Description
- Abstract:
- Belief has a many/one structure that is poorly understood. Beliefs are said to be bound or tied together, to fit together to form a total view, or to construct, form, or build up a picture of the world. This work focuses on clarifying this conception of belief and on understanding in what sense, if any, a subject?s beliefs are both many and one. Chapter One defines the central task as two-fold: (i) to determine whether, or under what conditions, a subject?s beliefs compose a single overall representation, and (ii) to determine the nature of the relation between a subject?s many beliefs and her single overall representation. Chapter Two defuses several initial lines of objection, and sharpens the problem by contrasting the unity of belief with three theses with which it could easily be confused. Chapters Three and Four examine prominent accounts of belief that allege something close to the view that a subject has a single, overall representation. Chapter Three focuses on David Lewis, who provides a theory of belief on which belief is ?singular, not plural?, and on Stalnaker?s possible worlds semantics, on which a belief state is a ?conception of the way the world is?. Chapter Four focuses on Donald Davidson, who presses various holistic theses concerning belief and the mental generally. There is a philosophically significant use of the concept of a global representation in the work of all three philosophers, but the theoretical accounts of belief they offer leave untouched the problem of understanding the many/one structure of belief. Chapter Five defends a schematic formulation of what it is to have a global representation of the world, and assesses whether the many/one structure of belief should be understood by appeal to conjunctive belief. Chapter Six explores the potential for diversity judgments to account for the unity of belief, and develops a theoretical account on which unity consists in a subject subsuming the content of her beliefs under one judgment via her taking there to be non-identities between the states of affairs her beliefs represent.
- Notes:
- Thesis (Ph.D.) -- Brown University (2009)
Access Conditions
- Rights
- In Copyright
- Restrictions on Use
- Collection is open for research.
Citation
Treanor, Nick B.,
"The World in Mind"
(2008).
Philosophy Theses and Dissertations.
Brown Digital Repository. Brown University Library.
https://doi.org/10.7301/Z0JW8C5T
