by Michael Neal
Accepted for presentation at:
1. The 37th Annual Meeting of the Society for Philosophy and Psychology, Université du Québec à Montréal, Montréal, Canada, July 2011. Keynote Speaker: Ned Block (New York University).
2. Long Island Philosophical Society, St. Francis College (Brooklyn, NY), April 2011.
Tamar Gendler suggests that there exists a mental state, which she calls alief, that does a better job of explaining... more
Tamar Gendler suggests that there exists a mental state, which she calls alief, that does a better job of explaining belief-behavior discord in humans than does the notion of belief. I
follow the lead of Eric Mandelbaum and provide reasons for doubting that aliefs are sufficiently different than beliefs. On account of this, I propose that the notion of alief is unnecessary for explaining belief-behavior discord in humans. Next, I show that Gendler’s claims about the reality-sensitive nature of alief states leaves open the possibility of attributing mutually exclusive properties to alief states. So, even if aliefs can be shown to be sufficiently different from beliefs and, therefore, potentially have more explanatory power than beliefs, Gendler’s notion of alief will still suffer from an internal inconsistency. Finally, if in order to avoid the charge of inconsistency I raise, Gendler were to suggest that alief states aren’t reality-sensitive and are, therefore, more like imagination states than belief states, she will still be left with the seemingly impossible task of explaining how alief states are sufficiently different from imagination states.
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