The doxastic zoo

Pascal Engel

pp. 297-316

in: Annalisa Coliva, Paolo Leonardi, Sebastiano Moruzzi (eds), Eva Picardi on language, analysis and history, Berlin, Springer, 2018

Abstract

The doxastic zoo contains many animals: belief, acceptance, belief in, belief that, certainty, conjecture, guess, conviction, denial, disbelief in, disbelief that, judgment, commitment, etc. It also contains belief's "strange bedfellows": credences, partial beliefs, tacit beliefs, subdoxastic states, creedal feelings, feelings of knowing, in-between believings, pathological beliefs, phobias, aliefs, delusions, biases, besires. How to order the zoo? I propose to distinguish doxastic attitudes from non-doxastic epistemic attitudes. The criterion is the existence of correctness conditions. Most bedfellows do not have such normative conditions. So they should not be allowed in the Doxastic Club.