Psychology Dictionary of Arguments

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Belief, philosophy: attitude of considering a sentence to be true. Unlike religious faith belief is linked to the assessment of probabilities. A belief is an attitude of a thinking person which can usually be formulated in a sentence, whereby the person must be able to integrate the sentence into a set of further sentences. A further condition is that the bearer of beliefs is able to reformulate the corresponding sentences and negate them, that is, to grasp their meaning. See also religious belief, propositional attitudes, intensions, probability, belief degrees, private language.
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Annotation: The above characterizations of concepts are neither definitions nor exhausting presentations of problems related to them. Instead, they are intended to give a short introduction to the contributions below. – Lexicon of Arguments.

 
Author Concept Summary/Quotes Sources

Brian Loar on Beliefs - Dictionary of Arguments

Schiffer I 19
Belief/Loar: a belief is understood as a function that depicts propositions on internal physical states.
>Brain/Brain state
, >Mental states, >Physical/psychic, >Propositions, >Materialism.
These internal physical states have functional roles that are specified by these propositions.
>Functional role.
Schiffer I 286f
Belief/SchifferVsLoar: Problem: his realization of a theory of beliefs/desires (as a function of propositions on physical states), whose functional roles are defined by the theory.
Problem: to find a theory that correlates each proposition with a single functional role rather than many roles.
>Mapping.
Schiffer: this will not work, therefore the Quine-Field argument is done in.

Quine-Field Argument/Schiffer:
. . .
Schiffer I 109
Def Conceptual Role/Field: (Field 1977)(1): the subjectively induced conditional probability function of an actor. Two mental representations s1 and s2 have the same conceptual role for one person iff. their (the person's) subjective conditional probability function is such that for each mental representation s the subjective probability of s1 given s is the same as that of s2 given s.
SchifferVs: that never happens.
Field ditto - E.g. blind persons certainly have different conceptual roles of flounders - then there will be no correlation to the belief objects either.

1. Hartry Field (1977).Logic, Meaning, and Conceptual Role. Journal of Philosophy 74 (7):378-409

. . .
Schiffer I 286f
Belief/Beliefs/Quine/Schiffer: for Quine, beliefs are never true, although he concedes Quine pro Brentano: ~ you cannot break out of the intentional vocabulary.
>Beliefs/Quine, >Intentionality/Brentano.
But:
QuineVsBrentano: ~ the canonical scheme includes no propositional attitudes, only physical constitution and behavior of organisms.
>Propositional attitudes.

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Explanation of symbols: Roman numerals indicate the source, arabic numerals indicate the page number. The corresponding books are indicated on the right hand side. ((s)…): Comment by the sender of the contribution. Translations: Dictionary of Arguments
The note [Concept/Author], [Author1]Vs[Author2] or [Author]Vs[term] resp. "problem:"/"solution:", "old:"/"new:" and "thesis:" is an addition from the Dictionary of Arguments. If a German edition is specified, the page numbers refer to this edition.

Loar I
B. Loar
Mind and Meaning Cambridge 1981

Loar II
Brian Loar
"Two Theories of Meaning"
In
Truth and Meaning, G. Evans/J. McDowell, Oxford 1976

Schi I
St. Schiffer
Remnants of Meaning Cambridge 1987


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