What is Gained: A view from the top

Of course, the principle of logical cohesion was not our original objection. The motivating goal was to gain ground on the possibility of belief change while pre- serving Davidson’s methodologies and insight. In situations of mismatched belief

8_{It is worth noting that Dennett, having circled all the factors incorporated here to make}

this claim, does not himself reach it. His motivation for introducing over-specified beliefs is to suggest what might mislead philosophers to accept a theory positing a language of thought (a theory which Davidson also does not accept). He is barred from relating assent and over- specification by his hasty conclusion that assent leads directly to opinion, which skirts many of the subtleties of De Sousa’s exposition.

1.5. THE STRUCTURE OF BELIEF 29

between speakers, Davidson was left to account for some error, classical implica- tions giving singular results. For Davidson, differing beliefs must be the result of flaw. With the addition of assent, the resolute bridge of logical necessity is burned and so is the need of characterizing multiple perspectives as error. Of course, we cannot attribute to another speaker an act of assent which is inconceivable to us, but an extended charity dictates that we understand that their tempered belief may be different than our own. We need not accept their subjective bridge so much as recognize it as a possibility. Should a speaker’s base beliefs seem to bear no relationship to the tempered belief they instantiate, that speaker runs the risk of being misinterpreted. As they should, for they have violated our dictum of similarity. Thus we are not opening the floodgates of interpretation to arbitrary unmotivated beliefs, merely allowing some multiplicity of conclusion. Every tem- pered belief, if it is to be used in interpretation, should stand the test of bearing a motivated, if subjective, relationship to the beliefs on which it is based. We hold other speakers to this criteria even in the most subjective realms. You may dislike a lovely chardonnay, but not if you haven’t tasted it. You may wear a tinfoil hat, but not without at least the motivation of insulating your brainwaves. Of course, you may offer another equally implausible explanation, but other speakers expect it to be comprehensibly related. If you have dawned cooking wear and give the reason that fish breathe water, you make yourself a serious candidate for a total state of incoherence, rather than just a case of eccentricity.

An interesting corollary of our ability to understand others’ capacity for hold- ing different tempered beliefs is that we can be aware of incompatible beliefs simultaneously, and select the appropriate ones for each instance of interpreta- tion. When you tell a child at Disneyland to go talk to Mickey Mouse and ask him about a favorite movie, knowing that the child accepts the presence of Mickey does nothing to impair your awareness that it is a man in a suit, that cartoons aren’t video images, and so forth. We interpret others not just on beliefs we have, but beliefs would could imagine having assented to. We are still relying heavily on our own belief set, for it still is our only ground from which to guess at the tempered belief of others. The only real difference is that we are no longer forced to suppose identity, even in the face of having no privileged access to the beliefs of others. Just as our beliefs are separate from the perceptions which are associated with them, so too can we see each cohesive set of tempered beliefs as separate and operating above our basic, everyday beliefs.

Even where we don’t consider our own discordant beliefs to be tempered, we aren’t prevented from developing a separate picture for the purposes of interpre- tation. If I interpret an utterance I hear based on what I would mean if I used it, I can imagine a belief underlying it might be a tempered one, even if my own is not. If none of my own beliefs allow successful interpretation of a statement

s, and I can predict no tempered belief the utterer of s might have assented to on the basis of our shared beliefs, and if I am going to continue to view the

speaker as rational, I can still try and envision some beliefs which would engen- der a tempered belief allowing me to interprets.9 However, as we shall see, this process is not immune to failure for it is limited by my ability to identify which beliefs led the speaker to assenting, a far less reliable process than going in the opposite direction, from supporting belief to assent. We are better at guessing where someone will go next than at guessing where they are and how they got there. This process of nominating a set of supporting beliefs for the purpose of interpretation we will term descent, which is less reliable and thus markedly not the inverse of assent.

With the resanctification of multiple valid beliefs about a single topic comes the possibility of correction through speech. For Davidson, if two speakers held different beliefs, one of them must have been incorrect. Armed with assent, and the consequent possibility of accurately attributing differing beliefs to others, comes the chance that belief not held by a speaker could be first attributed to another, and then adopted. Mostly, this will come in the form of drawing a different conclusion in an act of assent. If you don’t play along, the child is much more likely realize it is a man in a suit. This realization is not sparked by new information about Mickey, but by noticing that you make a different subjective evaluation. In a set few other cases, it can come through suspecting assent in another, in the absence of a supporting belief, and seeking out a basic belief to lead to that assent. If a convincing enough supporting belief is available, it can be accepted as native.10 Because of the difficulty retracing another’s path from many beliefs to just one tempered belief in reverse, this strategy is rarely successful. Later we will examine a special class of cases where it is more reliable.

9_{Finding examples which are neither trivial nor question begging here is challenging, as we}

near our goal. For the purposes of understanding, an example might go something like this. Someone tells you “If you feel like you are getting a cold, you should take echinacea.” To assent requires an idea of what echinacea is. In the absence of beliefs about echinacea, you can guess that the speaker believes that it reduces cold symptoms. With a posited base belief in hand, you can now imagine the speaker assenting to the belief expressed. However, there is nothing to guarantee that you would ever develop the belief that echinacea is good for colds, or in fact that if you were exposed to echinacea that you should have any cause to add ‘good for colds’ to your echinacea concept.

10_{Again, finding an example of this kind of change in belief, especially a successful one, is}

challenging, but it does occur. In my adoptive city of residence, on the first Monday of the month, at noon, they test the emergency alert siren. Being out among people on the street when it goes off, and watching them act as if there isn’t a iterative blaring scream rattling everyone’s eardrums is unsettling, particularly if you don’t know that it is a test. The first time I heard it, I quickly concluded that there must be some tempered belief held by the other pedestrians. It was not linguistically expressed, but the natural reaction to such stimulus is to take cover, so they had to have some other motivation. I was at least able to deduce that there was no danger, on the basis that others couldn’t have believed there was.

1.5. THE STRUCTURE OF BELIEF 31