UC Santa Barbara

The aim of this dissertation is to make substantive progress toward understanding the nature and ethics of belief. The job of understanding belief is too large a task for a single dissertation, but each chapter bites off a small portion of the larger task, each doing a job that has largely been neglected by philosophers of belief but, which is important for understanding the nature and ethics of belief. The dissertation starts by exploring the question of whether we should say we have an infinite or finite number of beliefs. Many philosophers have gone on record on the issue, but few have developed arguments or unpacked the implications of answering the question one way or another. I make the case that any plausible account of mental architecture should be able to render the verdict that we have an infinite number of beliefs. I then proceed to explore the relationship between the belief relation talked about by philosophers of language and beliefs. I make the case that, contrary to popular opinion on the matter, beliefs are not profitably understood as relations. I then turn to the question of what level of consistency we should expect between beliefs and behavior. A number of thinkers in philosophy, psychology, and cognitive science more broadly have used inconsistencies between agents’ stated beliefs and their behaviors to argue for the existence of novel mental phenomena or to make the case that many of the most paradigmatic cases of belief are not belief at all—that the religious do not generally believe in the tenets of their religion, that the deluded to do not believe their delusions, and that many racial egalitarians actually unwittingly hold racist beliefs. I make the case that they mostly have no case, as belief and behavior are rarely so in sync that we should be ever be surprised by someone acting in a manner inconsistent with their beliefs. Living according to one’s beliefs is an achievement; it is not constitutive of belief. I then turn to the question of how our beliefs and emotions interact. I argue that what we believe is often dependent upon what we feel to an extent that has gone underappreciated in the literatures on emotion and belief. I call the locus of this interplay, the belief-emotion nexus, and utilize the model of it developed herein to make progress on a variety of thorny issues in the philosophy and cognitive science of belief and emotion. Finally, I turn to the issue of believing the victim. Many claim that we have some special duty to believe the testimony of those reporting to be victims of sexual assault. I explore the issue with a careful eye toward the nature and ethics of belief issues involved and make the case that, under at least some common understandings of what “believe the victim” means, it is in fact rational to do so.