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Alief and Belief

T. Gendler

Published 2008 in Contemporary Epistemology

ABSTRACT

I introduce and argue for the importance of a cognitive state that I call alief. Paradigmatic alief can be characterized as a mental state with associatively-linked content that is representational, affective and behavioral, and that is activated – consciously or unconsciously – by features of the subject’s internal or ambient environment. Alief is a more primitive state than either belief or imagination: it directly activates behavioral response patterns (as opposed to motivating in conjunction with desire or pretended desire.) I argue that alief explains a large number of otherwise perplexing phenomena and plays a far larger role in causing behavior than has typically been recognized by philosophers. I argue further that the notion can be invoked to explain both the effectiveness and the limitations of certain sorts of example-based reasoning, and that it lies at the core of habit-based views of ethics. O. Four Opening Examples In March 2007, 4000 feet above the floor of the Grand Canyon, a horseshoeshaped cantilevered glass walkway was opened to the public. Extending 70 feet from the Canyon’s rim, the Grand Canyon Skywalk soon drew hundreds of visitors each day, among them New York Times reporter Edward Rothstein, who filed the following dispatch: A visitor to these stark and imposing lands of the Hualapai Indians on the western rim of the Grand Canyon knows what sensation is being promised at the journey’s climax. After driving for a half-hour over bone-jolting dirt roads...you take a shuttle bus from the parking lot...You deposit all cameras at a security desk, slip on yellow surgical booties and stride out onto a horseshoe-shaped walkway with 1 I am grateful to the Yale faculty lunch group for comments on a very early draft of this paper, and to audiences at Princeton University (March 2007), the Central APA Chicago (April 2007), and the Mind & Language Pretense Conference at University College London (June 2007) for excellent questions, comments, objections and suggestions regarding the talk which served as its immediate predecessor. For more recent discussion and comments, I thank John Bargh, Paul Bloom, Carolyn Caine, Greg Currie, Andy Egan, Roald Nashi, Ted Sider, Jason Stanley, Zoltán Gendler Szabó and Jonathan Weinberg.

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