The Possibility of Practical Reason, 2nd Edition

Reasons for studying truth-directedness

One reason, first pointed out by Bernard Williams, is that belief’s aiming at the truth enables us to explain the difficulty of believing at will.[2] The explanation is that believing a proposition at will would entail believing it without regard to whether it was true, and hence without the aim requisite to its being a belief.

Another reason for taking an interest in the truth-directedness of belief is that it may explain the phenomenon that has generally come to be known as the normativity of content. It may even explain the phenomenon away.

The phenomenon to be explained in this case is that the attribution of propositional content to a thought seems to yield normative consequences, on purely conceptual grounds. To say of a thought that it has the content that snow is white, for example, seems to imply that one ought to have the thought only if snow is white; and this normative consequence seems to follow immediately from the very concept of a thought’s possessing such a content. The normative force inherent in content attributions has struck some philosophers as evidence against their being analyzable in naturalistic terms or assimilable into the natural sciences.[3]

But the normative implications claimed here for content attributions are not quite right. It isn’t true that one ought to have the thought that snow is white only if snow is white; or, at least, it isn’t true on the most inclusive interpretation of the phrase ‘to have a thought’. If one can have a thought merely by entertaining it, without belief, then having the thought that snow is white would be perfectly in order even if one were up to one’s neck in black snow. What one would be obliged to avoid, if snow weren’t white, is not the mere thought of snow’s being white but rather the belief with that content. And one would be obliged to avoid the belief because, given its nature as a belief, it would aim at being true but, given its content, would fall short of this aim on account of snow’s not being white. The belief would be wrong or incorrect in the sense that it would be a failure in relation to its own aim.

The normativity previously attributed to content thus turns out to arise from the combination of content plus belief. We may even be tempted to say that the normativity is due entirely to the truth-directedness of belief and not at all to the nature of content. All that follows from a thought’s having the content “snow is white” is that the thought is true if and only if snow is white. Whether the thought ought or ought not to be held in a world containing black snow depends on whether it is to be held in a way that aims at the truth—that is, as an object of belief.

The result appears to be that in order to naturalize the normativity associated with content, we need only naturalize the truth-directedness of belief. If it can be a natural or scientific fact that belief aims to be true, then it can also be a natural or scientific fact that false beliefs are wrong or incorrect, which is the fact underlying the normativity generally attributed to content.[4] The hope of naturalizing that normativity is thus a reason for being interested in how belief aims at the truth.

A third reason for taking an interest in the truth-directedness of belief is that it may help us to understand theoretical reasoning and perhaps, by analogy, practical reasoning as well. Theoretical reasoning justifies a belief by adducing considerations that indicate it to be true. And a belief can be justified by indications of its truth because being true is what would make it successful or correct, given that being true is its aim as a belief. Hence the truth-directedness of belief is what accounts for the justificatory force of theoretical reasoning.

I have argued on other occasions that practical reasoning must be understood along similar lines.[5] If there is to be a mode of reasoning that justifies action, as theoretical reasoning justifies belief, then there must be a criterion of correctness or success in relation to which action can be justified, just as there is a criterion of correctness or success for belief. If there’s nothing that constitutes success for action as such, in the way that truth constitutes success for belief, then practical conclusions will not be supported by considerations with the normative force of justification or reasoning.

I am not going to defend this argument here—nor either of the preceding arguments, for that matter. My goal in this chapter is not to prove that the truth-directedness of belief can help us to understand the difficulty of believing at will, or the normativity generally attributed to content, or the form of practical reasoning. I have introduced these topics only as ulterior reasons for being interested in the phenomenon that I want to discuss.

Summary

I’ll begin the next section by teasing apart the multiple relations that belief bears to the truth, setting aside those relations which do not amount to belief’s having the truth as its aim. I will argue that the sense in which belief aims at the truth is not that it involves believing a proposition to be true; nor that it involves regarding a proposition as true; but rather that it involves so regarding a proposition with a particular aim. Just as a proposition is assumed by being regarded as true for the sake of argument or testing, so a proposition is believed by being regarded as true for the sake of something else. That “something else”—the aim with which a proposition must be regarded as true in order to be believed—is the aim of getting its truth-value right, by regarding it as true only if it really is. However, I will briefly postpone defining what it is to regard a proposition as true. Instead, I’ll close the section by identifying various ways in which this subdoxastic attitude of acceptance, as I’ll call it, can satisfy the concept of having an aim, or how its aim can be realized in the subject’s psychology.

At the start of the third section, I’ll define regarding-as-true as the attitude that plays a particular motivational role—indeed, the role that is traditionally thought to be definitive of belief. I will thus commit myself to the claim that this motivational role, far from being definitive of belief, is definitive instead of the subdoxastic attitude of acceptance, which is involved in assuming, as I’ve just mentioned, as well as other cognitive attitudes, such as imagining. I’ll devote most of this section to arguing that the attitude of imagining does indeed play this motivational role. My conclusion will be that belief must be characterized, not just as the attitude having the motivational role, but rather as a truth-directed species of that attitude: to believe a proposition is to regard it as true with the aim of thereby accepting a truth. The final section will deal with a few objections to this conclusion.

What truth-directedness isn’t: believing-true

For example, every instance of believing is an instance of believing something to be true, and this relation to the truth is sometimes confused with truth-directedness.[6] But in bearing this particular relation to the truth, belief is just like any other propositional attitude, since wishing entails wishing something to be true, hoping entails hoping something to be true, desiring entails desiring something to be true, and so on. Hence the fact that believing entails believing-true doesn’t set belief apart from other attitudes, as truth-directedness is supposed to do.[7]

One might take exception to the last item on the foregoing list: maybe we can simply desire an object, without desiring anything to be true. Similarly, one might claim that we can simply imagine an object, without imagining anything to be true.[8] One might then draw a contrast with belief by pointing out that, although there are objects that we believe without believing them to be true (as when we believe a person, for example), we still cannot believe them unless there is something that we believe to be true (such as something the person has told us).

Yet the contrast that one would have drawn, in that case, is a contrast between belief and attitudes that are thought to have non-propositional instances. That is, one would have claimed that there are instances of desiring and imagining that don’t entail desiring or imagining that p, for some proposition p, whereas there cannot be non-propositional instances of believing. In saying that believing entails believing-true, one would have said no more than that belief must have a propositional object, and so one still wouldn’t have said anything that distinguished believing from propositional instances of desiring and imagining. For in cases of desiring or imagining that p, the proposition p is desired or imagined to be true, just as a proposition is believed to be true whenever it is believed.

The point is that truth-directedness is supposed to distinguish belief from other attitudes generally, and not just from their non-propositional instances. That believing entails believing-true cannot be what is meant, then, by the observation that belief aims at the truth.

What truth-directedness isn’t: regarding-as-true

We can make some progress toward distinguishing belief from other attitudes by noting that the similarity between the expressions ‘believing to be true’ and ‘desiring to be true’ conceals an underlying difference. Believing a proposition to be true entails regarding it as something that is true, as a truth already in being; whereas desiring a proposition to be true entails regarding it as something to be made true, as a truth-to-be. So in ‘believing to be true’, the infinitive ‘to be true’ takes the place of what would be, in direct speech, a predication of truth in the indicative mood; whereas in ‘desiring to be true’, the infinitive takes the place of what would be a predication of truth in the optative or gerundive.

This distinction is so subtle as to seem like a quirk of grammar rather than evidence of a genuine difference between desire and belief. We must therefore try to flesh out the distinction.

One way not to flesh it out is by incorporating indicative and optative predications of truth into the propositional objects of these attitudes. Believing that p entails believing p to be true, but it does not involve an attitude toward the proposition ‘p is true’; it involves only an attitude toward the proposition p. If it did involve an attitude toward the proposition ‘p is true’, then the latter attitude would have to be a belief: what other attitude toward ‘p is true’ could constitute believing p to be true? The result would be a problematic regress.[9] The belief that p would involve a belief that p is true, which would have to involve a belief that ‘p is true’ is true, and so on, ad infinitum. Surely, we should say that believing p to be true involves, not an attitude toward the proposition ‘p is true’, but only an attitude toward p itself, albeit an attitude toward it as true.

From the fact that believing entails believing-true, we have now derived two features of belief: belief always takes a propositional object, and it regards that object as true. Unfortunately, these two features do not take us very far toward distinguishing belief from the other attitudes.

One respect in which they fall short is that talk of regarding a proposition as true is no more informative the other expressions with which we’re already dissatisfied. What is it to regard a proposition as true?

In past discussions, I have refused to answer this question, or I have given a non-answer.[10] My non-answer has been that a complete theory of belief will owe us an account of what it is to regard a proposition as true, but that different theories will discharge this obligation differently, offering alternative accounts among which I can reasonably wish to be neutral. I have simply insisted that believing, whatever it turns out to be, will have to involve regarding a proposition as true, whatever that turns out to be.

Yet there is another respect in which we have fallen short of distinguishing belief from the other attitudes. Whatever regarding-as-true turns out to be, it will still be involved in more than believing, since it will be involved, for example, in supposing or assuming, and in propositional imagining as well.[11] These attitudes are cognitive, like belief, rather than conative, like desire. To imagine that p is to regard p as describing how things are, not as prescribing how they should be.[12] Imagining is therefore a way of regarding a proposition as true—or, to introduce a term, a way of accepting a proposition.[13] The question remains how belief differs from imagining and the other cognitive attitudes.

What truth-directedness is

But here, at last, is the payoff to our strategy of asking what is distinctive about belief: we have found the role of truth-directedness. Differences among the cognitive attitudes appear to consist in the aim with which they accept a proposition, or regard it as true. Assuming, for example, involves accepting a proposition for the sake of argument, or for some similar purpose, but it doesn’t involve believing the proposition. When a mathematician says, “Suppose that √2 is rational,” he is not inviting us to believe it, but he is inviting us to take an attitude that’s more like a belief than it is like a desire. I suggest that this attitude is like a belief because it is an acceptance, and that it is unlike a belief because it is acceptance for the sake of argument, whereas belief is acceptance for the sake of something else.

What else could we accept a proposition for? What purposes or aims could acceptance have? Well, imagining involves regarding a proposition as true irrespective of whether it is true—regarding it as true, that is, without trying to get its truth-value right. Perhaps, then, believing involves regarding a proposition as true with the aim of so regarding it only if it really is.[14] Thus, to believe a proposition is to accept it with the aim of thereby accepting a truth.[15]

The result is a fairly modest conception of how belief aims at the truth. This conception is modest, to begin with, because it avoids burdening belief with some of the more ambitious aims that might be suggested by talk of truth-directedness.

Perhaps the most ambitious aim suggested by such talk would be the aim of believing as many truths as possible. This aim would be irrational, of course, since the world is teeming with truths, most of which are too trivial to be worth believing. But there are qualified versions of this aim that might not be irrational, such as the aim of believing as many as possible of those truths which are useful or interesting. Also rational, perhaps, would be the aim of maximizing the proportion of truths to falsehoods among one’s beliefs.

Yet none of these aims would answer to what I have in mind when postulating an aim that distinguishes belief from other cognitive attitudes. What I have in mind is an aim that differentiates believing a particular proposition from other ways of regarding that proposition as true, such as imagining or supposing it. I thus have in mind an aim with which a particular proposition can be accepted, such that its being accepted with that aim constitutes its being believed. And one’s acceptance of a proposition can amount to a belief without being part of any global epistemological project of accumulating true beliefs.[16]

What distinguishes believing a proposition from imagining or supposing it is a more narrow and immediate aim—the aim of getting the truth-value of that particular proposition right, by regarding the proposition as true only if it really is. Belief is the attitude of accepting a proposition with the aim of thereby accepting a truth, but not necessarily with any designs on truths in general, or Truth in the abstract.

How is the aim realized?

A further note of modesty in this conception of belief is that it leaves open how the aim of belief is realized. It allows but does not require the aim of belief to be an aim on the part of the believer; and it allows but does not require the aim of belief to admit of a naturalistic reduction. The conception merely requires that belief aim at the truth in some way or other, there being a broad spectrum of ways in which it might do so.[17]

At one end of the spectrum is the case in which a person intentionally aims a belief at the truth, by forming it in an act of judgment. He entertains a question of the form ‘p or not p?’, wanting to accept whichever disjunct is true; to that end he accepts one or the other proposition, as indicated by evidence or argument; and he continues to accept it only so long as he receives no evidence or argument impugning its truth. The resulting cognition qualifies as a belief because of the intention with which it is formed and subsequently maintained by the believer, and because of the way in which that intention regulates its formation and maintenance.[18]

A person can also aim cognitions at the truth without necessarily framing intentions about them. Suppose that one part of the person—call it a cognitive system—regulates some of his cognitions in ways designed to ensure that they are true, by forming, revising, and extinguishing them in response to evidence and argument. Regulating these cognitions for truth may be a function for which the system was designed by natural selection, or by education and training, or by a combination of the two.[19] In any case, the system carries out this function more or less automatically, without relying on the subject’s intentions for initiative or guidance. Even so, the subject may identify with this system, by endorsing it or fostering it or doing something else that makes its operations attributable to him, in the manner made familiar by Harry Frankfurt.[20] Its workings may then count as his doings, so that he can be said to have regulated the resulting cognitions, and thus to have aimed them at the truth.

At the far end of the spectrum, we can imagine a subject who is dissociated from the workings of this cognitive system, also in Frankfurt’s sense: he is oblivious to it, or he disapproves of it, wishes it would stop, hopes it will fail, either in general or on a particular occasion. In that case, the resulting cognitions may not qualify as having been regulated by him. But they will still have been regulated for truth, and hence aimed at the truth, albeit by a part of him with which he doesn’t identify. They will still be attempts at accepting truths, even though they will be attempts on the part of a cognitive system rather than the person as a whole. As cognitions aimed at the truth, they will still qualify as beliefs, according to my conception.[21] All of the cases in this spectrum can be described as follows. An acceptance has the aim of being the acceptance of a truth when it is regulated, either by the subject’s intentions or by some other mechanisms, in ways designed to ensure that it is true.[22]

Finally, my conception of belief is modest in that it doesn’t require belief to be governed by truth-seeking mechanisms alone. There are probably psychological mechanisms that cause, and are designed to cause, beliefs that happen to diverge from the truth. Evolution or education may have given us dispositions to err on the side of caution in perceiving predators, to overestimate our own popularity, and so on.[23] But my thesis is not that belief is completely shielded from mechanisms that tend to make it false; my thesis is that belief is necessarily subject to mechanisms designed to make it true.

In most cases, the latter mechanisms retain some influence, despite interference from the former. Arguments can dispel our belief that there is a predator in the shadows, though they may not dispel the visual appearance. Evidence can undermine our belief in our own popularity, though perhaps not an egotistical phantasy to the same effect. Unlike an optical illusion or a phantasy, a biased belief usually responds to indications of the truth, however imperfectly.

Even when a belief is prevented from responding to corrective influences, the fact remains that its regulative mechanisms are being prevented from doing what they were designed to do. A phantasy and a biased belief are alike in that they fail to track the truth; but the phantasy has no tendency to track the truth at all, whereas a biased belief is diverted from the truth; and something can be diverted from the truth only against the background of a tendency to track it. To say that belief aims at the truth isn’t to say that it can never be misled; on the contrary, it’s to say that belief can be misled: what can’t be misled are phantasies.

Behavior motivated by imagining: make-believe

As I see it, the desire-belief explanation of pretending makes the child out to be depressingly un-childlike. According to this explanation, the child keeps a firm grip on reality while mounting an appearance conceived as such. He puts on an act—an elephant act—conceived by him as a means of impersonating something that he is not. His subsequent pretending is a case of purposeful simulation, no different from an adult’s pretense.[26]

I call this explanation depressing because it denies that the child ever enters into the fiction of being something other than he is. In order to enter into the fiction, the child would have to act it out; and in order to act it out, I think, he would have to act out of imagining it, not out of a desire to represent it in action.[27] A child who was motivated by such a desire would remain securely outside the fiction, thinking about it as such—that is, as a fiction to be enacted. I’ll expand on this claim below; but first, let me mention some further drawbacks of the desire-belief explanation of pretending.

One further drawback is that the desire-belief explanation fails to account for children’s ability to invent and to understand novel ways of pretending. An especially imaginative child may come up with his own way of pretending to be an elephant, but not by considering which behaviors would be most suitable to an elephant act, as if he were an impressionist honing some zoological schtick. Rather, the child’s method is to imagine being an elephant—weighing a ton, walking on stumpy legs, carrying floppy ears—and then to wait and see how he is disposed to behave.[28]

Similarly, this child’s playmates do not appreciate his inventions by recognizing that they are especially similar to the behavior of real elephants, and hence good choices for an aspiring elephant-impersonator. On the contrary, success at pretending to be an elephant need not involve behavior that is realistically elephant-like at all. What it requires is rather behavior that’s expressive of elephant-mindedness—expressive, that is, of vividly imagining that one is an elephant.

Finally, I think that the present explanation is wrong developmentally, in that it credits the child with a precocious mastery of the distinction between fact and fiction. According to this explanation, pretending entails deliberately producing a false appearance. This explanation should lead us to expect adults to be even better than children at playing pretend: adults are better than children at acting—and lying—so why are they worse at pretending? The answer, I think, is that pretending isn’t a matter of deliberately producing a false appearance; it’s a matter of expressing one’s imagination, an activity to which mastery of the distinction between fact and fiction is actually a hindrance, not a help.

I have said that a child’s imagining that he is an elephant disposes him to behave as would be desirable if he were an elephant. Yet if imagining is to have a motivational force like that of belief, then it ought to work in concert with an attitude that has a motivational force like that of desire. The behavior to which someone is disposed by accepting p is behavior that, if p were true, would be desirable in the sense of promoting the satisfaction of his actual desires. Where does desire fit in to my account of pretending?

Note, to begin with, that imagining myself to be an elephant entails other, more specific bits of imagining: here is my trunk, there is my tail, and this—say, this chair—is a tree, or my elephant baby, or a pail of water, or whatever.[29] Within the fiction of being an elephant, I then have various desires with respect to my elephant-world—desires to rub my head against the tree, to drink out of the pail, to nurse my baby, or whatever. And my fictional behavior then expresses my fictional desires: I elephant-do as I elephant-want.

The question is what conation in the real world motivates the behavior that is fictionally motivated by these desires. What conative attitude in me, the child, makes me behave as if I’m an elephant who wants to drink from a pail with his trunk? The desire-belief explanation would be that the actual motive is a desire to simulate the fictional motive—in this case, a desire to act as if I’m an elephant who wants to drink from a pail. According to this explanation, I have no conations with respect to the fictional pail; I have only conations with respect to the fiction as such, that it be a fiction in which there is a conation with respect to the pail.

As noted above, this explanation excludes me from my own imaginary world. It explains how I can be motivated to put things into my fiction, including fictional motives, but not how I can act out my fiction, in the sense of acting out of my fictional motives. I can’t act out of my fictional motives at all, according to this explanation, because they are merely fictional: they don’t exist.

An explanation that admitted me into my fictional world would have to allow me real motives toward objects and events in that world: it would have to allow me elephant-desires and elephant-beliefs. In such an explanation, my motivating cognition would not be the thought “Here is how to behave as if this chair were a pail of water”; my motivating cognition would be the thought “Here is a pail of water.” And my motivating conation would be, not “Let me behave as if I wanted to drink,” but rather “Let me drink.” Only by acting out of such motives, framed from the elephant’s point-of-view, could I enter into the fiction of being an elephant. So long as I acted out of motives framed from the child’s point-of-view, I would remain on the outside of the fiction, looking in.

Consider again the motivating thought “Here is a pail of water,” described above as an elephant-belief. This thought is not actually a belief: I cannot believe something to be a pail of water if I know that it is a chair. But the cognition can properly be described as an elephant-belief, because I imagine it to be a belief on my part as an elephant.[30]

Part of what I imagine in thinking “I am an elephant” is that I am an elephant reflecting on what he is rather than a child imagining himself to be what he isn’t. Similarly, part of what I imagine with “Here is a pail of water” is that I am an elephant recognizing a pail of water rather than a child re-imagining a chair. I thus imagine my thought “Here is a pail of water” to be a belief.

My imagining this thought to be a belief helps explain how its motivational force enables me to enter into the fiction. When my imagining “Here is a pail of water” moves me to behave toward the chair as would be desirable toward a pail of water, it operates as it would if it were a belief, as I imagine it to be. I therefore act out of motives like the ones that I imagine myself to have. That’s why acting out of my imaginings is a way of entering into them: I am motivated as if from within the point-of-view that I imagine occupying.

This phenomenon is summed up by the description of my activity as make-believe. I cannot make myself believe that a chair is a pail of water. But I can imagine that a chair is a pail of water, and that I am thereby believing it to be one; and my imagining can then motivationally simulate its own imagined role, so that it functions as a mock-belief. In the motivational grip of this mock-belief, I am gripped as if by the belief that I imagine having as an elephant, and so I am inside the fiction, acting it out.[31]

The previous question, about the role of conations, can now be rephrased as follows. If my imagining “Here is a pail of water” serves as a mock-belief, is there something that serves as the corresponding mock-desire? Could there be an actual state of mind that I imagine to be the desire “Let me drink”?

What serves as this mock-desire could not actually be a desire, for reasons similar to those for which my elephant-belief cannot actually be a belief. Just as I cannot believe something to be a pail of water if I know that it is a chair; so, too, I cannot desire to drink from what I know to be a chair. I usually cannot desire things that are patently unattainable, any more than I can believe things that are patently false. If I think that something cannot come about through efforts of mine, then the most I can do is hope for it; and if I think that it cannot come about at all, then the most I can do with respect to it is wish.[32]

In the present case, what is imagined to be an elephant’s desire for an attainable drink must in reality be a child’s conation toward a drink known to be unattainable. And if I am to have a conation toward an admittedly unattainable drink, then it must be a wish rather than a desire, just as my cognition of the drink must be an instance of imagining rather than belief. What is imagined to be my elephant-desire for a drink must therefore be a wish. Of course, it isn’t an earnest or heartfelt wish; it’s a faint and ephemeral wish of the sort that we might ordinarily call a whim. Imagining that I am an elephant, I am struck with the whim of taking a drink.[33]

A motivational explanation of make-believe has now emerged along the following lines. What moves me to dangle my arm between my nose and the seat of a chair is, on the one hand, imagining that this is the way to drink from a pail of water with my trunk; and, on the other hand, wishing to drink from a pail of water with my trunk. In the fiction that I am an elephant, my imagining and wishing are a belief and desire, moving me to drink from the pail. When my imagining and wishing move me to behave as if drinking, they fulfill the motivational role of the belief and desire that they are imagined to be, with the result that I enact my imagined role as an elephant.[34]

This motivational explanation of make-believe implies that the attitudes of imagining that p and believing that p are alike in disposing the subject to behave in ways that would satisfy his conations if they were true. It therefore supports my thesis that the motivational role of belief is not sufficient to distinguish it from other cognitive attitudes. To represent a proposition in a way that confers a disposition to behave as if it were true is simply to regard the proposition as true—which is to have a cognition of it, but not necessarily a belief.

One might think that my explanation of make-believe already suggests a simpler way of distinguishing belief from imagination. The explanation suggests that belief is the attitude that motivates in conjunction with desire, whereas imagining is the attitude that motivates in conjunction with wish. Perhaps, then, a belief disposes the subject to do what would satisfy his desires if it were true, whereas imagining disposes him to do what would satisfy his wishes.

A problem with this suggestion is that belief and imagining may not be so exclusive about the conations with which they combine to motivate behavior. I shall later be discussing cases in which imagining seems to motivate in conjunction with desire;[35] and there may also be cases in which belief motivates in conjunction with wish.[36] Furthermore, even if belief motivated solely in conjunction with desire, and imagining solely in conjunction with wish, the problem would remain how to distinguish the one kind of pair from the other. Attitude-pairs of both kinds dispose the subject to behave in ways that would promote the satisfaction of the one attitude under circumstances satisfying the other. Which pairs of such motives are the belief-desire pairs? If we try to fix the motivational characterization of belief by pairing belief and desire, we end up with an inadequate motivational characterization of belief-desire pairs.

My motivational explanation of make-believe gains support from the experience of adults who have difficulty joining wholeheartedly into this activity. Consider the adult who freezes when invited by a child to join the other elephants at the watering-hole. What this adult experiences is an inhibition, but it isn’t at bottom an inhibition against the requisite outward behavior. He could force himself to go through the outward motions of participating in the make-believe while still being inhibited from actually participating. The reason is that he could still be inhibited from acting out his imaginings, which is what make-believe requires.

As I suggested earlier, this inhibition is acquired on the way to adulthood, in the process of mastering the distinction between fact and fiction, or between fantasy and reality. I can now explain further how I conceive of that process.

Mastering the distinction between fantasy and reality requires that we learn to seek what we can actually obtain, and to seek it in ways by which we can actually obtain it. It therefore requires that we come to suppress some of our behavioral dispositions. We have to suppress our dispositions toward trying to make thoughts true, if they cannot be made true, or not by us; and we have to suppress our dispositions to behave as would be desirable if thoughts were true, if they aren’t actually true. Both sets of dispositions lead to behavior that’s unrealistic, either because it has unattainable ends in view or because it adopts ineffective means. We need a way of suppressing our dispositions toward such unrealistic behavior.

Our solution, I think, is first to segregate our realistic conations and cognitions from their unrealistic counterparts, and then to acquire an inhibition against the motivational force of the latter. Among the thoughts that we are disposed to make true—that is, among our conations—we delimit a subset whose members we are disposed to revise, discard, or at least reclassify if we cannot actually make them true. These reality-tested conations are our desires, which interact with one another in relative isolation from our mere hopes and wishes. Similarly, among the thoughts for which we have a disposition to behave as would be desirable if they were true—that is, among our cognitions—we delimit a subset whose members we are disposed to revise, discard, or at least reclassify if they aren’t actually true. These reality-tested cognitions are our beliefs, which interact with one another in relative isolation from our mere imaginings. Setting our desires and beliefs apart from our wishes and imaginings is the first step toward mastering the distinction between fact and fiction.

The second step, I suggest, is to develop an inhibition against the motivational force of the unrealistic attitudes.[37] This inhibition tends to prevent us from manifesting the dispositions to make-true that are associated with thoughts unregulated for practicability; and it tends to prevent us from manifesting the dispositions to behave-as-would-be-desirable-if-true that are associated with thoughts unregulated for truth. It tends to prevent us, in other words, from manifesting the motivational force of wishes and imaginings, so that we tend to act only on desires and beliefs. We thus learn to behave realistically, out of conations that have been constrained by what is attainable, and cognitions that have been constrained by what is the case.

Behavior motivated by imagining: talking to oneself

Our inhibition against being motivated by unrealistic attitudes is perhaps clearest when it is less than fully effective. One such case is the behavior that is ordinarily called talking to ourselves.[38] By “talking to ourselves”, I don’t mean literally addressing remarks to ourselves, as when we give ourselves a reminder or a scolding. The case that I have in mind is the one in which, though described as talking to ourselves, we are actually imagining ourselves in conversation with someone else, saying things that we wish we had said or could say. We walk down the street muttering at an invisible interlocutor, perhaps even shaking our head for emphasis; we sit at a red light and tick off our points on the steering wheel; or we sit at the computer alternately writing a sentence and reading it to an imagined audience.

This behavior eludes desire-belief explanation.[39] There is nothing that we both want to do and believe ourselves to be doing by talking to ourselves in this way. If someone stopped us on the street and asked “Why were you just muttering and shaking your head like that?”, we could not offer an answer that began with the words “I wanted. . . .” What could we have wanted? To walk along muttering and shaking our heads? Hardly.

An explanation of our behavior would have to begin “I imagined . . .” or “I wished . . . .” Indeed, the explanation would have to include both. Merely wishing to say something to someone wouldn’t have made us move our lips unless we had imagined ourselves in conversation with him. And merely imagining ourselves in conversation with someone wouldn’t have made us move our lips if there hadn’t been something that we wished that we had said or were saying.

The normal inhibition against acting on such unrealistic motives slackens when we talk to ourselves, but it doesn’t entirely let go. It is still evident in the fact that we talk under our breaths. If we entirely lost this inhibition, we would address our imagined interlocutors right out loud, and the sidewalks would be filled with a babble of half-conversations. The fact that we talk to ourselves under our breaths suggests that the inhibition against unrealistic motivation is selective: it prevents behavior that would be inconvenient or self-destructive, but it permits behavior that is harmless, despite being unrealistic.

Make-believe and talking to oneself differ in two circumstantial respects. The imagining involved in these activities is anchored differently in the surrounding conations and cognitions.

When I make believe that I am an elephant, my imagining is realistically motivated by a desire. I want to imagine that I am an elephant, and this desire moves me to imagine that I am an elephant, with the result that I do what I want.[40] My imagining is itself a mental action motivated by a desire for some result and a (trivial) belief about how to attain it. When I talk to myself, however, my imagining is motivated by the same wish that makes me move my lips. What moves me to imagine myself conversing with someone is, not wanting to imagine conversing with him, but rather wishing that I were conversing with him.[41] Hence my imagining is not a way of doing what I wish; indeed, it is a way of not doing what I wish, by imagining it instead. It is thus an unrealistic, wishful mental activity rather than a realistic, goal-pursuing action.[42]

Another difference between make-believe and talking to myself is that, in the former, my imagining is accompanied by beliefs about the same behavior. I imagine that I am dipping my trunk into a pail of water, but I also believe that I am dangling my arm over a chair. I know what I’m doing, even as I imagine myself doing something else. When talking to myself, however, I may have no beliefs at all about my verbal behavior. If someone really did stop me to ask why I was muttering and shaking my head, I would probably respond “Was I?”—or perhaps even “I was not!” As I imagined speaking with someone, I was completely oblivious to the fact that I was speaking into thin air.

In these two respects, talking to myself resembles some further, less familiar cases of motivation by imagining. I therefore turn to a new category of examples.

Behavior motivated by imagining: psychoanalytic examples

Freud draws our attention to a passage in which Goethe recounts his earliest childhood memory, as follows: he was throwing crockery out a window and watching it smash in the street, to the wicked delight of older boys.[43] Freud tells us that he thought nothing of the passage until a patient, who was unacquainted with the works of Goethe, remembered doing precisely the same thing. What was significant for Freud was that the patient dated his memory to the age at which he had also attacked his baby brother in the cradle. Freud hypothesized that in casting out the crockery, the child phantasized that he was casting out his baby brother.[44] His behavior was thus motivated, according to Freud, by a wish to be rid of his infant rival.[45] Freud then reads the same interpretation back into the passage quoted from Goethe, with the help of data about the birthdates of the poet’s younger siblings.

Elsewhere Freud tells of an obsessive patient who “used to repeat an especially noticeable and senseless obsessive action”:[46]

Freud explains this bizarre behavior as follows:

Freud concludes: “With her obsessive action, therefore, she was representing the wedding-night.”

The “problem” posed by this patient’s wedding night might just have been that her husband was impotent and that she wished he wasn’t. But other symptoms attributed to this patient suggest that the problem was more complicated: she couldn’t leave her husband without casting doubt on his potency, and she wished that she could. Her solution was to phantasize that the table-cloth was a bed-sheet, and that the stain on it enabled her to prove her husband’s potency, as a previous stain had not. Freud’s explanations for these behaviors make them seem somewhat like make-believe, and somewhat like talking to oneself, but also significantly different from both. They consequently provide us with a third set of circumstances in which imagining can motivate.

Freud’s hypothesis is not that the jealous child was playing a game of Throwing Out the Baby, or that the dissatisfied wife was playing a game of Show the Stain, though this image of symptomatic behavior as make-believe can perhaps serve as a first approximation to Freudian theory. One difference is that the phantasies that motivate these behaviors are themselves motivated by the associated wishes rather than a desire to phantasize. What leads the child to phantasize that he is throwing out the baby is, not that he wants to phantasize doing this, but rather that he wishes to do it. Similarly, the wife wishes that she could prove her husband’s potency; she doesn’t want to phantasize proving it.[47]

In this respect, symptomatic behavior is more like talking to oneself than it is like make-believe. The wife is like someone who wishes that some fateful conversation had gone differently, and who is thereby moved repeatedly to imagine its going differently and to speak her part in the re-imagined conversation under her breath. In this case, she wishes that her honeymoon had gone differently, and she is thereby moved to phantasize its going differently, though she is moved to play her part, as it were, right out loud.

The wife’s failure to mute her symptomatic behavior points to a respect in which it differs from talking to herself. In talking to herself, she would usually be aware of the conversation that she was imagining, though perhaps oblivious to moving her lips. In calling the housemaid to the table, however, she is aware of her overt behavior but oblivious to the phantasy that it enacts. Hence the pattern of awareness is reversed, and this reversal may explain why her behavior isn’t muted, like speech under the breath. Because she is unaware of acting out a phantasy, she cannot be restrained by any inhibition against unrealistic motivation.[48] She is aware only of calling the housemaid to the table, a behavior against which she has no inhibition.[49]

Behavior motivated by imagining: expressive behavior

Another kind of behavior that is often motivated by phantasy is behavior that’s expressive of emotion.[50] Hume points out that a person who is suspended at a great height in a metal cage may tremble with fear despite knowing that he is securely supported.[51] Hume’s point is that, although the person doesn’t believe that he’s going to fall, he does imagine falling, and imagination can arouse the same emotions as a belief.[52] Hume might have added that imagination can also motivate the same behavior as belief, since the person in this example may not only tremble but also cling to the bars of his cage, despite the knowledge that he is thereby gaining no additional safety.

When this person is lowered to the ground, he may rattle the bars of his cage in his impatience to get out. Does he believe that he can rattle his way out of the cage? Probably not. But his impatience will just consist in the wish that he could escape from the cage more quickly, and he will be imagining a quicker way out.

Why do you scratch your head when you’re puzzled, hold your head when you’re worried, or smack your head when you’ve made a dumb mistake?[53] Are these gestures a kind of sign-language? And then, if no one else is in the room, are you talking sign-language to yourself? No, you’re acting out corporeal images of your own thinking—your mind’s body-image, so to speak. You’re acting out the phantasy of your memory as a balky machine (or a balky child), your curiosity as an itch, or your worries as raising the pressure inside your skull. You wish that you could jar your memory (or punish it), scratch your curiosity, or contain your worries. Your behavior is thus motivated by wish and imagination rather than desire and belief.

Why do you cower in fear, hide your face in shame, clench your fists in anger, shake your head in regret? There are fantasies at work here, fantasies of shrinking, disappearing, fighting someone, or undoing something.[54] These behaviors, like many of the others mentioned in this section, have an expressive or communicative role, but they are not motivated by desires to express or communicate anything: when you’re afraid, you don’t cower out of a desire to express or communicate your fear.[55] Rather, I would say, the expressive or communicative role of these behaviors is what wins them some reprieve from the normal inhibition on unrealistic motivation. As an adult, you allow yourself to act out your fantasies insofar as doing so is expressive of your emotions.

Acting out fantasies may go beyond mere gestures. Consider, for example, why setting your watch ahead by a few minutes helps to prevent you from being late.[56] You know that your watch is a few minutes fast, and so looking at your watch never leads you to believe that you are a few minutes later than you actually are. What, then, makes you hurry? Surely, the answer is that you are motivated by a cognition other than a belief.

When you’re in the passenger seat of a speeding car, why do you press your foot to the floor? When you’re behind the wheel, why do you yell at the drivers of the cars in front of you? And why do you yell at the referees of a sporting event that you’re watching on television? I know of no satisfactory explanation of these behaviors in terms of desires and beliefs. I can of course concoct desire-belief explanations for them: desire-belief explanations are all too easy to concoct. But the resulting explanations aren’t satisfactory, because they make your behavior look realistically purposive, when it is in fact utterly fantastic.

Motivational differences between imagining and belief

I have now introduced several categories of examples that feature motivation by imagining. These examples show that imagining that p and believing that p are alike in disposing the subject to do what would satisfy his conations if p were true, other things being equal. Admittedly, the examples have also suggested that other things are rarely equal between cases of imagining and believing, and hence that the actual manifestations of these states are often different. But these differences do not undermine my thesis.

After all, belief itself cannot be characterized in terms of the behavior that it actually causes, since most beliefs cause no behavior at all, and the same belief will cause different behavior in different psychological contexts. Belief can be characterized only in terms of its disposition to produce behavior under various conditions, such as the presence of a relevant conation and the requisite motor skills, and the absence of conflicting motives and inhibitions. The examples suggest that imagining can be characterized as having the same conditional disposition as belief; the only differences have to do with the satisfaction of the associated conditions.

Thus, for example, most deliberate imagining is accompanied by countervailing beliefs, embodying the subject’s knowledge of the facts that he is imagining to be otherwise, such as his knowledge that an imagined pail of water is really a chair. These beliefs exert their own motivational force, which can be expected to compete with that of the subject’s imagination. Ordinary beliefs are not regularly accompanied by countervailing beliefs, and so their motivational force encounters less competition.[57] I have also hypothesized that the motivational force of imagining comes under an inhibition, whose effects can be detected, of example, in the way that we lower our voices when talking to ourselves. Both of these differences make imagining less likely to cause actual behavior.

Yet the conditional disposition to cause behavior is the same, and this disposition is all that figures in the nature of belief. The only essential difference between these states is that believing that p, unlike imagining that p, is regulated in ways designed to make it reflect the actual truth-value of p. That’s why truth-directedness is essential to the characterization of belief.

Why motivational accounts seem right

Motivational characterizations of belief seem to dispense with reference to truth-directedness only because they tacitly restrict themselves to realistic motivation, whose cognitive component is necessarily truth-directed. For example, we might define belief as the state that determines the means by which the subject is moved to pursue desired ends; and we might think that we had managed to distinguish beliefs from fantasies without alluding to whether they aimed at the truth. In fact, however, our definition would tacitly allude to truth-directedness under cover of other terms.

This definition would distinguish beliefs from fantasies only because the behaviors motivated by fantasies—make-believe, talking to oneself, yelling at the television—don’t count as instances of pursuing desired ends. Yet the reason why yelling at the television isn’t an instance of pursuing an end is, not that it doesn’t have envisioned results, but only that it acts out a fanciful conception of how to produce them, whereas the pursuit of an end is essentially behavior whose conduciveness to its envisioned results is taken seriously. To pursue something is, by definition, to implement a serious rather than fanciful idea of how it can be attained; and so the very concept of pursuit already implies motivation by a truth-directed cognition. Defining belief by its role in the pursuit of desired ends would thus conceal but not eliminate reference to its truth-directedness.

I suspect that all motivational characterizations of belief tacitly rely on truth-directedness in similar fashion. Consider, for another example, the notion that belief can be defined in terms of its role in determining what the subject is willing to bet on.[58] This notion is familiar to students of formal decision theory, which is sometimes interpreted as showing how to deduce a person’s relative degree of belief that p from his preferences among various possible gambles on p (among other propositions). This interpretation of the theory relies, I suspect, on the assumption that attaching payoffs to the truth or falsity of a proposition will induce the subject to get real about it, so to speak, in the sense that he will now respond with his best attempt at getting its truth-value right.[59] Hence the decision-theoretic characterization of belief conceals an assumption of truth-directedness.

Even as innocent a concept as ‘action’ can be used to smuggle truth-directedness into motivational characterizations of belief—in discussion among philosophers, at least. Philosophers tend to assume that every action involves the pursuit of some desired end, or that every action is performed for a purpose. This conception of action immediately excludes a behavior like yelling at the referees on television, which the agent does for no purpose. All the agent has in this case is a wish, which he only imagines that he is fulfilling; and a wish doesn’t lend his behavior any purpose, because a purpose must be something that’s realistically pursued.

If we conceive of action as necessarily having a purpose, then we can define belief by its role in motivating action, but only because our concept of action already requires it to be realistically motivated. Properly understood, then, motivational characterizations of belief tend to confirm rather than refute the thesis that belief aims at the truth.

How motivational accounts mislead

Ideally, conceiving of action as necessarily having a purpose should lead philosophers to withhold the term from unrealistically motivated behavior. In practice, however, it sometimes leads them to see, or to think they see, realistic purposes where none exist. Consider, for example, Donald Davidson’s discussion of a case borrowed from Freud. Davidson describes the case as follows:[60]

Davidson’s explanation of this case contains a telling misstatement. He says that it was reasonable for the man, having removed the stick from the hedge, to return it to the path. Why was this reasonable? The man thought that the stick posed a danger in the hedge, but he had previously thought that it posed a danger in the path as well. Why did he remove the stick from one dangerous position only to place it in another position recognized as equally dangerous? Why didn’t he throw it even further out of the way? The answer to this question is not available to Davidson, because it entails interpreting the behavior as unrealistically motivated. Freud introduces this example in a footnote to his case study of the patient known as the Rat Man.[61] The behavior described in the footnote belongs to a different patient, but it closely resembles behavior displayed by the Rat Man himself, which Freud describes as follows:[62]

Note that the Rat Man didn’t even have the other patient’s pretext for returning the object to its original position, since he didn’t think that it posed any danger in the new position to which he had moved it; he simply thought that moving it had been absurd. But why, then, did he go back to replace it? Surely, taking the trouble to undo an absurd action is doubly absurd.[63]

Freud’s explanation is that the Rat Man is deeply ambivalent toward his beloved and has difficulty coping with his ambivalence toward her, as with various other figures in his life. He has therefore repressed the hostile component of his ambivalence, remaining conscious only of unalloyed love. But his hostility occasionally breaks through the repression, moving him to obsessive actions, in which he enacts murderous phantasies of which he is completely unaware. In replacing the stone in the road, the Rat Man was unconsciously phantasizing that his beloved’s carriage would, after all, come to grief against it.[64] Of course, the Rat Man’s phantasy was quite unrealistic, as was the conscious thought that originally prompted him to move the stone. There is no reason to believe of a particular stone that it will upset a particular carriage, and so there is no reason for moving the stone in either direction, whether for the sake of protecting or of harming a future passenger on the road. But the Rat Man wasn’t motivated, in either instance, by a belief that the stone would harm his beloved; he was motivated by a phantasy of its harming her, which in one instance was mistaken for a belief, and in the other instance was repressed entirely.

Freud explains the behavior of his other, unidentified patient along the same lines. Returning the branch to the path was, in Freud’s view, a “hostile act”, which wasn’t really due to the public-spirited motives adduced by the agent.[65] This explanation cannot be filled out as Davidson recommends. We cannot say: “Given that he wanted to harm someone, it was reasonable to extract the stick from the hedge and replace it on the path.” Even if harming someone had been a reasonable project, leaving a branch in the path would not have been a reasonable way of going about it. The correct interpretation of this behavior is therefore unavailable to Davidson, who insists on interpreting it as the realistic pursuit of an end.

The problem for Davidson’s theory doesn’t depend on the peculiarly pathological features of these cases, such as repressed hostility or obsessive repetitions. A perfectly normal agent may see a stick or stone in his path, imagine its causing a freak accident, and feel compelled to shift it out of the way, well knowing that it is not really a hazard. If we insist on explaining his action in terms of attitudes that would make it reasonable, we shall end up attributing to him a stronger belief in the occurrence of the envisioned accident than he actually had. He didn’t believe that the accident would happen; he just imagined its happening, but his fantasy was enough to motivate him. How often have you felt for your wallet or purse after merely imagining a mugging? How often has a mere fantasy of disaster prompted you to check whether you turned off the stove or fastened your seatbelt?[66]

What these cases tell us, I think, is that tacitly incorporating truth-directedness into our conception of action can lead us to misinterpret people’s behavior. Better to incorporate truth-directedness into our conception of belief, and to recognize that beliefs are not the only cognitions that can motivate.

Must truth be the aim?

My thesis is that belief is an acceptance regulated in ways designed to ensure that its content is true. All that my primary arguments have shown, however, is that belief cannot be fully characterized in terms of its power to cause behavioral output. Even if the upshot of these arguments is that belief must also be characterized in terms of how it is constrained by input, the question remains whether it is constrained in ways designed to ensure that its content is true. Belief might be an acceptance regulated for empirical adequacy, or merely for consistency with other, similarly regulated acceptances. It would then have a constitutive aim other than the truth.[67]

I am less intent upon fending off this objection than some of the others that I have entertained. If I have managed to show that belief must be characterized by its responsiveness to input as well as its power to produce output, I will consider my arguments to have succeeded in some measure, at least. But I do think that the input constraints definitive of belief are designed to yield beliefs that are true, and I’d like to be able to say why I think so.

I take it to be a conceptual truth that beliefs are correct when true and incorrect when false: false beliefs are necessarily faulty or mistaken.[68] What’s more, I don’t think that the fault in false beliefs can consist in their tendency to misdirect our behavior, since many beliefs have little or no chance of directing behavior, and even some false beliefs can direct us well enough.[69] False beliefs are faulty in themselves, antecedently to and independently of any untoward practical consequences. In what sense are they faulty? The most plausible answer, I think, begins with the observation that we conceive of beliefs as constitutively regulated by input. Faulty or mistaken beliefs are the ones whose regulation has not succeeded in producing the kind of cognitions that it was designed to produce. The fact that beliefs are conceived to be faulty when false indicates that the regulation conceived to be constitutive of them is regulation for truth. Truth-directedness thus appears to be enshrined in our concept of belief.

Our conceiving of belief as truth-directed doesn’t necessarily settle the issue, however. Perhaps we could discover that the attitudes we call beliefs are actually regulated in ways designed to promote something other than their being true. Would we conclude that these attitudes weren’t really beliefs, after all? Or would we revise our conception of belief, to reflect its newly discovered aim?

I do not have an answer to this question. But I would like to point out, very briefly, the extreme improbability of its premise, that we might discover belief to be regulated for something other than truth.

I think that introspection argues against this possibility. When we discern a gap between a belief and the truth, the belief immediately becomes unsettled and begins to change. If it persists, we form another belief to close the gap, while reclassifying the recalcitrant cognition as an illusion or a bias. I cannot imagine evidence that would show this reclassification to be a mistake.

Some people claim that their cognitive efforts are aimed at something short of the truth, such as instrumental success or empirical adequacy. Under some interpretations, however, this claim is compatible with my thesis. For example, what people call aiming at empirical adequacy may in fact be only a willingness to settle for it. If a basketball player says “I’m just aiming to win by one point,” we don’t necessarily assume that he is engaged in point-shaving; we assume that he is aiming to score as many points as possible but willing to settle for any margin of victory. His willingness to settle for a small margin is a second-order aim with respect to his degree of success in the first-order aim of scoring points. I don’t deny that we have a similar second-order aim with respect to our cognitive effort: we’re willing to settle for empirical adequacy rather than truth. What I deny is that we are engaged in epistemic point-shaving, aiming for empirical adequacy in the first instance.

A basketball player may say, alternatively, that his ultimate aim is to raise his own salary, but we don’t therefore assume that his every move on the court is directed at that aim. The best way for him to raise his salary is to aim at victory for its own sake, without regard to monetary rewards. Money may be the goal for which he enters the game, but he enters the game by adopting its object as an intrinsic aim. Similarly, we may enter the game of having beliefs on a particular subject because we want our motivating cognitions on that subject to yield successful actions; but success in action does not thereby become the object of the game.

As these analogies suggest, the best way of achieving empirical adequacy or instrumental success may be to aim at the truth instead, just as the best way of raising one’s salary may be to aim at winning, and the best way of winning may be to aim for the highest possible score. In each case, the former outcomes are much harder to aim at, and aiming at them can be counterproductive.

Must each belief have the aim?

Here is another respect in which my thesis could be more modest. I have claimed that our concept of belief is such that each instance of belief must aim at the truth in its own right. But I have also argued that truth-directed cognitions are psychologically segregated from their non-truth-directed counterparts, whose motivational force is generally inhibited; and this argument raises the possibility of defining belief as a cognition that is psychologically grouped with the truth-directed ones, whether or not it is truth-directed itself. Belief would then be defined as a cognition that is treated as aiming at the truth, either by the subject or by his psychological mechanisms, in that it is included among those cognitions whose motivational force is uninhibited because of their truth-directedness.[70]

We are all familiar with the experience of finding one of our own mental states on the wrong side of a psychological boundary, as when we find the residue of a dream mixed in with our experiential memories. Ronald Reagan was often reported to have retailed the plots of movies under the guise of historical anecdotes, as if the fantasies in which he had participated as an actor had become mixed in with his beliefs. Reagan, or his mind, treated these cognitions as if they were truth-directed, and yet they were permanently disconnected from the truth, since he went on repeating them, and thus behaving as if they were true, no matter how often he was told that they were false. Did the President believe what he was saying?

I am assuming that the President was not deliberately lying. I’m also assuming that he didn’t find grounds, however spurious, for discounting the corrections that were offered to him. Finally, I am assuming that he wasn’t engaged in any complex form of self-deception, unconsciously orchestrating the evidence that was allowed to enter his thinking. Rather, I assume that he was just as he seemed, blithely impervious to the facts. And on that assumption, I am inclined to think that he did not believe what he was saying. He may have believed that he believed what he was saying; but what he was saying conveyed the content of fantasies on his part rather than beliefs.

My reasons for favoring this description of the case derive partly from introspection. Sometimes I find myself wondering whether I really believe a proposition that I’m about to assert. What I ask myself on such occasions is not whether I have found a representation of the proposition among my beliefs. I have found it among my beliefs, witness my disposition to assert it. Of course, I may be asking whether I ought to believe the proposition—that is, whether it is true—but in at least some cases my question is descriptive with respect to my attitude, not prescriptive. I’m asking whether I even now believe the proposition, or whether it isn’t instead the content of a fantasy or assumption that has fallen in among my beliefs. This question could never arise, however, if an attitude’s falling in among my beliefs was sufficient for its being a belief. If my mental classification of the attitude determined its nature, then it couldn’t be misclassified.

Furthermore, if an attitude’s being treated as a belief were sufficient for its being a belief, then misclassified fantasies would tend to fall under epistemic norms. To describe the attitudes expressed in President Reagan’s anecdotes as beliefs would imply that Reagan should have discarded them or revised them so as to conform with historical reality. All he should have done, however, was to reclassify them—to re-shelve them, mentally speaking. The President wasn’t so much a bad historian as a sloppy mental housekeeper. If we want to cut him this much normative slack, however, we have to think of his anecdotes as reporting the contents of misplaced fantasies rather than irrational beliefs.

I am therefore inclined to resist the suggestion that the acceptance of a proposition can qualify as a belief merely by virtue of being mentally classified among the acceptances whose motivational force is uninhibited because they are regulated for truth. Whether an acceptance qualifies as a belief depends, I think, on whether it is so regulated in its own right.

I don’t pretend that our colloquial use of terms like ‘fantasy’ and ‘belief’ will always follow my definition in classifying mixed or borderline cases. I am especially worried about cases of delusion. Aren’t there people who believe that they are Napoleon? (People other than Napoleon, I mean.) Don’t such people have a belief that isn’t regulated for truth?[71]

I think the answer is that it isn’t literally a belief. I suspect that we tend to apply the term ‘belief’ in a figurative sense to phantasies for which the subject doesn’t or cannot have countervailing beliefs. When someone is said to believe that he is Napoleon, he actually has a phantasy to that effect; but on the question of who he is, a phantasy is all he has. He is somehow incapable of reality-tested cognitions of his identity. The phantasy of being Napoleon is thus what he has instead of a belief about his identity; and in this sense it is his belief on the topic, just as a cardboard box on the sidewalk may be his house by virtue of being what he has instead of a house.[72]

If you ask me, however, a cardboard box on the sidewalk isn’t really a house. And a phantasy of being Napoleon isn’t really a belief.