Beliefs and facts

pp. 11-22

in: Colin Cheyne, Knowledge, cause, and abstract objects, Berlin, Springer, 2001

Abstract

I do not intend to offer a full analysis of belief, but only to make explicit the basic assumptions about beliefs that underlie the arguments I employ. These assumptions should be uncontroversial. In particular, they are compatible with any current theories of mind except for eliminativism and perhaps naive behaviourism. It is widely accepted that behaviourism, whether naïve or sophisticated, has failed, so I shall not argue against it here. I discuss belief eliminativism briefly in Section 2.3.