Academic

Haack on Belief

By Lawrence Solum

Susan Haack (University of Miami - School of Law) has posted Belief in Naturalism: An Epistemologist's Philosophy of Mind (Logos Episteme, Vol. 1, No. 1, pp. 67-83, 2010) on SSRN. Here is the abstract:

My title, "Belief in Naturalism," signals, not that I adopt naturalism as an article of faith, but that my purpose in this paper is to shed some light on what belief is, on why the concept of belief is needed in epistemology, and how all this related to debates about epistemological naturalism. After clarifying the many varieties of naturalism, philosophical and other (section 1), and then the various forms of epistemological naturalism specifically (section 2), I offer a theory of belief in which three elements - the behavioral, the neurophysiological, and the socio-historical - interlock (section 3), and apply this theory to resolve some contested questions: about whether animals and pre-linguistic infants have beliefs, about the fallibility of introspection, and about self-deceptiion (section 4).

Full post as published by Legal Theory Blog on December 21, 2010 (boomark / email).