Superficialism

Image by Gerd Altmann from http://Pixabay.com

I'm a superficialist about belief. On my view, to believe something is to match, to an appropriate degree and in appropriate respects, a "dispositional stereotype" composed of various behavioral, experiential, and cognitive dispositions. To believe something is just to be disposed to act and react as though you believe it -- outwardly in your planned and spontaneous behavior and inwardly in, for example, your inner speech, emotional responses, and implicit reasoning. (For more details, see here and here.) I prefer not to conceptualize belief structurally, for example in terms of the manipulation of representations stored in one or more functionally defined "boxes". It's this structural neutrality that makes my account superficial. Belief, on my view, concerns what's happening at the behavioral and experiential surface of cognition (and in patterns of transition between similarly superficial states). Facts about underlying architecture are irrelevant, except to the extent that of course there must be some underlying architectural facts or other that give rise to the surface patterns.

I like to compare the architecture of belief to the architecture of personality traits. What is it to be extraverted? Plausibly, it's nothing more than to have a certain suite of dispositions -- being disposed to enjoy parties, to be talkative, to feel energized by meeting new people, to seek out social contact, etc. If you're like that, you're an extravert, and it doesn't really matter what underlying cognitive architecture implements that pattern. Maybe you have a big "E" written in some extraversion box. Maybe you've got some representation like "meeting new people is good" in your Value Box. Maybe your alpha-dongle is hooked up to your beta-flipper. It doesn't really matter. As long as you are robustly disposed to act and react, inwardly and outwardly, like an extravert, you're an extravert.

Now one disadvantage of superficialism, which has been repeatedly emphasized to me by Eric Mandelbaum  is this: Superficialism is not as explanatorily rich as a view that commits to an underlying architectural story.

Why did the extravert enjoy the party? The superficialist will have to say something quasi-circular like, "Well, she's an extravert, and extraverts tend to enjoy parties". Someone with an alpha-dongle explanation can seemingly do better: "See, it's because the party released gamma juice, flooding the alpha-dongle which then made the beta-flipper go wild!" See how much more satisfying that explanation is. More satisfying, anyway, if there really is gamma juice and an alpha-dongle that we can see and measure, lining them up with the party and the mood. An explanation that goes from the observed surface to an inner functional architecture and then back up to another observed surface will, all else being equal, be better than an explanation that just says that the two observed surfaces tend to be associated.

Back to belief: I ask Alyssa, "What is the capital of California?" and she answers "Chicago". Why? The superficialist explanation is this: To believe that Chicago is the capital of California is just to be disposed to act and react in a variety of ways, including by answering "Chicago" to questions of that sort, and Alyssa fits this pattern. (Compare again to "why did the extravert enjoy the party?) A certain type of representationalist about belief has a seemingly more satisfying answer: To believe that Chicago is the capital of California is to have the representation "Chicago is the capital of California" stored in memory. When asked the question, that representation was retrieved from memory and processed in such and such a way, generating the answer "Chicago".

The representationalist's explanation sounds (superficially?) better. But is it better? That depends, I submit, on how good the architectural story is. I don't think the architectural story is all that good. Or, less commissively, I don't think the philosophical community is currently in a position to know that it's good in the way we ought to know that it's good before hanging our concept of belief on that story.

Consider this analogy. It's the late 1500s to mid 1600s, post-Copernicus, pre-Newton, with Tycho and Galileo and Kepler and Descartes and old-school Ptolemaists all theorizing about the planets. Everyone knows, of course, that Mars will trace such-and-such a path through the sky this coming August. But why does Mars do that? What's the explanation?

Structuralists offer various explanations: It's riding on a crystalline sphere! It's hooked to the Sun on magnetic chains! It's riding in a vortex of globules!

Superficialists refrain from such structurally commissive explanations, instead simply fitting the planetary motion into a pattern: that it will appear in such-and-such a trajectory in August fits with the general pattern of what we know about its motion, its overall pattern of progression and retrogression mapped over the years. The superficialist points to the predictive equations as explanation enough for now, without positing an underlying physical mechanism.

Now if it's the case that one of the structural explanations is correct, then indeed that structural explanation is better than explanation by showing how a particular incident fits within a larger superficially observed pattern. But if we don't yet know which if any of the structural explanations is correct, superficialists have the advantage of firmer ground: They refrain from committing prematurely. The best science of the day might suggest that it's vortices, but let's wait before going all-in on that. Certainly let's wait before building our philosophical definition of "planet" in terms of vortices. The superficialist will say, superficially, "to be a planet is to be one of those things we see in the sky that tend to move like this"; the structuralist will say, "to be a planet is to be a huge sphere that rides around the Sun in a vortex of globules".

Here's where I differ from Mandelbaum and other non-superficialists. I think we're still in the pre-Newtonian days regarding the cognitive architecture of belief. Storing representations with the content P in various functional boxes in the mind, then retrieving them when relevant for use in theoretical or practical inference, coupling P with other belief-representations like "P -> Q" or with some desire-representation R to generate intention T -- that's a cartoon story which can be useful for certain purposes, but it's probably not really what the cognitive architecture of belief is like underneath for at least relatively complicated beliefs like "there's a gas station on the corner" or "my children's happiness is more important than their success in school".

Until we have the right architecture, and know we have it, it's better to go superficial -- at least insofar as we are philosophers interested in a conception of belief that's empirically robust. The representationalist's appearance of a better explanation is as misleading as the vorticist's or crystalline sphere lover's appearance of a better explanation of planetary motion.

Of course, it's good that not everyone is as restrained as the superficialist is. It's good that Descartes pushed vortices and Ptolemaic astronomers pushed crystalline spheres and Kepler hypothesized about the magnetic power of the Sun. They were all overconfident and wrong! But where would science be without them?

Eric Schwitzgebel

http://schwitzsplinters.blogspot.com/2020/07/superficialism-about-belief.html