Bibliographic record
Abstract
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
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.009 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.009 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.017 | 0.002 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".