PRACTICAL BELIEF AND PHILOSOPHICAL THEORY Philip

Philosophy invariably starts with the attempt to spell out ideas and beliefs that we already hold, whether on topics like time or causality, colour or value, consciousness or free will, democracy or justice or freedom. It may go well beyond such pre-philosophical assumptions in its further developments, regimenting them in unexpected ways, revising them on novel lines, even discarding them entirely in favour of other views. But philosophy always begins with the articulation of ordinary ideas and beliefs. This is where its ladder starts. As the name suggests, articulation requires that the ideas and beliefs articulated were already there waiting to be spelled out, and that identifying them is a matter of analysing what is there, not a matter of adding something new. If philosophical articulation is to deserve its name, and if at the same time it is to be a significant enterprise, then the contents that it articulates--the contents of our pre-philosophical beliefs--must satisfy two constraints. First, they must be sufficiently familiar to us pre-philosophical believers for articulation to be guidable by our common understanding of what we believe; otherwise it would not be, properly speaking, articulation. But, second, the contents must remain unfamiliar enough for articulation to be able to increase that prior understanding; otherwise it would not be a significant enterprise. But how can any pre-philosophical beliefs simultaneously meet these two constraints? That is the problem that I want to address in this paper. The problem is associated with the paradox of analysis (Ackerman [1]). According to that paradox, analysis or articulation cannot be analytically responsible to our prior understanding of what we believe and capable at the same time of substantively advancing that understanding. The usual approach to the paradox of analysis concentrates on the notion of analysis or articulation, arguing that analysis can be so understood that no problem arises (Mackie [27, Chapter 1]). In this paper I approach the paradox from a different angle. I concentrate on the notion of belief--this is already implicit in my formulation of the problem--arguing that belief can be so understood that the paradox is avoided. The paper is in three sections. In the first, I discuss familiar behavioural and judgmental modes of believing things and show how they fall foul of the paradox. In the second, I introduce a third, distinct mode which I describe as practical belief. And then in the third section, I show that the contents of practical beliefs satisfy both the familiarity and unfamiliarity constraints and point us towards a coherent and attractive account of philosophical articulation.