Nature of Belief

Forming beliefs is one of the most basic and important features of the mind. While philosophers generally use the term "belief" to refer to human attitude when one takes something to be the case or regards it as true, both within and beyond the field alike, there is little agreement on the true nature of belief itself. Are beliefs simply representations stored in the mind? Is believing in something a matter of being disposed to act -- and to react -- in a particular pattern of ways? When we ascribe a "belief" to someone, are we not merely describing them, but applying some type of evaluative standard to them? If yes, what is that standard, and what might it signify? In The Nature of Belief, leading philosophers begin to address these questions and others concerning the nature of belief, interrogating the concept from a variety of conflicting ideologies and perspectives. This collection of fresh, insightful essays addresses pressing philosophical issues such as causal history, representational structure, correctness conditions, availability to consciousness, responsiveness to evidence, situational stability, and resistance to volitional change. The featured contributors also address how belief differs across related mental states, such as acceptance, imagination, assumption, judgment, credence, faith, and bias, offering groundbreaking analyses of a diverse range of critical viewpoints. This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 International licence. It is free to read on the Oxford Academic platform and offered as a free PDF download from OUP and selected open access locations.

Jonathan Lewis-Jong is an experimental psychologist. His research focuses on the nature and causes of religious belief. His most recent book is Experimenting with Religion (Oxford, 2023). He is Researcher in Psychology of Religion at the Benedict XVI Centre for Religion and Society at St Mary's University, Twickenham; Associate Member of the Faculty of Theology and Religion, University of Oxford; and Honorary Senior Research Fellow at Bristol Medical School. Eric Schwitzgebel is a professor of philosophy at University of California, Riverside. His work addresses the nature of belief, theories of consciousness, moral psychology, science fiction, metaphilosophy, and Chinese philosophy. His most recent book is The Weirdness of the World (Princeton, 2024).