partial belief accounts.
However, one view that I don't think anyone has properly explored yet is the idea that beliefs - at least as classically understood by psychologists and philosophers - may be surprisingly rare (compare the view of philosophers like John Doris who argue that virtues are very rare). Usually, if someone sincerely professes to believe that P, and we don't think they're lying, we assume that they do believe that P. Maybe in extreme cases, we might point to ways in which they fail to live up to their apparent belief that P, and suggest that they can't believe P all that strongly. However, for the purposes of folk psychology, we normally take this as sufficient grounds for ascribing them the relevant belief that P.
Contrast this with how psychologists and philosophers have traditionally thought about the demands of belief. When you believe that P, we expect you to make your other beliefs consistent with P. We expect that P will be "inferentially promiscuous", meaning that you'll draw all sorts of appropriate inferences on the basis that P. And finally, we expect that your behaviour will largely align with what people who believe that P typically do (ceteris paribus in all these cases, of course).
To be sure, we recognise all sorts of ways in which people fall short of these demands, but they're still regulatory norms for believing. And simply put, I think that many of the standard cases where we ascribe beliefs to someone (e.g., a relative saying "no-one trusts each other any more") don't come close to these standards, nor do people feel much if any obligation to make them come close to these standards.
Instead, I think a lot of what we standardly call beliefs might be better characterised as "context-sensitive dispositions to agree or disagree with assertions". Call these S-dispositions. I think S-dispositions have a normative logic all of their own, far more closely linked to social cues and pressures than the conventional demands of epistemology. The view I'm describing says that S-dispositions should be understood as a distinctive kind of psychological state from beliefs.
However, they're a state that we frequently confuse for beliefs, both in the case of other people and even ourselves. That's partly because when we do truly believe that P, we're also inclined to agree with assertions that P. However, I don't think it works the other way round - there are lots of times we're inclined to agree with assertions that P without meeting any of the common normative criteria for strict belief. But this isn't something that's immediately transparent to us; figuring out whether you really believe something is hard, and requires a lot of self-reflection and self-observation.
Consider someone, John, who sincerely claims to believe that meat is murder. John may find himself very inclined to agree with statements like "animal farming is horrific", "it's murder to kill an animal for food", and so on. But let's say John is reflective about his own behaviour. He notices that he only started asserting this kind of thing after he fell in love with a vegan woman and wanted to impress her. He also notes that despite making some basic efforts to be a vegan, he frequently fails, and doesn't feel too bad about it. He also notes that it's never occurred to him to stop wearing leather or make donations to charities trying to reduce animal suffering. In this case, John might well think something like the following: "I had a strong disposition to agree to statements like 'Meat is murder', but my behaviour and broader mindset weren't really consistent with someone who truly believed that. Whatever state it is that makes me inclined to agree to statements like that, then, is probably not a sincere belief."
I think an obvious objection here is that this is a semantic issue: I'm essentially no-true-scotsmanning the concept of belief. However, I'd push back against this. My broader philosophical and psychological framework for understanding the mind is a "psychological natural kinds" model: I think that there really are important divisions in kind in the mind between different kinds of psychological state, and a big part of the job of cognitive science is to discover them. The view I'm describing here, then, is that a lot of the states we conventionally call beliefs aren't in fact beliefs at all - they're a different psychological natural kind with its own norms and functions, which I've termed S-dispositions. There may be some interesting connections between S-dispositions and strict beliefs, but they're weak enough and complicated enough that a good ontology of the mind should consider them separate kinds of psychological states.
I also think this 'sparse beliefs' view I'm describing has some interesting potential upshots for how we think about speech and epistemic virtue, including the simple point that S-dispositions are ubiquitous and strict beliefs are rare. I'm still figuring these out, and I'd like to hear others' views on this, but it raises some interesting questions. For example, should we have a different set of norms for rewarding/punishing S-dispositions from those we apply to beliefs? If someone says "Russians are a bunch of fucking savages", and we have reason to believe that it's merely an S-disposition rather than a belief, should we judge them less harshly? Or similarly, if someone has two contradictory S-dispositions, is that necessarily a bad thing in the same way that having two contradictory beliefs would be? Should social media platforms make an effort to distinguish between users who casually assert problematic or dangerous things ("men should all be killed") versus those whose broader pattern of online interactions suggests they truly believe those things? What sort of epistemic obligation if any do we have to make sure our S-dispositions line up with our strict beliefs? Is there something epistemically or morally problematic about someone who casually says things like "Americans are idiots" in specific social contexts yet in practice holds many Americans in high esteem?
In any case, I'm in the early stages of writing a paper on this, but I'd love feedback from you all.
Some questions that come to mind:
Can someone simultaneously hold an S-disposition and a belief that are in contradiction? Or is that a category error?
It seems like in principle anyone can hold any particular belief. E.g. you can imagine Pericles having a belief about whether Russia was right to invade Ukraine, once you explained to him what Russia and Ukraine were and asking him to take a certain set of facts as given. Same with someone in the contemporary day having a belief about some critical issue in the Athens of his day. Does the same hold for S-dispositions? Or are they inherently embedded in a certain social context?
How might one differentiate between an S-disposition and a belief? Both introspectively and externally.
Do S-dispositions generate beliefs? Do beliefs generate S-dispositions?
I feel like Gramsci's conception of ideology also somehow relates to S-dispositions, as a kind of social terrain of thoughts overlaying individual beliefs (as opposed to a particular set of beliefs).
Good questions!
Yes, absolutely. In fact I think people can hold full-blown beliefs that are in contradiction, although (unlike S-dispositions) this creates genuine cognitive dissonance.
This is tricky because individuating beliefs contents is tricky. When an astrophysicist says "the sun is heavy" and a 10 year old child says "the sun is heavy", do they hold the same belief? In general, I'm inclined to be sloppy here and say it's a matter of fineness of grain; there's a more coarse-grained level at which the physicist and the child hold the same belief, and a fine-grained level at which they hold different beliefs. That said, I'm inclined to think that individuating S-dispositions should if anything be easier than individuating beliefs insofar as it's more closely linked to public behaviour and less linked to normatively-governed cognitive transitions (the kind of inferences you'd make, etc.). To be a bit more rigorous about it, I'd say two individuals A and B share an S-disposition P to the extent that (i) they are inclined to assert or deny P in the same social contexts, and (ii) do not integrate P with their broader cognitive states and behaviour in the manner characteristic of belief.
Great question. A few simple rules of thumb. (i) As noted above, conflicting S-dispositions do not generate negative emotional affect in the same way that conflicting beliefs do (cognitive dissonance); (ii) S-dispositions are relatively behaviourally and inferentially inert, and do not play a significant role in people's lives even in cases where beliefs with the same content do (e.g., someone who pays lip-service to climate change narratives vs a true believer); (iii) S-dispositions are almost exclusively generated and sustained by social contexts, whereas beliefs can be frequently arrived at relatively independently (there are big social influences on beliefs of course, but the point is that there are only social influences on S-dispositions); (iv) individuals feel no real obligation or interest in updating S-dispositions as compared to beliefs, etc.. Applying these heuristics to oneself can help one distinguish the two.
Again, a very good and interesting question, and one I'm still thinking about. I think the clearest causal arrow here runs from S-dispositions to beliefs: someone might adopt animal rights-related S-dispositions for social reasons, and subsequently go on to translate some of these into full blown beliefs. In the opposite direction, one could imagine a person's belief system being "hollowed out", so they assent and dissent from the same propositions but without any of the interest and commitment that they used to have; something like this can happen to religious people, for example, but distinguish those cases from instances where people genuinely 'lose their faith' and acquire full-blown atheist beliefs. More broadly, I expect there to be lots of interesting connections between the two.
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