Strong Belief is Ordinary

Abstract

In an influential recent paper, Hawthorne, Rothschild, and Spectre (“HRS”) argue that belief is weak. More precisely: they argue that the referent of believe in ordinary language is much weaker than epistemologists usually suppose; that one needs very little evidence to be entitled to believe a proposition in this sense; and that the referent of believe in ordinary language just is the ordinary concept of belief. I argue here to the contrary. HRS identify two alleged tests of weakness – the neg-raising and weak upper bounds tests, as I call them – which they claim believe and think pass. But I identify several other expressions in ordinary English for attributing belief, all of which fail both tests. Therefore, even if HRS are correct that believe and think refer to a weak attitude, it does not follow that the ordinary concept of belief is weak. I conclude by raising some problems for the accounts of belief as guessing, building on HRS's arguments, due to Kevin Dorst, Matt Mandelkern, and Ben Holguín.

Memory belief is weak

“…The current debate hinges heavily on the analysis of linguistic intuitions and linguistic phenomena, e.g., “neg‐raising” and “weak upper bounds” (see Clarke, 2022). The received wisdom seems to be that in analysing the philosophical characteristics of a notion (such as “believes”), our linguistic verdicts on the felicitousness of certain kinds of expressions involving the notion serve as appropriate evidence.…”