A planning theory of belief

1. What does it mean to hold a belief? Some of our ways of speaking in English suggest that to hold a belief is to have something in your mind: beliefs are things we acquire, defend, recover, and so on (Abelson, 1986). That is, believing is a matter of being in a state of having a thing. In this paper, I will argue for an alternative: believing is something we do. This is not a new suggestion. For instance, Matthew Boyle (2011) defends a theory of belief as an activity, which he traces back to Aristotle. This paper, however, makes two new contributions: first, I argue for an analogy between belief and planning that fleshes out what it would mean to understand belief as an activity, and second, I aim to show how the resulting view can help sense of a variety of theories in cognitive psychology that suggest cognitive information storage is dynamic and reconstructive. Imagine you are eating breakfast while planning your route to work. In virtue of what do you count as planning? The most obvious answer is that you are conducting a certain kind of mental activity, a kind of search for the best (or perhaps merely an acceptable) way to get to work. Further, as I'll argue, this mental activity can't be reduced to holding in one's mind a series of plans – it's possible to be planning without having a plan yet, as when you just start thinking, and plans can also be brought to mind without planning taking place, as in when you implement a plan that was formed earlier on. The belief-as-planning account draws on these features. Our theory of belief should really be a theory of believing, a mental activity that is not reducible to a set of beliefs. By placing this activity at the center of the account, we can now see beliefs, the sets of things, as an abstraction over the activity of believing. This allows for an alternative to pure representationalism or pure dispositionalism: believing is representational, whereas beliefs are a function of this activity in real and counterfactual circumstances. Occupying this middle ground preserves something important about representationalism, namely the idea that belief happens in the mind and can be real even if it has no impact on action. At the same time, the planning account sides with the dispositionalist in allowing a looser relationship between thought and the total set of believed propositions. The structure is as follows. In §2, I bring out two features of non-occurrent beliefs, and in §3, argue that these cause problems for representationalist accounts of belief. These problems indicate a desideratum for accounts of belief: to be psychologically grounded but not dependent on representational form. §4 proposes a simplified model of planning, which forms the basis for an analogy between belief and planning in §5. In the final section, I discuss some upshots and challenges for the proposal. 2. On the intuitive view suggested by English idioms, believing means being in a state of having a thing. Contemporary analytic philosophers tend to adopt a modified version of this idea: belief is a combination of an attitude, something like taking-to-be-true, held toward a proposition. This thesis might be more or less representationalist, where pure representationalism locates thinks of belief as a representational state with propositional content and a connect, psychologically real, attitude, and the alternative extreme, dispositionalism, instead understands belief as a tendency to act and think in certain characteristic ways. While the debate between representationalism and dispositionalism is fraught and ongoing (see Quilty-Dunn & Mandelbaum, 2018; Schwitzgebel, 2002), in what follows I will only argue against representationalism, since it will serve to highlight a challenge that provides the inspiration for my positive picture. Another reason to start with representationalism is the thought that it would in some sense be nice to be representationalists, if we could: that is, if there was a reasonable theory of belief that located beliefs in real, psychological states, we'd have a weak reason to prefer such a theory over an equally reasonable dispositionalist alternative just because representationalism involves a unification between psychology and philosophy, and provides a deeper explanatory footing for our theory by grounding beliefs in real states of the world rather than modal dispositions over mental states. I'll start by introducing two relevant dimensions of non-occurrent beliefs, assuming a representationalist view for reductio. First, belief, as well as representational states such as preference, supposition, and so on, can be arranged on a continuum of representational stability. Let's say that Clelia believes the post office is closed on Saturdays. She formed this belief a long time ago, and perhaps not even at a precise moment of judgment, and tomorrow she will call it to mind when we discuss sending a gift to her sister. But how should we describe her state of mind today, when she's not thinking about the post office at all? A view that ascribes high representational stability would say that she has, even today, a representation of the post office being closed, and that this very same representation will be used tomorrow when she does start thinking about the post office. This representation is stable in the sense of remaining in the same condition over time. On the other end of the spectrum, we might say that today, Clelia doesn't have a representation at all – tomorrow, when she starts thinking about sending the present, she will build up her belief from scratch, taking into account the context, her and other In this her belief is and the end of the from a belief. belief does not just into her from – it is on information in time from her as well as But it is a new in the sense that these other information are not beliefs, a of the information is at the time rather than in the and of the of a belief that the post office is closed on that time, even when she's not thinking about In our this belief is stability out of and non-occurrent belief. I'll this with a second, Let's say non-occurrent belief, as beliefs would to is First, Clelia might have a of of a belief, an version that is the same kind of a representation of a way the world tomorrow, she would call to mind this and it in on the and other information Clelia might really the post office is closed on but when she thinks about it tomorrow, we would only be to answer more precise does she it of the or of her belief about the she is or about the so on. I'll call this the since her belief the same representational but is or less that the belief, not the relationship between a and a in that the same with the same but in of But this is not the only way a non-occurrent belief might from might just as well that Clelia believes in virtue of a more of mental states and for instance, rather than an she might so to of the belief: an of a that closed, or other of the representation that does not the in the way an it she might have that over time, that will of the belief tomorrow and of the belief in the but that do not the in This can in the of propositions. 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