TL;DR: It is often the case that the behavior of intelligent/agentic entities (in this case, I’m mostly thinking about humans and things made of humans, like orgs, cultures, etc.) towards some X is not adequately described in terms of having beliefs about X. One reason for this is that their aliefs (~behavioral predispositions guided by some “reasons in the world”) and their judgments (truth-oriented explicit thoughts / intellectual endorsements) discord/fail to cohere. Another reason is that even getting [[aliefs oriented towards some X] alone] or [[judgments oriented towards some X] alone] to cohere on their stance towards X is difficult, because the mind typically does not explicitly track all the epistemic/referential dependencies, and thus cannot invoke them on the spot to be available for coordinated revision.
(Beliefs are not special here. This is true of all mental elements that involve both abstract thought and contextually applied heuristic behavior[1], e.g., desires.)
(I’m writing this partly because most people I meet don’t have this fragmented mind picture integrated in their thinking about other minds.)
When discussing whether an entity (e.g., a person/community/organization) “believes that X”, it is helpful to split the notion of “belief” into two components.[2]
Belief = Alief + Judgment
I.e., one believes that Xiffone alieves that Xandone judges that X.
An alief is, in [my short words], a predisposition to behave as if someone believed something, regardless of whether one actually believes that.[3] One illustrative example from the Gendler article that introduced the concept is a person being terrified to cross a glass walkway over a canyon, even though they’re completely sure it’s safe. Various traumas, PTSD symptoms, and learned emotional reactions are also good examples of this phenomenon. They are like heuristics, typically developed for “good reasons”,[4] but also shallow, not explicitly/directly grounded in “representational content”/”explicit thought”, and therefore not as amenable to changes downstream from changed in the corresponding “representational content”/”explicit thought”.
A judgment[5] amounts to “intellectual endorsement”, representational/explicit thought, a truth-oriented representation, amenable to endorsed communication.
You can also think about this as: aliefs as Type 1 processes & judgments as Type 2 processes (in the sense explained here).
Aliefs and judgments influence each other, and we can meaningfully say that an entity believes X if that person’s aliefs and judgments have reached sufficient agreement on the matter of X.[6] But also, syncing various parts of a cognitive system with an update to one part is often difficult and far from perfectly reliable in the absence of reasonably strong signals/incentives towards it.
Aliefs saying X=0, while judgments “say” X=1 is not the only way to fail to reach internal agreement/coherence on X. Both aliefs and beliefs may “say” different things about X in different contexts, so there’s no alief-judgment agreement on X because aliefs and/or judgments cannot be ascribed a meaningful/coherent stance about X.
Examples:
“I don’t know why this org behaves as if they were oblivious to the fact that X (alief), when their public comms clearly reflect a good understanding of X (judgment).”
[Similar to the one above.] Someone is behaving as if they do not understand X, even though they have been told about X a few times already and said things indicating a good enough understanding of X in response.
Someone says and thinks X to be a good and worthwhile idea, and they end up finding themselves not doing it.
An important component of therapy is ensuring that updates in good directions propagate through the entire system. Often the judgment part makes the update, but the alief part remains unmoved. But it is also often the case that the alief part actively resists the judgment part being updated, because it kind of expects that something terrible may happen if such-and-such belief/judgment is adopted (see “exiles” in IFS).
In case it needs to be said, this doesn’t mean that judgments are universally (or even by-default) correct. Stuff like in the third example above can actually be good and healthy when one finds oneself unexcited or [currently steamless] about a project that “abstractly seems great and totally makes sense”.
(Acknowledgment: Influenced by Tsvi’s discussion of “internal sharing of elements”. See also more examples in the linked section of his post.)
Or: insofar as one wants to talk about “beliefs”, I claim that this model is much more helpful than the lack of it. The further elaboration on this model is to think about various shards of various contextually invoked shards of alief and judgment.
I’m borrowing “judgment” from Schwitzgebel’s The Pragmatist Metaphysics of Belief, where (IMO) he proposes to equate belief with something like “sufficiently generally applied alief”, regardless of the judgment. I disagree with his judgment here, which is evident from this post.
We can think about it as an example of “coherence” in the sense that Wentworth discusses in Coherence of Caches and Agents:
More generally, we’re typically interested in “coherence” in cases where all the local constraints together yield some useful property “at the large scale”. In logic, that might be a property like truth-preservation: put true assumptions in, get true conclusions out. In our fibonacci example, the useful “large scale” property is that the cache in fact contains the fibonacci sequence, all the way out to its largest entry. And for agents, the “large scale” property will be that the agents maximize or apply a lot of optimization pressure to something far in their future.
Given the decomposition “one believes that Xiffone alieves that Xandone judges that X”, would you say that the person terrified to cross the glass walkway does not believe that it is safe, but merely judges that it is safe?
TL;DR: It is often the case that the behavior of intelligent/agentic entities (in this case, I’m mostly thinking about humans and things made of humans, like orgs, cultures, etc.) towards some X is not adequately described in terms of having beliefs about X. One reason for this is that their aliefs (~behavioral predispositions guided by some “reasons in the world”) and their judgments (truth-oriented explicit thoughts / intellectual endorsements) discord/fail to cohere. Another reason is that even getting [[aliefs oriented towards some X] alone] or [[judgments oriented towards some X] alone] to cohere on their stance towards X is difficult, because the mind typically does not explicitly track all the epistemic/referential dependencies, and thus cannot invoke them on the spot to be available for coordinated revision.
(Beliefs are not special here. This is true of all mental elements that involve both abstract thought and contextually applied heuristic behavior[1], e.g., desires.)
(I’m writing this partly because most people I meet don’t have this fragmented mind picture integrated in their thinking about other minds.)
When discussing whether an entity (e.g., a person/community/organization) “believes that X”, it is helpful to split the notion of “belief” into two components.[2]
I.e., one believes that X iff one alieves that X and one judges that X.
An alief is, in [my short words], a predisposition to behave as if someone believed something, regardless of whether one actually believes that.[3] One illustrative example from the Gendler article that introduced the concept is a person being terrified to cross a glass walkway over a canyon, even though they’re completely sure it’s safe. Various traumas, PTSD symptoms, and learned emotional reactions are also good examples of this phenomenon. They are like heuristics, typically developed for “good reasons”,[4] but also shallow, not explicitly/directly grounded in “representational content”/”explicit thought”, and therefore not as amenable to changes downstream from changed in the corresponding “representational content”/”explicit thought”.
A judgment[5] amounts to “intellectual endorsement”, representational/explicit thought, a truth-oriented representation, amenable to endorsed communication.
You can also think about this as: aliefs as Type 1 processes & judgments as Type 2 processes (in the sense explained here).
Aliefs and judgments influence each other, and we can meaningfully say that an entity believes X if that person’s aliefs and judgments have reached sufficient agreement on the matter of X.[6] But also, syncing various parts of a cognitive system with an update to one part is often difficult and far from perfectly reliable in the absence of reasonably strong signals/incentives towards it.
Aliefs saying X=0, while judgments “say” X=1 is not the only way to fail to reach internal agreement/coherence on X. Both aliefs and beliefs may “say” different things about X in different contexts, so there’s no alief-judgment agreement on X because aliefs and/or judgments cannot be ascribed a meaningful/coherent stance about X.
Examples:
“I don’t know why this org behaves as if they were oblivious to the fact that X (alief), when their public comms clearly reflect a good understanding of X (judgment).”
[Similar to the one above.] Someone is behaving as if they do not understand X, even though they have been told about X a few times already and said things indicating a good enough understanding of X in response.
Someone says and thinks X to be a good and worthwhile idea, and they end up finding themselves not doing it.
An important component of therapy is ensuring that updates in good directions propagate through the entire system. Often the judgment part makes the update, but the alief part remains unmoved. But it is also often the case that the alief part actively resists the judgment part being updated, because it kind of expects that something terrible may happen if such-and-such belief/judgment is adopted (see “exiles” in IFS).
In case it needs to be said, this doesn’t mean that judgments are universally (or even by-default) correct. Stuff like in the third example above can actually be good and healthy when one finds oneself unexcited or [currently steamless] about a project that “abstractly seems great and totally makes sense”.
(Acknowledgment: Influenced by Tsvi’s discussion of “internal sharing of elements”. See also more examples in the linked section of his post.)
I.e., “cut across the hierarchy” or something.
Or: insofar as one wants to talk about “beliefs”, I claim that this model is much more helpful than the lack of it. The further elaboration on this model is to think about various shards of various contextually invoked shards of alief and judgment.
This is circular because we lean on the notion of belief to define its component, but good enough for a short description.
Dennett would say “free-floating rationales”.
I’m borrowing “judgment” from Schwitzgebel’s The Pragmatist Metaphysics of Belief, where (IMO) he proposes to equate belief with something like “sufficiently generally applied alief”, regardless of the judgment. I disagree with his judgment here, which is evident from this post.
We can think about it as an example of “coherence” in the sense that Wentworth discusses in Coherence of Caches and Agents:
Given the decomposition “one believes that X iff one alieves that X and one judges that X”, would you say that the person terrified to cross the glass walkway does not believe that it is safe, but merely judges that it is safe?