Reasons to Believe: Cognitive Models of Beliefs Change

Reviews in the Neurosciences, 2000

Processes of believing are thought to have an important impact on the control of human behavior. Recently, neuroimaging and neurophysiological studies have shown that believe processes involve brain areas known to be involved in emotion-related and cognitive processing. But there is a discrepancy between the increasing interest in empirical research and the lack of coherent terminology and conceptualization. We will show that in processes of believing, the medial frontal cortex plays a critical role within a widespread cortico-subcortical network owing to its role in valuation of internal and external events and in subjective control of action. Also, we will describe a model of processes of believing that integrates the divergent neurophysiological and conceptual aspects as a starting point for further interdisciplinary research questions.

Frontiers in psychology, 2014

Over the past decades, delusions have become the subject of growing and productive research spanning clinical and cognitive neurosciences. Despite this, the nature of belief, which underpins the construct of delusions, has received little formal investigation. No account of delusions, however, would be complete without a cognitive level analysis of belief per se. One reason for this neglect is the assumption that, unlike more established and accessible modular psychological process (e.g., vision, audition, face-recognition, language-processing, and motor-control systems), beliefs comprise more distributed and therefore less accessible central cognitive processes. In this paper, we suggest some defining characteristics and functions of beliefs. Working back from cognitive accounts of delusions, we consider potential candidate cognitive processes that may be involved in normal belief formation. Finally, we advance a multistage account of the belief process that could provide the basis...

Advanced version "Reasons: Beliefs Support and Goals Dynamics" published on Mathware & Softcomputing

The paper is devoted to the structural relation between Beliefs and Goals. I discuss its importance in modelling cognitive agents; its origin in cognitive processing; its stucture (Belief Structure relative to a Goal); its crucial role in rationality, mediating between "epistemic" and "pragmatic" rationality; its crucial role in Goal Dynamics (in a broad sense). In particular, I will analyse the role of Beliefs in a) the Processing of Goals, from their firing to their satisfaction or abandon: how Beliefs determine step by step such a process; b) the Dynamics or Revision of Goals, i.e. the change of Goals on the basis the change of a dynamic environment; c) the Typology of Goals, that may be partially characterized just on the basis of their typical Belief Structure. Particular attention is devoted to different Goals "destinies" (when Goals are dropped) on the basis of peculiar "reasons" to drop. The paper will not give a complete or formal account of any of this aspects. It is more an exploring paper, which essays to individuate basic ontological cathegories, basic principles and fruitful directions of analysis, and is aimed to reach an overall view of the role and importance of cognitive Reasons supporting Goals.

Ethics in Progress, 2013

Exploring the idea of a more practical relationship between the agent and his own mental life leaves room for reconsidering the relevance of the familiar analogy between reasons for belief and reasons for action. Even if their difference is usually admitted, they are also treated as equivalent, in the sense that the connection between reasons to believe and the arising belief would be analogous to the connection between reasons for action and the arising action. If such an analogy might be relevant to a certain extent in the frame of a theoretical stance towards oneself, I'll argue that it cannot be maintained once we have put the agent at the heart of self-knowledge.

Three experiments examined the effects of motivational variables on the epistemic (or knowledge acquisition) process. The motivations considered were need for cognitive structure and fear of invalidity, and the epistemic phenomena studied were subjective confidence and hypothesis generation. In the first experiment a tachistoscopic task was employed to examine the effects of fear of invalidity upon (1) subjects' initial and final confidence in a hypothesis and (2) shifts in confidence occasioned by successive items of new information. The second experiment replicated and extended the first by investigating the effects of need for structure over and above those of fear of invalidity. The third experiment employed an object recognition task and investigated the process of hypothesis generation assumed to mediate motivational effects on subjective confidence. It was found that both initial contidence and informationally induced confidence shifts were of higher magnitude when subjects' need for structure was high rather than low, and when subjects' fear of invalidity was low rather than high. Furthermore, the number of alternate hypotheses generated was higher under high (versus low) fear of invalidity, and low (vs high) need for structure. The above findings were discussed in reference to Kruglanski's theory of lay epistemology. 0 1987 ~~ademic Press, Inc.

Review of Philosophy and Psychology, 2011

We very often grant that a person can gain knowledge on the basis of epistemic artifacts such as telescopes, microscopes and so on. However, this intuition threatens to undermine virtue reliabilism according to which one knows that p if and only if one’s believing the truth that p is the product of a reliable cognitive belief-forming process; in an obvious sense epistemic artifacts are not parts of one’s overall cognitive system. This is so, unless the extended cognition hypothesis (HEC) is true. According to HEC when parts of the environment become properly coupled to the agent’s brain then they too can be considered constitutive parts of the overall cognitive mechanism—i.e. cognition potentially extends to the world surrounding the agent. Interestingly, HEC and the broader framework of virtue reliabilism share some intriguing similarities, which render these two views mutually supportive. Making these similarities explicit provides a principled account of the way in which our knowledge-conducive cognitive characters may extend beyond our natural cognitive capacities by incorporating epistemic artifacts.

Logic Journal of IGPL, 2010

In this paper we consider the relation between beliefs and goals in agent theory. Beliefs play three roles in reasoning about goals: they play a role in the generation of unconditional desires from conditional ones, they play a role in adoption of desires as goals, and they play a role in the selection of plans to achieve goals. In this paper we consider the role of goals in reasoning about beliefs. Though we assume that goals do not play a role in the belief generation problem, we argue that they play a role in the belief selection problem. We show the rationality of the use of goals in belief selection, in the sense that there are cases in which agents that take their goals into account in selecting a belief set from a set of alternatives outperform agents that do not do so. We also formally distinguish between the rational role of goals in belief selection and irrational wishful thinking.

Philosophical Explorations, 2008

Two conceptions of motivating reasons, i.e., the reasons for which we act, can be found in the literature: (i) the dominant 'psychological conception', which says that motivating reasons are an agent's believing something; and (ii) the 'non-psychological' conception, the minority view, which says that they are what the agent believes-his beliefs. In this paper I outline and defend a version of the second conception of motivating reasons. Similar conceptions of motivating reasons have been defended persuasively by a minority of philosophers recently. However, this minority position is still regarded as implausible or confused, mostly because it is not sufficiently well understood, or because it is thought to bring with it insuperable difficulties. Here I offer a detailed and distinctive version of that minority view-a version that, I think, overcomes the apparently insuperable difficulties associated with the minority view. I also offer an account of the relation between motivating reasons and the explanation of action.

F1000Research, 2016

Despite the long scholarly discourse in Western theology and philosophy on religion, spirituality, and faith, explanations of what a belief and what believing is are still lacking. Recently, cognitive neuroscience research addressed the human capacity of believing. We present evidence suggesting that believing is a human brain function which results in probabilistic representations with attributes of personal meaning and value and thereby guides individuals’ behavior. We propose that the same mental processes operating on narratives and rituals constitute belief systems in individuals and social groups. Our theoretical model of believing is suited to account for secular and non-secular belief formation.

Cognitive Psychology, 2005

Human learning may depend upon domain specialized mechanisms. A plausible example is rapid, early learning about the thoughts and feelings of other people. A major achievement in this domain, at about age four in the typically developing child, is the ability to solve problems in which the child attributes false beliefs to other people and predicts their actions. The main focus of theorizing has been why 3-year-olds fail, and only recently have there been any models of how success is achieved in false-belief tasks. Leslie and Polizzi (Inhibitory processing in the false-belief task: Two conjectures. Developmental Science, 1, 247-254, 1998) proposed two competing models of success, which are the focus of the current paper. The models assume that belief-desire reasoning is a process which selects a content for an agentÕs belief and an action for the agentÕs desire. In false belief tasks, the theory of mind mechanism (ToMM) provides plausible candidate belief contents, among which will be a Ôtrue-belief.Õ A second process reviews these candidates and by default will select the true-belief content for attribution. To succeed in a false-belief task, the default content must be inhibited so that attention shifts to another candidate belief. In traditional false-belief tasks, the protagonistÕs desire is to approach an object. Here we make use of tasks in which the protagonist has a desire to avoid an object, about which she has a false-belief. Children find such tasks much more difficult than traditional tasks. Our models explain the additional difficulty by assuming that predicting action from an avoidance desire also requires an inhibition. The two processing models differ in the way that belief and desire inhibitory processes combine to achieve successful action prediction. In six experiments we obtain evidence favoring one model, in which parallel inhibitory

Behavioural Public Policy

People's risk estimates often do not align with the evidence available to them. In particular, people tend to discount bad news (such as evidence suggesting their risk of being involved in a car accident is higher than they thought) as compared to good news (evidence suggesting it is lower) – this is known as the belief update bias. It has been assumed that individuals use motivated reasoning to rationalise away unwanted evidence (e.g., “I am a safe driver, thus these statistics do not apply to me”). However, whether reasoning is required to discount bad news has not been tested directly. Here, we restrict cognitive resources using a cognitive load (Experiment 1) and a time restriction manipulation (Experiment 3) and find that while these manipulations diminish learning in general, they do not diminish the bias. Furthermore, we also show that the relative neglect of bad news happens the moment new evidence is presented, not when participants are subsequently prompted to state th...

Rivista di Filosofia, 2019

Belief is an epistemic state often contrasted with other epistemic states. The contrast varies depending on the kind of states one is interested in. If the relation with language is at stake, beliefs are compared with sub-doxastic states, implicit beliefs, dispositional beliefs or proto-thoughts. If the relation with certainty is at stake, we have credences, assents or opinions. After reviewing these concepts and the related theories, I argue that we need a multi-faceted and dispositional view of beliefs, one that incorporates four different parameters, as I call them. These are the degree of inferentially integration, consciousness of its content, the order of the belief and its degree of certainty. All of these parameters have been used by one author or the other, but none has used them all. However, they are compatible with each other and make a satisfactory explanatory and a metaphysically sound set.

2015

Bromwich (2010) argues that a belief is motivationally efficacious in that, other things being equal, it disposes an agent to answer a question in accordance with that belief. I reply that what we are disposed to do is largely determined by our genes, whereas what we believe is largely determined by stimuli from the environment. We have a standing and default disposition to answer questions honestly, ceteris paribus, even before we are exposed to environmental stimuli. Since this standing and default disposition is innate, and our beliefs have their source in environmental stimuli, our beliefs cannot be the source of the disposition. Moreover, a recent finding in neuroscience suggests that motivation is extrinsic to belief.

Teorema

We explore the possibility of characterizing belief wholly in terms of its first-order functional role, its input (evidence) and output (further beliefs and actions), by addressing some common challenges to the view. One challenge concerns the fact that not all belief is evidence-sensitive. In response to this, normativists and teleo-functionalists have concluded that something over and above functional role is needed, a norm or a telos. We argue that both allow for implausibly much divergence between belief and evidence. Others have suggested that belief should be saved as the evidence-sensitive attitude, by making it share its motivational role with an hitherto unrecognized state: alief. We argue that the appeal to alief faces a dilemma: Either explanation of intentional action by means of alief is a species of intentional explanation, in which case it becomes hard to distinguish alief from (irrational) belief, or alief is sufficiently different from belief, but then neither the e...

Synthese, 2021

Some propositions are not likely to be true overall, but are likely to be true if you believe them. Appealing to the platitude that belief aims at truth, it has become increasingly popular to defend the view that such propositions are epistemically rational to believe. However, I argue that this view runs into trouble when we consider the connection between what's epistemically rational to believe and what's practically rational to do. I conclude by discussing how rejecting the view bears on three other epistemological issues. First, we're able to uncover a flaw in a common argument for permissivism. Second, we can generate a problem for prominent versions of epistemic consequentialism. Finally, we can better understand the connection between epistemic rationality and truth: epistemic rationality is a guide to true propositions rather than true beliefs.