| Evans, D. (2001). Emotion: A very short introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press. |
 
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| Added by: Mark Grimshaw-Aagaard 28/05/2011, 07:52 |
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| Re John Searle's thought experiment, the Chinese Room. A man in a room has a set of rules for responding to Chinese inscriptions that are given to him. Based on these responses, people outside the room believe the man knows the Chinese language. He doesn't though. Searle argues a computer is like this -- it only interprets, it never knows therefore could never become conscious. |
| Szabó Gendler, T. (2010). Intuition, imagination, & philosophical methodology. Oxford: Oxford University Press. |
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| Last edited by: Mark Grimshaw-Aagaard 21/10/2023, 06:42 |
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| "...imaginative content is taken to be governed by the same sort of restrictions that govern believed content" -- mirroring in pretense-episodes. |
| Belief is a "receptive attitude whereas pretense is a productive attitude". In the former, the person responds "to something in the world itself" whereas, in the latter, the person projects "something onto the world". |
| "imagination is distinct from belief on the one hand and from mere supposition on te other. It is this which explains both our general capacity to imagine morally deviant situations and our general unwillingness to do so." |
| Dealing with imaginative contagion: "cases where merely imagining or pretending that P has effects that we would expect only perceiving or believing that P to have." |
"A paradigmatic alief is a mental state with associatively linked content that is representational, affective and behavioral, and that is activated--consciously or non-consciously--by features of the subject's internal or ambient environment. Aliefs may be either occurrent or dispositional."
Examples SG gives include refusing to eat fudge shaped like dog faeces (even though you believe it to be be perfectly delicious), fear of walking on glass over a dangerous drop (even though you believe the glass to be safe), refusal to wear the shirt of someone you hate (even though, freshly laundered, you believe it to be clean).
Alief is often, (not always) discordant with belief. |
| "if alief drives behavior in belief-discordant cases, it is likely that it drives behavior in belief-concordant cases as well. Belief plays an inportant role in the ultimate regulation of behavior. But it plays a far smaller role in moment-by-moment management than philosophical tradition has tended to stress." |
| "Beliefs change in response to changes in evidence; aliefs change in responses to changes in habit. If new evidence won't cause you to change your behavior in response to an apparent stimulus, then your reaction is due to alief rather than belief." |
| "The assumption that behavior invariably indicates belief arises from aliefs that are mistaken for beliefs." |
"Aliefs activate behavioral propensities. So (in conjunction with desire) do beliefs (and their teleofunctional analogues)."
Sometimes these propensities coincide (norm-concordant aliefs may govern the behavioural tendencies); sometimes they are at odds with each other (norm-discordant aliefs govern the behaviour). |
Examples of belief-bias in selection tasks and matching-bias.
Matching-bias -- in a selection task, if items available for selection are given in the statement to be tested, subjects will invariably pick them even if the reasoning is invalid.
There are examples of context-based effects too. |
| Successful imagination may be incomplete or incoherent -- exhibit disparity. If incomplete, even in pretense, some features may be unspecified or unspecifiable. If incoherent, some features are logically or conceptually incompatible. The illusion that the pretense is complete and coherent comes "from imaginative reliance on a picture that treats imagining as just like belief, only off-line, and from a picture of prop-based pretense that treats principles of generation as complete, uniform mappings from one realm to another." (p.150). |
An alief can actually occur when a cluster of dispositions to entertain such aliefs are activated (occurrent alief). A dispositional alief is the propensity for an occurrent alief to take place were the right conditions or external stimulus to occur.
A subject alieves with representational-affective-behavioural content. S alieves R-A-B. SG terms this a four-place relation: "[subject], dog-shit, disgusting, refuse-to-eat" (p.262). SG suggest it can also be, and might be better, described as two-place: "S (occurrently) alieves R when S's R-related associations are activated and thereby rendered cognitively, affectively, and
behaviorally salient" (p.265). |
| Aliefs tend to reveal themselves to us precisely when they are discordant with beliefs. |
Alief differs from belief thus:
1. Belief and imagination are propositional.
2. belief and imagination involve acceptance.
3. Alief may be activated non-consciously.
4. Alief may be activated at will.
5. I believe that P and imagine that non-P "violates no norms" (p.271). I believe that P and alieve that non-P -- "something is amiss" (p.271). Norms of cognitive-behavioural coherence are violated.
6. Belief is reality-sensitive, imagination is reality-insensitive. Alief is neither. |
