Dennett suggests on 'big think' that we should consider not as singular propositional items of cognition but rather in terms of systems or networks - what has been called "wholeism".
He begins with the assumption, it seems, that beliefs are propositional:
"An eternally appealing idea is that the brain writes sentences that
store the beliefs so that when you learn that giraffes are mammals,
there’s someplace in your brain where the mental word "giraffe" and the
word "mammal" are tied together with an "is" or something like that. So
we have a big library of sentences. Those are our beliefs."
While I think this is somewhat misleading in that beliefs can go beyond a "linguistic dogma" in terms of what we understand tacitly and believe tacitly that evades linguistic expression. Whether beliefs are stored as propositional content is also up for debate. My inclination is to suggest that beliefs are stored primarily in terms of memory. As much work in the neurosciences (neuropsychology, cognitive psychology, cognitive science, etc.) has documented and investigated extensively, we know that the hippocampus is critical in the function of memory and the category of memory has been divided in various ways. There is the semantic and episodic memory distinction, the declarative and working memory distinction, as well as a short-term and long-term distinction and there are also notes about spatial and other kinds of memory as well. Much of the investigations on memory would, in my opinion, suggest that the beliefs we have about the world are not simply in the form of propositions or simply limited to the scope of linguistic expression. While it may be the case that because we can most easily recognize beliefs through linguistic expression, and even then it is not so clear-cut in discerning which expression is one of belief or an expression of something else, such basic observation may have lead the conception of belief to be strictly propositional. However, belief can be construed in terms of bodily knowledge as well as tacit knowledge. Many of us can infer and often do infer the states of other persons by observing their actions. In other words we can formulate beliefs based on what we observe others doing. That is, we have the ability to form a theory of mind for another person. None of which is necessarily formed in propositional content or inferred from propositional content. Another example is when interacting with another person in another society where you do not know the language. And yet, we can pick up on instances of suffering, compassion, and malaise.
The second assumption that Dennet makes, which is in a way widely agreed is the stability and consistency of beliefs. What has been widely characterized as the "involuntariness" of belief. It does not change and it is consistent across contexts, i.e. "context-independent". And one of the arguments is that if it changes then it was never really belief, which is one of the arguments from John Henry Newman's An Essay in Aid of a Grammar of Assent. But many contemporary philosophers have suggested that there is an involuntary character to belief. It can be based on feelings and it is dispositional. Jonathan Cohen gives the example of observing a swerving car in front of you. By observing this, one comes to the natural inference that the car is going to crash. This is an involuntary occurrence of the belief that the car is going to crash. There are other examples of the involuntariness but I'll leave it here.
One of the contentions that can be made against the involuntary character of belief is from the anthropology literature that widely suggests that beliefs are mutable. They change over time and that a basic observance of ritual does not entail that the participants of the ritual believe in the symbolism, narrative, or meaning given to the ritual (see prior post). However, I think there is still room for debate. While anthropology hasn't made any further distinctions beyond belief to look at the various textures cognitions can have, which limits meaningful discourse about cognition and behavior, philosophy has made further distinctions such as acceptance that distinguishes itself from belief. So the issue of whether belief is involuntary or not involuntary, or whether belief is mutable or not mutable is up to debate (which in my view can be informed from some of the literature in psychology) it is not definitively resolved. Nonetheless, we can acknowledge there are beliefs with strong conviction that do not change and there are those with strong conviction that do eventually change.
However, these assumptions about belief does not discount the idea of "wholeism". What "wholeism" does suggest is that our beliefs are situated within our understanding of ourselves and the worlds we occupy. In this sense, our beliefs cannot be singularly picked out but that all beliefs are within a network or system of understanding and that beliefs "come in systems. They cohere in large clumps." This goes right to the tradition of the 'sociology of knowledge' which has sought to uncover the complexities of embodiment, habitus, and social epistemology. We are beings situated within a society from which we learn how to navigate and live in the world. So any belief that we may have is necessarily tied to other beliefs and pieces of information we hold about the world. In this regard, I would agree that "wholeism" is something that needs to be accounted for while still holding reservations about whether beliefs are propositional and involuntary.
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