Another puzzle about belief (by guest blogger Keith Frankish)
9 am: Jack enters his office and flips the light switch. Call this event A. It is plausible to think that there's an intentional explanation for A: Jack wants light and believes that flipping the switch will produce it. But light doesn’t come. The bulb goes pop, and Jack sets off to the store cupboard to get a replacement.
9.05 am: Bulb in hand, Jack re-enters his office, and again flips the switch -- then curses his stupidity. Call the second switch-flipping event B. Now what is the explanation for B? More specifically, is the explanation the same as for A, and it is an intentional one?
There are four options, and each has its problems:
1) The explanation is the same and it is intentional: Jack wants light and believes that flipping the switch will produce it. Problem: In the run-up to event B Jack surely doesn't believe that flipping the switch will produce light. After all, he knows that the bulb is blown and that blown bulbs don’t produce light, and he is minimally rational.
2) The explanation is the same and it is not intentional -- perhaps the movement is a reflex one. Problem: Flipping a light switch is just one of a vast array of routine unreflective behaviours for which we find it perfectly natural to give intentional explanations. If these actions are not intentional, then the realm of folk-psychological explanation will be massively reduced, vindicating at least a partial form of eliminativism.
3) The explanation is different and it not intentional. Problem: It's implausible to think that A and B have different explanations. In a real life version, I'd be willing to bet that the neurological processes involved in two cases were of the same type.
4) The explanation is different and it is intentional. Problem: As for (3), plus it's hard to see what alternative beliefs and desires might have motivated B.
This puzzle about belief seems to me an important one, though it has received relatively little attention -- which is why I thought I’d give it an airing here. (One of the few extended discussions I know of is by Christopher Maloney in a 1990 Mind and Language paper titled 'It's hard to believe'. Eric also discusses cases of this sort in his draft paper 'Acting contrary to our professed beliefs'.)
My own view is that the plausibility of the options corresponds to the order in which I have stated them, with (1) being the most plausible. That is, I would deny that at the time of event B Jack doesn't believe that flipping the switch will produce light. The problem then, of course, is to explain how he can believe that the switch will work while at the same time believing that the bulb is blown and that blown bulbs don’t produce light. The only plausible way of doing this, I think, is to distinguish types, or levels, of belief which are relatively insulated from each other, and to claim that Jack's belief about the effect of flipping the switch is of one type and his belief about the condition of the bulb of the other. (Maloney takes the broadly same line, though he works out the details in a different way from me.) I happen to think that this view is independently plausible, so the puzzle is actually grist to my mill, though distinguishing types of beliefs has its own problems. I'd be interested to know how others react to the puzzle.