On the Objects of Belief

1. Introduction When I talk about the objects of belief I do not mean, e.g., the sun to which my thought that the sun will rise tomorrow refers; I do not mean the objects we think about. I take objects rather in a general philosophical sense; they simply are the bearers of properties and the relata of relations. I am thus concerned with the objects that are related by the belief relation " a believes that p ". In this scheme " a " represents a person or an epistemic subject; but I am not going to discuss what a person is. " p " or " that p " represents an object, namely the object of belief; and I am going to discuss what this is. In other words, I am interested in belief contents – to use a less neutral, narrower and equally unclear term. More precisely, I am interested in a specific claim: The most popular view presumably is that the objects of belief are propositions. The last fifteen years brought increasing evidence that this propositional view has to be rejected. In fact, I believe it to be false. So, my central claim, to be explained in section 9, is that there is a better conception, which I shall call " the intentional conception ". To my knowledge, the intentional conception as I understand it received its first relatively clear statement in Perry (1980). However, it seems less well-respected than it deserves, and it still lacks a precise formulation. My chief concern, pursued in sect. 7-10, is therefore to clarify the intentional conception and to offer some new arguments in its support. I shall end in sect. 11 with a brief description of its rich consequences. I shall start, however, by reaffirming, as a kind of stagesetting, how 2 central the theory of the objects of belief is kto the whole of epistemology. This requires some sorting out – which occupies the next five sections. 1 2. Theory of knowledge and theory of belief Current philosophical epistemology may be divided into two main areas: the theory of knowledge and the theory of belief. The theory of knowledge obviously embraces the problem of scepticism that Descartes once engraved into philosophical thinking: can I know anything at all? This issue struck me as immaterial ever since. It is surely nurtured by a confusion of knowledge and certainty, though its …