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Self-Conscious Mind

Self-Conscious Mind
ERIC MARCUS
1
3
Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, OX2 6DP,
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© Eric Marcus 2021
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First Edition published in 2021
Impression: 1
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DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192845634.001.0001
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for information only. Oxford disclaims any responsibility for the materials
contained in any third party website referenced in this work.
For my daughters, Lola and Bea.

Contents
Acknowledgments ix
Introduction 1
1. Belief and Judgment 9

I. Belief and Truth 11
II. Judgment and the Limits of Irrationality 22
III. Objections 30
2. The Self-Consciousness of Belief 39
I. Belief and Honest Assertion 42
II. Honest Assertion and Belief Avowal 46
III. Belief Avowal and Doxastic Self-Knowledge 50
IV. Explaining the Self-Consciousness of Belief 55
3. Making Nonsense of Moore’s Paradox 62
I. What is Moore’s Paradox? 63
II. Neo-Expressivism 69
III. What Avowals Express 76
4. The Challenge for an Account of Inference 84
I. The Taking Condition 85
II. The Causal Theory 86
III. Dispositions to the Rescue? 90
IV. Broome’s Rule-Following Account 92
V. The Constitution Theory 95
VI. Inference as an Evaluative, Causation-Constituting Act 99
5. Inference without Regress 104
I. Two Regresses 104
II. What I Can’t Believe 107
III. What I Must Believe 109
IV. Taking as Understanding (and Not Intuition) 112
V. Further Issues 116
VI. Summary 120
viii 
6. The Unity of the Rational Mind 123

I. The Self-Consciousness of Inference 123
II. Self-Consciousness as the Source of Mental Togetherness 130
III. Belief and Judgment Redux 139
Conclusion: Philosophical Judgment 143
Bibliography 153
Index 159
Acknowledgments
This book would have been far worse and might never have been at all without
the help of many friends and colleagues. For fruitful conversations, email
exchanges, and/or comments on drafts, thanks to Dorit Bar-On, Matt Boyle,
Jason Bridges, Jim Conant, Keren Gorodeisky, Matthias Haase, Adrian
Haddock, Arata Hamawaki, Jonas Held, Ulf Hlobil, David Horst, David
Hunter, Andrea Kern, Christian Kietzmann, Irad Kimhi, Nicholas Koziolek,
Ram Neta, Alexandra Newton, Gilly Nir, John Phillips, Sebastian Rödl, Guy
Rohrbaugh, John Schwenkler, James Shaw, Will Small, Chris Blake-Turner,
and Markos Valaris. Peter Momtchiloff and two anonymous referees at
Oxford University Press also provided valuable feedback and advice. I am
grateful to Ryan Simonelli for compiling the index. And thanks to Wiley for
permission to use bits and pieces of “To Believe is to Know You Believe,”
dialectica 70 (3): 375–405, and “Inference as Consciousness of Necessity,”
Analytic Philosophy 61 (4): 304-322.
My greatest debt is to Lydia Marcus, without whom I would never have
found the happiness and peace of mind that enables me to write philosophy.
She has my deepest gratitude and love for this, as for everything else.
Introduction
We do philosophy when we cannot see how something simple and obvious

is so much as possible. A case in point: We take ourselves to speak with
distinctive authority about what we believe and why we believe it. In our
struggle to defend this presumption—even to say what exactly it amounts to—
we are led variously to skepticism (the presumption is wrong), denialism
(there is in fact no such presumption), deflationism (this ‘speaking authorita-
tively’ is really just a ho-hum instance of __), inflationism (we just need to
postulate a new kind of __), and defeatism (we will not make progress without
help from outside philosophy). Forswearing these options, this book articu-
lates and defends an understanding of the rational mind that incorporates the
presumption without distortion or compromise, putting it at the center of a
philosophical theory of the nature of belief and inference.
Belief and inference, I contend, are essentially self-conscious. To a first
approximation, this means that to hold a belief or to make an inference is at
the same time to know that one does. My argument for this thesis exploits the
following striking fact: It is impossible to hold patently contradictory beliefs in
mind together at once. It is impossible to do so, I argue, because we cannot
believe what we know to be false. This impossibility is a species of rational
necessity, a metaphysical necessity whose source is the rationality of the
subject. We also find rational necessity in inference. A subject who makes an
inference represents the conclusion as what must be true, given the truth of the
premises, and therein believes it. Rational necessity is a phenomenon that
uniquely characterizes the relation between one person’s beliefs. And what
explains it is that beliefs and the inferences by which we acquire them are
constituted by a particular kind of endorsement of those very states and acts.
In the course of exploring the connection between self-knowledge and
assessments of what should be believed and inferred, we will arrive at an
understanding of the unity of the rational mind. Consider: What makes a pair
of beliefs part of a single view of the world, as opposed to shards of separate
views? When one of my currently held beliefs clashes with one of yours, we
disagree. When one of my currently held beliefs contradicts another of my
own, I am inconsistent. The difference turns on whether or not the clashing
Belief, Inference, and the Self-Conscious Mind. Eric Marcus, Oxford University Press. © Eric Marcus 2021.
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192845634.003.0001
2 
beliefs belong to a single mind, but what makes for a single mind? I contend
that what makes a pair of beliefs mine is precisely that I have a distinctive first-
personal knowledge of their being mine. Surprisingly, this is not knowledge of
a preexisting unity supplied in some other fashion, but the very source of that
unity. An examination of the nature of belief and inference, in light of the
phenomenon of rational necessity, reveals how the unity of the rational mind
is a function of our knowledge of ourselves as bound to believe the true.
Rational self-consciousness is the form of mental togetherness.
I now sketch this line of thought.
It is often said that belief aims at truth. This saying means at least this much:
Beliefs are assessable according to whether or not they are true. What accounts
for this fact about belief? It is not enough to point to the internal structure of
belief—that it consists in a subject’s representing a proposition as true. That
would be too easy, for this is precisely what those who ask the question are
trying to understand. It is often assumed that a satisfactory answer will take
something like the following form: The cognitive system of a believer regulates
certain internal states so as to introduce, maintain and revise appropriately
those that represent what is the case while weeding out those that represent
what isn’t the case; it is in virtue of being so treated by the system that those
states are beliefs. More generally, a belief is thought to be what it is—a state
whose aim is truth—in virtue of ‘acting’ like one.
A core idea of this book is that insofar as belief aims at truth, it is not
because of the relations into which beliefs enter, but simply because of how the
thinker represents the believed proposition. What’s required, in other words,
is not a switch from the first-person point of view (how do I, in being a
believer, represent the proposition?) to the third-person point of view (how
does a belief as such interact with other states?) but a deeper understanding of
the former: What exactly is it to represent a proposition as true, in the relevant
sense? My answer: It is to represent it as what should be represented as true or
(as I put it) as to be believed. This, and not the relations into which a state
enters, makes it belief. Its aim is internal to the attitude itself. More precisely,
what makes it the case that I believe p is that I take myself to be bound (in a
specified sense) to represent p as true. The correct account of the nature of
belief entails that belief is essentially known to the believer. Because, in
believing, one represents the believed proposition as to-be-believed, I also
know in believing that I am open to criticism if the belief is false. The source
of the truth-assessability of belief, I argue, renders this normativity metaphys-
ically inseparable from doxastic self-consciousness.
 3
Insofar as belief aims at truth, it is bad in some sense to hold contradictory

beliefs. After all, one of any such pair must be false. But it is not just bad. In
paradigmatic cases, it is metaphysically impossible to hold contradictory
beliefs. When beliefs are held (as I will put it) in mind together—in the absence
of distraction, self-deception, confusion, and the like—it is impossible both to
believe that p and also to believe that not-p. It is impossible because anyone
capable of holding a belief at all knows that a proposition and its contradictory
cannot both be true (even if very few would put it this way). It is an
understanding of the law of non-contradiction that makes it impossible
(when it is impossible) for me to hold contradictory beliefs.
This impossibility is a kind of rational necessity. By rational necessity,
I don’t simply mean a principle it would necessarily be irrational to violate.
I mean a kind metaphysical necessity whose source is the rationality of the
subject. Rational necessity is, I argue, essential to understanding the nature of
the mind: to understanding belief itself, the special character of the rational
bonds that link our beliefs to one another, and, more generally, the source of
the mind’s unity.
Consider again the questions raised above: what confers on a worldview the
unity of being someone’s? How can we explain the difference between incon-
sistency and disagreement? What makes one mind one? In what does the unity
of a mind consist? What is the character of the doxastic bonds that account for
the togetherness of the beliefs of a single subject?
In order to answer these questions, as well as to fully understand the nature
of belief itself, I focus on inference in the book’s second half. Its elusive
character was brought into relief over a century ago by Lewis Carroll. In his
famous tale, the tortoise draws Achilles’ attention to a pair of obviously true
premises from which a conclusion obviously logically follows. The tortoise
challenges Achilles to “force” him “logically” to accept the conclusion. Achilles
finds that he cannot do it, since no matter how many beliefs he coaxes the
tortoise into accepting, no matter how obvious these extra premises render the
validity of the relevant inference, it remains possible that the tortoise fails to
draw the conclusion. Many think that Carroll’s Paradox can be avoided simply
by refraining from casting rules of inference in the role of premises. But that is
not so. The problem is that what moves someone to actually draw the
conclusion cannot, it seems, be the mere possession of certain beliefs—
whether they are premises, background beliefs, or what have you—but rather
the fact that those beliefs are fortuitously ensnared in a causal process that
operates outside the scope of her beliefs. No one ever really draws a conclusion
in light of the fact that the premises support the conclusion; this is just
4 
something that happens to the thinker when the possession of certain beliefs
triggers a conveniently situated mechanism. Inference, as we ordinarily pre-
sume it to transpire, can thus seem impossible.
The theory of belief outlined in the first half of the book helps us escape
Carroll’s Paradox. Just as the (rationally grounded metaphysical) necessity of
rejecting a belief (say, ~p) can be due merely to the fact that someone will not
surrender their belief that p, the (rationally grounded metaphysical) necessity
of accepting a belief (say, q) can be due merely to the fact that someone will not
surrender their beliefs that p and that p entails q. Nothing more is required,
psychologically or rationally, to reject ~p than the belief that p. Similarly,
nothing more is required, psychologically or rationally, to accept the belief that
q than the beliefs that p and that p entails q. I believe q because I must—where,
again, this is rationally grounded metaphysical necessity—believe it, given
what else I believe.
Inference is consciousness of necessity. It is at once consciousness of the
necessity of the truth of a conclusion, given the premises, and consciousness of
that conclusion as what I must believe, given that I believe the premises.
Whereas to believe is to represent a proposition as to-be-believed, to infer is
to represent the to-be-believed-ness of the conclusion as to-be-inferred from
the to-be-believed-ness of the premises. Because, in inferring, I represent the
inference itself as good, I also know in inferring that I am open to criticism if
the conclusion does not in fact follow from the premises. The source of the
validity-assessability of inference, I argue, renders this normativity inseparable
from inferential self-consciousness.
That a person’s beliefs constrain one another—not just normatively and
causally, but metaphysically—helps to drive home an important lesson about
the nature of belief. Belief is a term we use to divide, with potentially mislead-
ing artificiality, our overall view of the world into proposition-sized pieces.
The risk is that we come to view beliefs as possessing a kind of particularity—a
constitutive independence from other beliefs—that they lack. And in so doing,
we are unable to recapture in our philosophy of mind the true character of the
mind’s unity.
My answer to the question of the source of the mind’s unity runs roughly as
follows: My beliefs, unlike the beliefs of others, affect what else I do or do not
believe simply in my understanding their implications for what else I should or
should not believe. In paradigmatic cases, the mere fact that one understands a
proposition to follow from (or to be inconsistent with) others that one
believes, and which one will not surrender, thereby makes that proposition
metaphysically necessary (or impossible) to believe. The unity of the rational
 5
mind is what constitutes this causal–normative nexus. And what constitutes it

is, I argue, self-consciousness.
The very idea of an inferential requirement contains within it the idea of a
unified subject who derives the conclusion from the premises. It is because S
believes p that S (and not necessarily anyone who is not S) must believe q. And
in thinking of someone as inferring—i.e., in thinking of someone as represent-
ing the to-be-believed-ness of the conclusion as to-be-inferred from the to-
be-believed-ness of the premises—I employ that very concept. I understand
the goodness of the inference as justifying a single subject who believes the
premises in accepting the conclusion. And when I make the inference,
I understand this S to be me, i.e., I grasp the unity from the ‘inside’.
I understand myself, qua believer of p, as also bound to believe q. This
recognition is what makes it the case that I do believe q because I believe
p. And it is what explains the fact that I know that it is because p that I believe
q, and know this not on the basis of observation or inference, but simply
because I believe q on the inferential basis of p. The togetherness of our beliefs
is, in this sense, constituted by consciousness of the togetherness; i.e., con-
sciousness of my being the subject of both of these obligations is what makes it
the case that I conform to them. Consciousness of the unity of the mind is not
another state; it is the form of mental togetherness. The unity of the mind is
constituted by self-consciousness.
The foregoing summary consists chiefly of a series of suggestive claims that
will (I hope) convey the general shape of the central line of thought that runs
through the book. The book to follow argues in detail for these claims,
considers alternative theories, and adds many elements that I have omitted
in this sketch.
The book is organized as follows:
I develop, in chapter one, an account of belief by way of discussing the
following five interrelated truths: (i) to believe that p is to represent p as true;
(ii) truth is a standard by which beliefs are assessed; (iii) a certain sense of the
question ‘Why?’ has application to beliefs; (iv) beliefs are governed by the law
of non-contradiction; and (v) a belief is the sort of thing one can bring to
mind. Over the course of refining, qualifying, and defending these theses,
I arrive at the view that to believe is to represent a proposition as what one
should represent as true. Beliefs that are in mind (which I call judgments) are
such that they are governed metaphysically, and not just normatively, by the
law of non-contradiction. One cannot clearly and distinctly at once represent
as true both a proposition and its contrary. I respond to a variety of objections
6 
to this position, including—at length—the objection that the account is under-

mined by the beliefs of nonhuman animals and human infants.
The second chapter presents an argument, initially without relying on the
account developed in chapter one, for the following thesis: To believe that p is
to know that one believes that p and to know it simply by believing it. The bulk
of the argument is a defense of three premises that entail the inseparability of
belief from knowledge of belief: (i) S believes that p only if S is able to honestly
assert that p; (ii) S is able to honestly assert that p only if S is able to avow the
belief that p; and (iii) S is able to avow the belief that p only if S knows that she
believes that p. I defend each premise from objections, paying special attention
to the phenomenon of self-deception. I show that one can hold both that belief
is essentially self-conscious and that people are sometimes wrong about what
they believe. Ultimately, I use the theory of belief developed in chapter one to
account for doxastic self-consciousness.
I show, in chapter three, how the view on offer resolves Moore’s Paradox,
further developing the themes and theses discussed in previous chapters.
Moorean absurdity does not, as it is generally held, involve an inter-level
conflict between first- and second-order beliefs (or the corresponding utter-
ances); it is just a conflict between doxastic stances on the question of a single
proposition’s truth. Moore-Paradoxical statements are, in this way, similar to
statements of the form “p and not-p”. What makes the two sorts of statements
seem fundamentally different is the apparent necessity of construing “I don’t
believe that p” and “I believe that not-p”, as they occur in Moorean utterances,
as expressive of doxastic attitudes toward one’s own doxastic states, rather
than toward the relevant p. That is, what makes Moorean absurdity puzzlingly
puzzling is that whereas an utterance of “p” expresses the speaker’s stance on
the truth of p, the corresponding utterance of “I believe that p” would seem to
express the speaker’s stance on the logically unrelated proposition that she
believes that p. But this is a mistake. The correct explanation of Moorean
absurdity is that both assertion and explicit belief-avowal manifest precisely
the same thing: self-conscious knowledge of (first-order) belief. But one will be
blind to this solution so long as one fails to appreciate the character of doxastic
self-knowledge.
The book’s second half bores down on the topic of inference. A touchstone
of recent discussions of inference is The Taking Condition: In inferring q from
p, one draws the conclusion in light of one’s representing p as supporting q.
This condition highlights two elements of inference. First, in inferring q from
p, one draws a conclusion. It is thereby brought about that the subject believes
that q. This bringing-about suggests causation in the broadest sense. Second,
 7
in inferring q from p, this bringing-about happens in light of the subject’s

endorsing the thought: p supports q. Inference thus joins two elements: one
causal, the other evaluative. I show in this chapter that extant accounts fail to
properly join these two elements. They fail because the two elements are not,
as is generally assumed, separable. Inference is the endorsement of a thought
that the ground supports the grounded and this endorsement amounts to a
causal connection between the corresponding beliefs. The difficulty is in seeing
how a thought could not merely register the presence of, but actually consti-
tute the causal relation between beliefs.
One who infers represents premises as supporting a conclusion in a manner
that constitutes a causal connection between the premise-beliefs and the
conclusion-belief. The trick for an account of inference is to say how this
schema can be satisfied. I do that in chapter five, using Carroll’s tale as a
lodestar. Inferring is a matter of understanding the relevant propositions well
enough to recognize that it is impossible for premises that one accepts to be
true and the conclusion to be false, so that one sees the conclusion as what
must be true, thereby believing it. (This will raise the worry, to which I respond
at length, that the account covers only deductive inference.) My central
formulation of this thesis will ultimately extend, both substantively and
terminologically, the account of belief expounded in earlier chapters. To
believe a proposition is to represent it as to-be-believed; in inferring q from
p, one represents the to-be-believed-ness of q as to-be-inferred from the to-
be-believed-ness of p. Just as one believes that p in seeing p as what one ought
to believe, someone believes that q for the inferential reason that p in seeing q
as what one ought to believe in light of the to-be-believed-ness of p.
Inference is a self-conscious act. I establish this, in chapter six, using an
argument precisely analogous to the one defended in chapter two in conjunc-
tion with belief. Here are the premises: (i) S believes that q for the reason that p
only if S is able honestly to give p as her reason for believing q; (ii) S is able
honestly to give p as a reason for believing that q only if S is able to ‘just say’
that she believes q in light of p, i.e., only if she is able to avow the reason; and
(iii) S is able to ‘just say’ that she believes q in light of p only if S knows that p is
her reason for believing that q. It follows that one infers only if one knows one
does. I then show how the self-consciousness of inference resolves an infer-
ential version of Moore’s Paradox.
I account for inference in terms of what I label the ‘being-in-mind-together’
of beliefs. Beliefs that are in mind together are subject to rationally grounded
metaphysical necessity. Because one believes p, one can’t or must believe q. Up
until this point in the book, I have simply relied on the reader to acknowledge
8 
the reality of this phenomenon. To make further progress, we must go beyond

suggestive labeling. If it is impossible to hold a pair of mental states in mind at
once and the impossibility has its source in our understanding of the necessary
falsehood of a conjunction, then the subject has knowledge not just of the
individual states they’re in but also of their combination. What, then, is the
relation between the unity of our beliefs and consciousness of this unity? My
answer: The unity of the rational mind consists in the subject’s consciousness
of that unity.
My approach to each of these issues is shown to be plausible in its own right.
But, as the foregoing outline will have made plain, the book to follow is not a
collection of discrete solutions to putatively separate problems. Rather I treat
all of the problems as interrelated, and thus my solution is a unified concep-
tion of the mind in its theoretical orientation. My hope is that the unity of the
analysis will lend additional credence to my treatment of what are generally
taken to be separate issues.
1
Belief and Judgment
The term ‘belief ’ lives a messy life outside philosophy, and the precision of a
philosophical account can create the impression that something important is
being left out. The risk of misunderstanding here will be reduced, I hope, by
declaring from the start that my goal is not to give an account that captures
every acceptable, literal, and true occurrence of the term. I aim to understand
what we are generally saying in ordinary contexts about the cognitively typical,
adult humans to whom we apply it.
Here, presented in the order to be discussed, are seven interrelated truths
about belief, so understood, that will orient my discussion in this and later
chapters:
(i)To believe that p is to represent p as true.

(ii)Truth is a standard by which beliefs are assessed.
(iii)A certain sense of the question ‘why?’ has application to beliefs.
(iv) Beliefs are governed by the law of non-contradiction.
(v) A belief is the sort of thing that one can bring to mind.
(vi) One knows one’s own beliefs better and differently than anyone
else can.
(vii) Sometimes people are wrong about what they believe.
While these statements have the syntax of universal generalizations, they are
not intended to make substantive general claims about an independently
specifiable kind of state. Rather, they are topic-fixing. These principles are
meant to focus the reader on what I will discuss. To be sure, each needs to be
clarified, refined, and/or qualified. In the course of doing so, I develop a theory
of belief that best explains their joint truth. (The complementary theory of
inference defended in the second half of the book will extend the explanatory
gains of its first half by articulating how certain mental acts meet ‘the taking
condition,’ and do so without engendering regress.)
It will be important in what follows not to lose sight of the fact that my
account of what I call belief—that is, those entities described by the theory
that explains (i)–(vii)—is compatible with the existence of distinct yet
Belief, Inference, and the Self-Conscious Mind. Eric Marcus, Oxford University Press. © Eric Marcus 2021.
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192845634.003.0002
10   
unproblematic uses of ‘belief,’ uses on which it refers to something else. For

example, insofar as cognitive psychologists, ethologists, and pet owners use the
term ‘belief ’ to refer to states that are not beliefs in my sense—e.g., to sub-
personal states that carry information from one place in our bodies to another,
to person-level states that guide the intelligent behavior of rational creatures
but do so without the possibility of their becoming conscious, to the conscious
cognitions of (non-human) animals—this does not threaten my arguments in
any way. Many different kinds of things are called “belief,” and (i)–(vii) don’t
all hold true of all of them. But my interest is exclusively in the kind of state of
which (i)–(vii) are all true. Of course, if we had reason to believe that there is
no kind of state of which (i)–(vii) are all true, then this would undermine my
project. But there is no such reason. Relatedly: Cognitive science tells us about
many different kinds of movement-guiding representations in the brain, but
it doesn’t tell us whether those representations explain (i)–(vii) or even if
(i)–(vii) are true of them. Once the nature of beliefs (in my sense) is better
understood, we will then be in a position to assess the relation between them
and the sort of states that cognitive scientists discuss under the same label. But
I do not undertake that inquiry here.
Before beginning, some discussion of the kind of account to be given is in
order. Late twentieth-century accounts of belief tended to be reductively
naturalistic. Philosophers of mind attempted to explain belief exhaustively in
behavioral, functional, dispositional, and/or teleo-functional terms. These
approaches live on, but another family of views has joined them. Since the
turn of the century, many have begun to favor accounts of belief in terms of its
aim, specifically its aiming at truth, or perhaps something else.¹ This approach
gets at a crucial normative feature of belief: A false belief is deficient. Some
(though not all) of this work too has a reductive character: It is the cognitive
system, rather than the person, that regulates certain internal states so as to
introduce, maintain, and revise appropriately the true, while weeding out the
false; and it is in virtue of being so treated by the system that those states are
beliefs and so assessable according to the norm of truth. According to other
members of this family, the believer herself has the aim of believing truly, and
it is in virtue of her regulating certain of her states according to this aim that
those states count as belief, and so are assessable according to the norm of
truth. Both strategies share the assumption that belief ’s connection to truth
is a matter of how a state is treated and is in that sense external to the beliefs
themselves. That is, it is a state’s being regulated either personally or
¹ Bernard Williams introduces ‘aim’-talk to the literature on belief in Williams (1973).

   11
sub-personally in a certain manner that accounts for its aiming at truth and,
therefore, for its being subject to the truth-norm. It is because of how belief
‘behaves’ (i.e., its external relations) and not because of how the believer
represents the proposition (its internal structure), that belief is assessable
according to the truth-norm.
The gist of the theory I will defend in what follows is that to believe is to
represent a proposition as what one should represent as true. It is precisely in
recognizing this doxastic obligation that one conforms to it. Thus, insofar as
belief aims at truth, it is not because of how the state is regulated, but because
of how the thinker represents the believed proposition.
I. Belief and Truth
Nishi Shah and David Velleman argue that
(i) to believe that p is to represent p as true.
does not single out belief. Supposing p, assuming p, and imagining p also
could be described as involving representing p as true.² This shows not so
much that there is more to believing p than representing it as true, but that the
relevant sense of ‘representing-as-true’ needs to be further specified. To that
end, note that supposing, assuming, and imagining are all action-types, in the
sense that it is possible to suppose, assume, or imagine at will. The sense in
which believing that p is representing p as true is one in which the relevant sort
of ‘representing’ is not something that can be done at will.³
But this clarification will still not enable us to identify the relevant attitude,
as there are other non-voluntary attitudes toward p that might be described as
forms of representing p as true. If, for example, I have a visceral fear of
cockroaches, one might describe me as feeling and acting as if it were true
that cockroaches were dangerous, and in doing so as representing the prop-
osition ‘cockroaches are dangerous’ as true. Nonetheless, it might be that I do
not believe that cockroaches are dangerous—not even a little bit. Perhaps we
can rule out these non-voluntary representings-as-true by following through
on the observation that belief is the sort of attitude that one holds on the basis
of reasons, i.e., there are reasons for believing and not just reasons why people
² Shah and David Velleman (2005).

³ The related issue of pragmatic reasons for belief will be discussed below.
12   
believe. Even if there is a sense in which I represent ‘cockroaches are danger-

ous’ as true, it is (we can imagine) not an attitude I hold for any reason.
Is it enough to single out the relevant sort of representing-as-true to say that
it is at once non-voluntary and also held for reasons? No. Consider that if I am
sad that p I am sad that p is true. In being sad that p, I thereby in some sense
represent p as true. I cannot adopt this attitude at will, but I am sad for reasons,
e.g., I am sad that I broke the dish for this reason: It was a family heirloom.
More generally, the emotions seem to be modes of representing p as true that
are both non-voluntary and ‘held’ for reasons.
Truth is not, however, the object of the emotions. If one is sad that p, one
must believe (know, even) that p. But if p turns out to be false, the mistake is
not in the sadness but in the belief. Whether the sadness itself is mistaken does
not depend on whether it’s a fact that p, but only on whether p (fact or not)
warrants sadness. If a friend is sad that her application to become a member of
the Russian Roulette team has been turned down, she is sad about something
that she should not be sad about. The mistake is in the sadness. If, on the other
hand, she is sad because the world is going to end tomorrow—or so she
believes—the mistake is in the belief. The truth of p, then, is something like
a background condition rather than the object of sadness about p.
But what does it mean to say that truth is the object of belief? Here is my basic
thought. To believe that p is not simply to treat p as true in thought and action—
as perhaps one might if one were supposing it or if one were in the grip of an
irrational fear—but to represent so treating it as correct. I propose, then, that the
following principle can explain the other six truths introduced above:
(i)* to believe that p is to represent p as what one should represent as true.
To see how it can do this, i* itself must be clarified. Responding to a pair of

objections will bring it into focus.
First, it might seem open to obvious counterexamples. If someone made an
offer of a billion dollars to anyone who represented the proposition ‘the sun is
made of butter’ as true, I might represent it as what one should represent as
true, thereby satisfying the letter of i*. But I do not believe it. One can hold that
a certain proposition should be represented as true without believing it.
Second, it looks as if believing that p is being identified with an apparently
different belief: the belief that p is what one ought to believe. This would be
problematic on its face, as these seem to be different contents and also would
appear to generate a vicious regress. Believing that one ought to believe p
would then have to be identified with believing that one ought to believe that
one ought to believe that p, and so forth.
   13
The butter example shows that i* is hopeless if ‘should represent as true’

covers practical imperatives. Plainly, one does not believe p in virtue of
representing holding p to be true as beneficial. Replying to this objection
requires specifying a different sense of ‘should.’
To that end, consider theoretical deliberation, i.e., deliberation on the
question of whether a certain proposition is true. In an ordinary case, one
considers what one has seen with one’s own eyes, what one has been told,
relevant memories, any evidence that bears on the question, etc. To find a set
of considerations sufficiently demonstrative of the truth of p is to recognize p
as what one should believe, and to thereby believe it—at least in the paradig-
matic case (more on this below). More precisely, part of what it is for the
drawing of one’s conclusion to manifest rational responsiveness to supporting
considerations is for that responsiveness to incorporate an understanding of
those considerations as conducive to the truth of one’s conclusion. The motion
from premise to conclusion in theoretical deliberation is thus fueled partly by a
grasp of this particular sort of normative connection between propositions.
This idea is more or less equivalent to what Paul Boghossian calls “The Taking
Condition” on inference.⁴ I will discuss it at length in later chapters and say in
more detail what form the incorporation of this “understanding of supporting
considerations” must take. But if one accepts that the theoretical deliberator must
possess some such understanding, then one must think of her as viewing her own
believing that p as responsive to the various considerations that constitute her
reasons for believing that p (supposing she has any). She thinks that, in light of
her reasons, p is to be believed. To think of it as ‘to be believed’ in the relevant
sense has nothing to do with thinking of the benefits of holding the belief as
outweighing the costs. It has to do only with the truth-conduciveness of the
relevant considerations. This indicates the sense of ‘should’ that figures in (1*).
My proposal then is that to believe that p—even when no such deliberation has
occurred—is simply to represent believing that p as what one should do, in the
just-sketched sense. To avoid any further confusion, I will rely in the remainder
of the book on the following formulation:
(i)** To believe that p is to represent p as to-be-believed.⁵
⁴ Boghossian (2014). Cf., Lavin (2011).

⁵ I thus go much farther than Shah, who (in Shah 2003) argues that deliberation about whether to
believe p is a matter of employing our knowledge that beliefs are deficient if they are false. For me (and
not for Shah) belief is itself an exercise of the concept of belief and (consequently) an application of our
knowledge of its normativity. For Shah, beliefs are bodily states that are causally regulated by truth-
tracking mechanisms. Those creatures who possess the concept of belief—and not all believers, on
Shah’s view, do possess the concept—can influence their beliefs by triggering a mechanism that protects
beliefs from the influence of non-evidential belief-forming dispositions. Thus for me (but not Shah),
14   
We are still not done with the first objection, however. One might, it seems,
represent a proposition as to-be-believed (even with the foregoing clarifica-
tion) without believing it. For example, there might be a certain proposition
that one simply can’t take seriously—say, that one’s spouse is an undercover
Russian spy. The CIA has, suppose, requested a meeting on the subject and for
prudential reasons, one has decided to take it. The evidence is overwhelming.
At the end of the session, one may genuinely still not believe that she is a spy,
but one is in a state expressible by saying such things as “I ought to believe that
my wife is a spy, but I still can’t quite bring myself to believe it.” Such a case
appears to show that representing a proposition as being sufficiently well
supported to warrant belief is one thing, actually believing it is another.
(Note that this counterexample does not rely on a pragmatic ‘should.’)
One gets a different impression from the following example. Suppose a
woman is playing poker, trying to figure out whether her opponent is bluffing.
She considers his behavior on prior rounds of betting, which she finds
inconclusive. Hoping to get a read on him, she asks him whether he’ll show
her his hand if she folds. He enthusiastically says he will, thereby revealing that
he wants her to fold, a sign that his hand is weak. This evidence settles the
matter for her—he’s bluffing. Here there is no temptation to break down the
transition between deliberation and belief into two steps: first, a step in which
she recognizes that she ought to believe he’s bluffing; and second, a step in
which she actually comes to believe that he’s bluffing. She simply recognizes
what the evidence shows and therein believes it.
Furthermore, the counterintuitive idea that there is necessarily a gap
between a normative judgment of belief-worthiness and a belief has an
unacceptable consequence. One would then have to say that a rational expla-
nation of why a person believes p explains directly only why she judges that
she ought to believe p. An explanation of why she actually believes it would
also have to mention that the ought-judgment led to the belief. You ask why
she believes he’s bluffing and she says “because he said he’d show me his
hand.” You reply “that’s why you think you ought to believe he’s bluffing, but
why do you actually believe it?” The poker pro would be utterly confused. Her
original answer seems to leave nothing of this sort to explain. On the two-step
view, there would be questions about how precisely the ought-judgment gives
rise to the belief, whether it is an automatic process or whether more activity
from the thinker is required. If it is automatic, one might ask how long it takes
believing that p requires conceiving of your attitude towards the proposition that p as governed by the
norm of truth. For Shah, this is only a requirement for deliberation about p.
   15
and whether the process can be sped up or slowed down, whether it might still
be accomplished while the subject was asleep or drunk. And would reasoning
on the basis of p subsequent to the recognition that the evidence decisively
favors p but prior to the belief ‘taking root’ somehow have to be qualified
(unbeknownst to the reasoner) as merely conditional reasoning? If more
activity from the thinker is required, then we must ask what sort of activity
this might be—if not more deliberation, then what? Absent fealty to the two-
step picture, these questions would be dismissed as absurd.
Here’s a different angle on the same worry. Belief, one would think, is the
conclusion of theoretical reasoning: the final step in the deliberation of a
rational creature. The practical analogue of this thesis—that action is the
conclusion of practical reasoning—is controversial because an action, such
as my walking to the store, seems like the wrong sort of thing to be an element
of reasoning.⁶ But according to the two-step picture, rational activity ends with
the judgment that one ought to believe p, one step short of actually believing
that p. But how does one go from believing that p is to be believed to believing
p itself, supposing that these are distinct? Not on the basis of more evidence.
After all, the evidence in favor of believing p is precisely the evidence that one
ought to believe p. So the transition from the latter to the former (if there must
be such a transition) cannot be understood as the direct expression of the
subject’s rational activity. It would have to be a process of ‘sinking in’ that one
hopes takes place subsequent to one’s recognition that p deserves to be
believed. One could label this process ‘rational’ or not, but it would amount to
viewing the making up of one’s mind as outsourced, at the final stage, to
unconscious or subpersonal mechanisms that one could at best cheer on as
they did or didn’t churn out the belief at which one hoped to arrive. Better to
reject the gap: representing p as what one ought to believe just is believing that p.
Note that the difficulty that the gap poses for the two-step picture has
nothing to do with the immediacy of the alleged transition between believing
that p ought to be believed and simply believing that p. And so it is no use
responding that, in some cases, the latter might be the immediate effect of the
former. (And why, one might wonder, is the former a less problematic
stopping point for theoretical reasoning than the latter?) The point is that
no matter how immediate the transition, the belief that p on the two-step view
is something external to the agent’s doxastic reasoning about p, for such
⁶ I would and have argued, however, that in fact action is (as Aristotle held) the conclusion of
practical reasoning. To x just is to represent x-ing as to be done. See Marcus (2012), ch. 2 and Marcus
(2018).
16   
reasoning cannot take you beyond judging that p ought to be believed. (It
would also follow that the Taking Condition, to be discussed below, is never
satisfied.)
But it might seem that the two-step view is irresistible. It clearly does, after
all, fit the case of the Russian spy. The husband judges that he ought to believe
that his wife is a spy but can’t quite bring himself to do so. If he does later come
around to believing it, it may not be in virtue of having acquired any new
evidence, but rather only in virtue of taking more seriously the evidence that
he already has. In this case, a doxastic ought-judgment and a belief are
separate matters. The question is whether this shows that there is no doxastic
ought-judgment to which a belief is identical. It doesn’t. For there remains the
option of denying that the husband expresses the same sort of normative
judgment as the poker pro expresses, were she to say: “I ought to believe he’s
bluffing.”
Would such a denial be unacceptably ad hoc? No.
First, as we have seen, the two-step view requires us to give up on something
central to our understanding of the rationality of belief. If there is a way of
preserving what seems to be the right thing to say about both the exceptional
case and the ordinary case, we should pursue it.
Second, the proposed distinction fits one we find in the phenomenology of
deliberation. Consider that we can take up the question of whether p is true in
a spirit of doxastic openness; one can give oneself over to the results of one’s
deliberation come what may. When one deliberates in this engaged manner,
one’s beliefs are on the line. This is the typical case. If I am considering
whether q then, upon encountering what I take to be decisive evidence—p—
in favor of q, I thereby believe q. There is no extra step necessary, in which
I decide to adopt the belief supported by the evidence. Nor is there some kind
of waiting period, only after which the belief takes root. On the other hand,
one can take up these sorts of questions in a more academic spirit, in a
disengaged manner. One might be unable seriously to entertain the idea that
one’s spouse is a Russian spy, and yet one might nonetheless examine the
evidence. Whether or not one will go along with the results of this inquiry may
then not be settled simply by the power of the evidence; one’s affection or
loyalty may block what one acknowledges are decisive epistemic reasons for
belief. This example opens up space in the mind of the deliberator between ‘I
ought to believe’ and ‘I do believe’ exactly because he is not engaged in
deliberation in the normal way.
Representing a proposition as to be believed is the characteristic product of
theoretical deliberation. More specifically, it is the characteristic (though not
   17
necessarily the) product of engaged as opposed to disengaged deliberation. We

might equally well use the same words to express the conclusion of either sort
of deliberation: “I should believe p.” In one case we are looking at the evidence
in order to make up our mind what to believe; in the other case, we aren’t. But
only in the former case does the statement express the thinker’s representing p
as to be believed (in my sense). In the CIA case, the husband is not examining
the evidence with the ordinary sort of attitude; his wife’s being a Russian spy is
not something he is willing to contemplate seriously. Hence, he ends up with
the sort of opinion that results from disengaged deliberation, in which a gap
opens up between the result of the deliberation and what one in fact believes.
The point is neither that beliefs are always the product of deliberation, nor
that engaged deliberation always results in belief, nor that disengaged delib-
eration never results in belief. Rather, belief is the characteristic product of
engaged deliberation. There is, on the one hand, thinking that one ought to
believe p, where the thinking is of the sort characteristically arrived at on the
basis of engaged deliberation; and, on the other hand, there is thinking one
ought to believe p, where the thinking is of the sort characteristically arrived
on the basis of disengaged deliberation. My thought, then, is that the distinc-
tion that we need to avoid the unacceptable two-step picture is not ad hoc,
given that we already implicitly grasp the corresponding distinction between
the two sorts of deliberation.
Obviously, the husband’s and poker pro’s ‘ought’-judgment are not unre-
lated. The former is a deficient exercise of our capacity to make up our minds
about what’s true. An utterance (“I ought to believe that p”) that the two
subjects might use to express their attitudes have the same truth-conditions,
but in the latter case, the normal connection to what the thinker actually takes
to be true has been severed. For a believer of p, “I ought to believe that p”
expresses an attitude of belief toward the proposition p. It articulates the norm
responsiveness to which constitutes the relevant state. The statement is made,
as one might put it, from the inside of the ‘ought.’ For the akratic believer, the
same utterance expresses an attitude of belief toward the proposition “I ought
to believe that p.” He is outside of the ‘ought,’ and thus his belief does not
simply collapse into a belief that p.
Interestingly, the very same constellation of pressures appears in chapters
two and three in relation to utterances of the form “I think that p.” Ordinarily,
they too express the thinker’s attitude toward p. But because one can have
another relation to one’s thinking that p—an alienated relation—utterances of
this form sometimes express a second-order belief: the belief that one believes
that p. The fact that one’s belief that p can be expressed equally by utterances
18   
of the form “p,” “I ought to believe that p,” and “I think that p” speaks to the
belief-attitude being a normative, self-conscious one. Yet it’s hard to see
exactly how these two faces of belief are connected and to resist the temptation
to treat the unusual cases (doxastic akrasia and belief-alienation) as revelatory
of the core phenomenon (argument-from-illusion-style), leaving belief ’s nor-
mativity and self-consciousness as extraneous.
So far we have considered the first objection to the idea that to believe just is
to represent a proposition as what one should represent as true: that it is open
to obvious counterexamples. But these cases have not undermined the thesis,
only shown us how to refine it so as to reveal its best articulation. The second
objection, recall, concerns whether my proposal entails that believing that p
gives rise to a regress of belief. If believing that p is, in effect, a matter of
believing that one should believe that p, then believing that one should believe
that p is also believing that one should believe that one should believe that p.⁷
But my point is this: ‘to-be-believed’ in ‘representing p as to-be-believed’ is a
specification not of the content of a belief, but rather of the attitude constitu-
tive of belief. So, if propositional attitudes in general can be characterized as
ways of representing a proposition, belief in particular can be further specified
as representing a proposition as what ought to be believed. If you think of
‘representing-as-to-be-believed’ not as the attitude constitutive of belief, but
instead merely as part of the content of a distinct belief, then we are again left
with a question about how the gap between this normative belief about p and
the belief that p itself is traversed.⁸ Against the objection, then, that represent-
ing p as-to-be-believed must, in the end, be understood as a belief with
a content distinct from p, I have argued that in fact, it is simply the belief
that p itself.
But one might wonder what this amounts to. In what sense can an attitude
toward p be a ‘representing-as-what-ought-to-be-believed’ if not by somehow
involving a distinct belief, explicit or implicit, with the content ‘p ought to be
believed’?
I begin my answer to this question where my reply to the previous objection
left off: There is no difference between considering whether to believe p and
considering (in an engaged manner) whether p is to be believed. There are not
two separate questions, (i) whether to believe the content ‘p’ and (ii) whether
to believe the content ‘p ought to be believed.’ This is what the artificiality of
the two-step picture establishes: We do not treat the former question as
bearing on a content distinct from the latter question. The question of whether
⁷ This sort of worry is discussed in Railton (2004). ⁸ Cf., Raz (2011), 38.
   19
to believe p is, necessarily, already the question of whether one ought to believe
p (in the relevant sense). The latter merely makes explicit the normative
character of the belief-attitude. One does not alter the content under consid-
eration by adding to it ‘ought to be believed.’ (The analogous claim about
adding ‘is true’ is widely accepted.)
Let’s try a different formulation of the regress worry. I said above that
whereas an ordinary believer expresses an attitude toward p by saying, “I
should believe that p,” the akratic believer uses the same sentence to expresses
an attitude of belief toward the proposition “I should believe that p.” But
doesn’t the ordinary believer also have an attitude of belief toward the prop-
osition “I should believe that p”? And if that’s right, then mustn’t she also have
the attitude of belief toward the proposition “I should believe that I should
believe that p’?
I take the answer to these questions to be ‘yes.’ But no vicious regress ensues.
Suppose one held the view simply that believing p just is taking p to be true.
Here’s a question one might ask about such a view: Is there yet another
description of that same attitude available, as the attitude of ‘taking it to be
true that p is true,’ and so forth? Suppose one said ‘yes,’ as I think is plausible.
Why should it be a problem that it is possible to generate infinitely many (and
infinitely long) descriptions of one and the same attitude? It’s not as if holding
the attitude would depend on the capacity, let alone the actuality, of reciting to
oneself all of these possible descriptions. Similarly, I would say that represent-
ing p as to be believed might also be described as representing p as what
one should represent as to be believed, and so forth, and that there is no
vicious regress.
It should be clear enough how
(i)** to believe that p is to represent p as to-be-believed
incorporates
(ii) truth is a standard by which beliefs are assessed.
After all, if what it is to believe that p is to represent it as to-be-believed, in the

sense sketched above, then not only does one represent it as true, but one
represents it as what merits being represented as true. Thus it is not simply
that a false belief is judged deficient by a standard that inheres in belief by dint
of its functional, causal, dispositional, or teleofunctional properties. Rather the
very idea of the standard is a constituent of the concept deployed by the
20   
believer in believing that p. (As I will emphasize below, this claim does not
entail that one who believes is therein ready to articulate the normative aspect
of the concept in a manner that would pass muster in a philosophical essay.)
To think of oneself as believing that p is to think of oneself as responsible to
the truth on the question of p, as wrong if p is false. Thus no one who honestly
avows the belief that p can intelligibly dismiss (what they recognize as)
compelling evidence that p is false. Thus, we should in fact go farther than (ii):
(ii)* the believer understands her beliefs to be assessable by the standard of

truth.
This connection between belief and truth helps to explain (iii):
(iii) A certain sense of the question ‘why?’ has application to beliefs.
In formulating (iii), I borrow language from a famous passage in Anscombe’s

Intention:
What distinguishes actions which are intentional from those which are not?
The answer that I shall suggest is that they are the actions to which a certain
sense of the question ‘Why?’ is given application; the sense is of course that
in which the answer, if positive, gives a reason for acting.⁹
Here is how I would make the analogous point in the case of belief. There are
various sources of behavior beyond belief that one might describe as ‘behaving
as if p were true’—p-ish behavior, for short.¹⁰ I alluded above to one such
source: irrational fears. I may step away from a floor-to-ceiling window in a
skyscraper out of an irrational fear of falling. Nonetheless, I do not believe that
I would otherwise fall. There are many other sorts of examples. Adolescents
behave as if they believe that they are immortal, but they do not really believe
this. People operate with implicit biases that they are neither aware of nor
endorse. The general idea here is familiar from Tamar Gendler’s distinction
between beliefs and ‘aliefs,’¹¹ though we must be careful to keep mind that the
latter category, unlike the former, has no internal unity: It is just a term for the
motley set of sources of p-ish behavior outside belief.
⁹ Anscombe (2000), 9. ¹⁰ The terminology is from Schwitzgebel (2011).

¹¹ Gendler (2008).
   21
What distinguishes beliefs from other sources of p-ish behavior? A certain

sense of the question ‘why?’ is given application to belief; the sense is of course
that in which the answer, if positive, gives a reason for belief. Following
Anscombe, I should emphasize that one can show that the question has
application without giving a positive answer. Perhaps it is possible to believe
with no reason at all. The point is that the applicability of the relevant ‘why?’
question shows that what is at issue is the sort of state that is held on the basis
of reasons, specifically reasons for belief. Implicit biases, irrational fears, and
the other non-belief sources of p-ish behavior are necessarily not held on the
basis of reasons for, and so the relevant ‘why?’ question has no application. We
can put this by saying that whereas some beliefs are irrational, implicit biases
and the others are arational, i.e., they belong to kinds to which the relevant
‘why?’ question is categorically inapplicable.
My aim here is not to defend an account of implicit biases and irrational
fears. The crucial point for my argument is that the theory on offer is
consistent with the existence of tendencies of thought and feeling that
manifest in belief-like behavior but whose source is not the person’s
endorsement. Although this strikes me as the appropriate classification
for what we call ‘implicit bias,’ et al., my account of belief does not depend
on its being so. The topic of this chapter is the category of state described
by the theory that best explains (i)–(vii). And I contend that someone’s
being in such a state is a matter of the person’s representing the proposi-
tion as to-be-believed and so as knowable in a distinctively first-personal
way. An exhaustive taxonomy of the states that lead us to act as if we
believe, together with an analysis of the corresponding concepts, and an
empirical study of usage patterns of the words that express them is not
necessary to make this point. What’s necessary is just the idea that what
are not beliefs (in my sense) may nonetheless lead people to act as if they
hold beliefs (in my sense) that they don’t.
Anscombe introduces the ‘why?’ question as shedding light on the nature of
intentional action only to note in the next sentence that it doesn’t get us very
far. And the same point holds here: If we are trying to understand the nature of
belief, we need more than an explanation in terms of a ‘why?’ question that is
itself explained in terms of reasons for belief.
Still, (iii) does serve to distinguish beliefs from other states that are similar
in their usefulness in explaining p-ish behavior. And we can make sense of
(iii), given what we have already said about belief. The hallmark of reasons for
is what Joseph Raz calls the normative–explanatory nexus: To explain by citing
someone’s reason is to state a factor in virtue of whose support the action was
22   
performed or the proposition believed.¹² Since what it is to believe is to

represent a proposition as meriting belief, belief is the sort of state that is held
on the basis of considerations that show it to merit belief. And given that the
normative element is a matter of what one should believe in a sense of ‘should’
that is linked to truth, the reasons for belief will be considerations that support
the truth of the proposition. And this helps to explain (iii). I will have much more
to say about the distinctive character of reasons for belief in due course.
There is a further, significant implication of Anscombe’s point. She holds
that whether the ‘why?’ question has application is shown by whether the
agent gives it application. If the agent honestly refuses it application, that
shows that it lacks application, and hence there is no action of the relevant
sort. On the corresponding view of belief, if someone responds to the question
“why do you believe that p?” by honestly saying “I don’t,” it shows that she
doesn’t believe that p. This implies that necessarily, to believe that p entails
knowledge that one believes that p. This is a wildly unpopular but—as I will
argue in chapter two—true thesis. Here, as elsewhere, my course through the
theoretical realm follows the one Anscombe’s charted in the practical realm.
II. Judgment and the Limits of Irrationality
Recall
(iv) Beliefs are governed by the law of non-contradiction.
(iv) may seem like a retread of (ii). After all, if beliefs are assessable according
to the standard of truth, then something is amiss if someone violates a logical
law—by, say, believing both p and not-p. Thus, if governed by the law of non-
contradiction just means that someone whose beliefs violate it is thereby
believing deficiently, it would not be worth additional discussion. But beliefs
are not merely governed by the law in a normative sense.¹³ To see this,
consider that someone who utters a statement of the form ‘p and not-p’ is
unintelligible insofar as we attempt to interpret it as an ordinary conjunction.
The problem is not that we find the expressed attitude rationally deficient.
Rather, we have no idea what attitude toward p to ascribe the speaker.
¹² Raz (2011).
¹³ My thoughts on this topic are deeply indebted to Kimhi (2018), although we agree about almost
nothing.
      23
(Perhaps there are some highly unusual exceptions, e.g., where p is related to
one of the paradoxes of self-reference. I put these to one side here.)
Why should we have no idea what state of mind the asserter of ‘p and ~p’
purports to express? Here is a simple if initially unpromising answer: It is
impossible and not merely rationally deficient to believe a contradiction. The
answer seems to be unpromising for at least this reason: The assertion of a
complex proposition that contains a contradiction in some well-disguised
form is intelligible. For someone might mistakenly take it to be true and assert
it. This suggests that what is genuinely impossible is that someone believes a
contradiction and also believes that it is a contradiction. Believing it to be a
contradiction, and hence false, one disbelieves it. But then the impossibility
would be: believing what one takes to be false and not: believing a contradiction.
Yet: If a thinker fully understands a contradiction, then she knows that it is
necessarily false and so cannot believe it. That is, to credit someone with the
conceptual wherewithal to grasp fully the meaning of a contradictory state-
ment is at the same time to attribute to her knowledge that the statement
cannot be true. Consider a proposition that has the form ‘p & ~p,’ say: “it’s
raining and it’s not raining.” Someone who fails to understand that this is a
contradiction does not qualify as understanding it sufficiently well to genu-
inely believe it. I don’t have a general test for when someone understands a
proposition sufficiently well to qualify as believing it, but I will assume here
both that there is such a thing as what I will call a qualifying understanding for
believing a proposition, and that this case involves someone who lacks it. To
have the cognitive wherewithal to hold a doxastic attitude toward a statement
of the form ‘p & ~p’ is to know that it must be false. In considering it, one
thereby rejects it. And it is not a contingent fact about our psychology that we
cannot do this. There are no superbeings who manage to understand a
statement of that form and affirm it; it is not the sort of inability that might
be overcome with, say, greater biological resources for cognitive processing.
We cannot do it because there is no understanding a proposition of this form
without seeing that it is false. Believing a contradiction, while understanding it
to be a contradiction, is thus a metaphysical and not merely psychological
impossibility. Given what belief is and the understanding that it requires, there
is nothing that could count as a belief in a contradiction.
It is, however, a familiar point that there is a difference between believing
a contradiction and holding a pair of contradictory beliefs. Even if simple
logical falsehoods are impossible to believe, it does not follow that the law of
non-contradiction governs the relation between beliefs in a stronger than
normative sense.
24   
Not only does it not follow, but it can seem simply wrong. People may not
believe simple contradictions, but they do hold contradictory beliefs. Consider
the absent-minded professor, who is preparing a sack lunch for her children,
placing folders and books in their bags, when she receives a text message
announcing that school has been canceled for the day due to classrooms having
been flooded by the recent rains. She is briefly overwhelmed by frustration over
being deprived of another day of writing and broods over how frequently the
school seems to shut down for one reason or another—all the while continuing to
ready her children’s things for a day at school. To make sense of the latter, we
need to understand her as believing that her children are going to school; to make
sense of the former, we need to understand her as believing that her children are
not going to school. She holds contradictory beliefs.
Cases like this one might seem to be a slam-dunk in the case against
understanding the law of non-contradiction as governing the relation between
beliefs in a metaphysical sense. But it is not. To see this, we need to discuss (v).
(v) A belief is the sort of thing one can bring to mind.
It is a crucial feature of the intelligibility of the absent-minded professor that

her mind is in the relevant sense absent in relation to the behavior that
grounds our ascription of one but not the other of the incompatible beliefs.
This absence partly constitutes the lack of connectedness of the two stances.
In this case, it is a matter of distraction; in other cases, one or a combination
of a variety of factors might explain it: denial, repression, forgetfulness,
serious mental illness, etc. Both beliefs are not, as I will put it, in mind or in
consciousness together.
My distinction between beliefs that are and are not in mind is intended as a
competitor to the more familiar distinction between ‘occurrent’ and ‘disposi-
tional’ beliefs. The latter distinction has done more harm than good. It has
bred confusion insofar as not everyone understands ‘occurrent’ in the same
way. For some, the term is used to signify beliefs that are actual as opposed
to potential.¹⁴ In this sense, one might or might not be aware of one’s occurrent
beliefs. For others, it is used to signify beliefs that are inside the current stream of
consciousness.¹⁵ The latter sense in turn sometimes gives rise to the conflation of
beliefs that are not occurrent (in that sense) with unconscious beliefs. The very
¹⁴ See, e.g., Lycan (1986).

¹⁵ This notion has its roots in Hume (1978/1740), 1.3.7 and has been discussed in Price (1969) and
Campbell (1967).
      25
idea that beliefs occur is, as some authors have pointed out, a metaphysical
abomination since beliefs are not events.¹⁶ Furthermore, the entrenchment of
the distinction has obscured the fact that the very idea that beliefs are dispositions
is itself a piece of philosophy, and a bad one at that.
What is uncontroversial is that we do sometimes speak of having/not having
or keeping/not keeping it in mind that p. No doubt we use such phrases in a
variety of ways. One way surely is to refer to something’s being on one’s mind
in the sense of answering to the query: “Penny for your thoughts?”¹⁷ One’s
belief is on one’s mind in that one is attending to the fact (or purported fact)
that p (which is not the same as attending to the phenomenology of one’s
belief). But there is a more interesting distinction in the vicinity, one that will
be important in what follows.
Consider my belief that my name is Eric. This is not a fact to which I attend
very often; rarely, if ever, would I reply to “Penny for your thoughts?” with “I
was just thinking about the fact that my name is Eric.” Nonetheless, I have it in
mind in the following sense: It would be, under current doxastic conditions,
impossible—and not merely deficient—for me to believe that my name is not
Eric. Were I to come to believe that my name is not Eric, this would require
that I forget or change my mind. It couldn’t simply be added to the beliefs
I already have. There are countless beliefs that we have in mind in this sense,
beliefs corresponding to facts (or purported facts) of which we have a standing
awareness, one that excludes metaphysically—and not just normatively—
awareness (or purported awareness) of incompatible facts.
Consider, by contrast, my belief that an electric eel is not an eel. Prior to my
choosing this example, this was not a belief that I had in mind in the sense I’m
now attempting to elucidate. If asked yesterday by a devious aquarium guide to
count the number of eels in a certain tank, I would perhaps have counted the
electric eels as eels (even while recognizing them as electric eels). Perhaps it is
true to say that as I comply with the guide’s request, I hold contradictory
beliefs on the question of whether electric eels are eels. But this is possible
because my belief that electric eels are not eels does not correspond to a
standing awareness of the corresponding fact. Thus, I can thoughtlessly
acquire a contradictory belief without forgetting or changing my mind.
Beliefs that one has in mind are paradigmatic beliefs. This is indicated by
the following explanatory asymmetry. Upon learning someone holds separate
beliefs of the form p and that not-p, we find it puzzling and take it to require
explanation. We would wonder how it is possible. And there are a variety of
¹⁶ See, e.g., Crane (2013), 163. ¹⁷ Cf., Anscombe (2000), 4.

26   
answers that we would accept. She was confused, distracted, did not ‘put it
together,’ lost track of, or was suppressing her belief in one of them. But no
explanation is needed to explain why someone who believes that p cannot
believe that not p.
The phenomenon has come to be obscured in an environment in which
phrases like ‘inconsistent belief-set’ are thrown around without any regard for
how strange the phenomenon actually is. Normally, if we were told of some-
one who used to believe p that they now believe not-p, we would assume that
they changed their mind, not that they had retained their original belief but
also acquired a new, contradictory belief. Normally, it seems plausible to say,
such a thing would not be possible. Something unusual must explain it. We
would lose our grasp on what was being said of the person if it were stipulated
there was no such explanation, if in reply to a demand for an explanation the
attributer simply said: “She just does hold those beliefs and that’s all there is to
it.” This state of affairs, in which someone holds a pair of contradictory beliefs
but there is no explanation of what has gone wrong, is inconceivable. This
supports the notion that there is a mode of believing—the paradigmatic
mode—such that it is impossible to hold contradictory beliefs in this mode.
I will refer to beliefs that one has in mind in the relevant sense as judgments.
The thought, then, is that in paradigmatic cases (i.e., where the beliefs are in
mind) one cannot both believe that p is true and also believe that it is false, i.e.,
one cannot judge that p and also judge that not-p.
Why should it be impossible to make contradictory judgments? One strat-
egy for answering this question connects the concept of a judgment (as just
defined) with the earlier argument against the possibility of believing a simple
contradiction. If there are conditions under which it is possible to have
separate, (simply) contradictory beliefs despite the impossibility of believing
a (simple) contradiction, then evidently those conditions must be such that to
hold those beliefs is not sufficient for believing the conjunction of their
contents. Perhaps, then, the conditions under which it is not possible to
have separate contradictory beliefs are precisely those in which having sepa-
rate beliefs is sufficient for believing the corresponding conjunction:
(iv)# If one judges p and at the same time judges that q, then one judges that
p and q.
To put it differently, one cannot have it in mind that p and that q, and yet fail
to believe p & q. So the impossibility of judging that p and at the same time
judging that not-p just is the impossibility of believing (p & not-p).
      27
To mark the more-than-merely-normative dimension of (iv) I say:
(iv)* Judgments are metaphysically governed by the law of non-contradiction.
According to the approach I develop over the course of this book, every
rational act is informed by the law of non-contradiction. To put p forward is
already to knowingly reject its negation. Still, people do sometimes inadvert-
ently fall into self-contradiction. And when they do so, we hold that they are
failing qua believers, since one of a pair of contradictory beliefs must be false. It
is precisely this normative understanding that makes it impossible to know-
ingly embrace a contradiction. Hence, the metaphysical necessity articulated
by (iv)* is grounded in our rational nature.
The thesis that there is a mode of belief such that beliefs in this mode are
governed by the law of non-contradiction is singularly anachronistic. Many
measure the progress in the study of mind over the last several centuries in
terms of how thoroughly we’ve rejected ideas of this sort. But as instructive as
the exploration of the depths and varieties of our irrationality has been, it has
also obscured elements of our rationality that do not admit of adulteration.
Although there may be various kinds of inconsistency that crop up behind the
scenes, the evaluation of propositions that happens on stage is necessarily free
of it in its self-evident forms. The rational mind is marked by the necessary
absence of unobscured contradiction. And the distinctive rationality of human
beings is not a matter of their mental states exhibiting less irrationality than
other animals, but rather of their possession of sorts of mental states whose
nature is essentially rational in the sense that they are constituted the subject’s
normative judgments. This, in turn, is what gives rise to the possibility of
irrationality. In that sense, humans are both distinctively rational and (conse-
quently) distinctively liable to irrationality.
My pushback against the general trend of rationality-minimization began
just above with what I take to be a fairly uncontroversial thesis: that one
cannot believe a statement of the form ‘p & ~p.’ If one accepts this, one already
takes there to be some truth to (iv)*. Contradictory beliefs are so bad qua
beliefs, that they are literally unbelievable. The question is whether this
phenomenon extends from individual beliefs to the relation between beliefs.
Resistance will become fierce at this step. This is in part due to the general
climate of skepticism regarding the thought that certain forms of irrationality
might be impossible, that a normative feature of a proposed object of belief
could make belief in it impossible. Many view belief as a representation in a
biological information-processing machine. Even if a properly functioning
28   
mind prevents the co-presence of contradictory beliefs, the thought will go,
minds, like every other machine, break down. And even putting such break-
downs aside, the strongest form of necessity that could separate such a pair
would be natural, not metaphysical.
I am under no illusions that the considerations so far marshaled in favor of
(iv)* are sufficient to dislodge the network of mutually supportive assump-
tions, principles, and distinctions that constrain current conceptions of the
available options for understanding belief and the mind more generally. To do
that would require a simultaneous attack on many different fronts. Much of
this is yet to come. But I have here at least tried to cast some doubt on the
notion that beliefs come in two varieties, dispositional and occurrent—an idea
that is now so well entrenched that it is represented in introductory texts
as a first step to understanding belief.¹⁸ In fact, it’s a prophylactic against
philosophical wisdom. Yet many are unable to see the taxonomy as a piece of
philosophy at all.
This is in part because the distinction is sold as the philosophical articula-
tion of a familiar set of phenomena. A belief might be such that one cannot
lose sight of the corresponding fact. These are beliefs that are in mind, in my
sense. But a belief that is out of mind is not a disposition, it is a deficient
categorical state. Someone who believes that p (whether in mind or not) has, if
not a standing awareness, then at least a standing attitude toward a proposi-
tion. Distraction, repression, and the like make it possible for a subject to
possess such a standing attitude toward contradictory propositions. These
beliefs are not in mind. But belief, whether in mind or not in mind, is
categorical: A person-level attitude toward a proposition that, in ideal cases,
is partly constitutive of knowledge of a fact. Belief is the (person-level)
categorical basis of a variety of dispositions.
It is worth spending a moment airing a crucial defect of the view of belief as
disposition. (There are also fatal problems, to be aired in chapter six, with the
way the proponent of dispositional belief conceives its non-dispositional
partner, ‘occurrent belief.’) Dispositionalism distorts the explanatory connec-
tion between believing and the behavior to which believing characteristically
gives rise. (This problem is analogous to one that dogs dispositionalist
accounts of color.)¹⁹ If, for example, a disposition to assert that p is identified
as constitutive (or partly constitutive) of believing that p, then the explanatory
connection between someone’s believing that p and their asserting that p is
minimal, comparable to the explanatory connection between a glass’s being
¹⁸ See Lavelle (2013), 53. ¹⁹ See Jackson (1996).

      29
fragile and its breaking after being dropped. In reply to the question of what it
is about a glass’s being fragile that explains its breaking after being dropped,
one could do no better than say that to be fragile just is to break in such
circumstances. In order to get a better explanation, one would have to drop
down from the level of fragility to the level of its categorical grounds. Similarly,
in reply to the question of what it is about S’s believing that p that explains S’s
asserting that p, one could do no better than say that to believe that p just is to
assert that p under the right conditions. But there ought to be something more
to say here without dropping down to the level of beliefs’ (putative) categorical
grounds. For, intuitively, S is disposed to behave p-ishly (and so to assert that
p) because S believes that p. That p is what someone believes can be a perfectly
good explanation of why she asserted p. Belief, in other words, is not identical
(or partly identical) to but rather explains the relevant dispositions. (This is
among the lessons of the failure of logical behaviorism.)
We can make this complaint less abstract by considering briefly a disposi-
tional approach to the question of why a subject cannot both believe that p and
also believe that not-p. Eric Schwitzgebel argues against the possibility of ever
having contradictory beliefs as follows:
The dispositional properties characteristic of belief that P—for example the

disposition to explicitly judge that P when the question arises, the disposition
to treat the world as though P were the case—conflict with the dispositional
properties characteristic of belief that not-P, such that no person can have a
dispositional profile that simultaneously matches well both the profile of a P-
believer and a not-P-believer.²⁰
No person can have this profile because, roughly, the two dispositions yield
incompatible manifestations in the same contexts. I can’t believe both because
I can’t both be disposed to explicitly judge that P and also to explicitly judge
that not-P when the question of P’s truth arises. So the fact that I can’t believe
both is not explained by my seeing for myself, in conscious reflection, that one
of the propositions must be false. Rather this ‘occurrent judgment’ is itself the
manifestation of an underlying disposition. But a more appealing view—and
one, I would suggest, that would seem obvious absent a commitment to
dispositionalism—is that, e.g., were I to write ‘false’ next to the statement ‘it
is raining and it is also not raining,’ this is simply because I can see that it must
be false. The dispositionalist must say instead, implausibly, that the
²⁰ Schwitzgebel (2010), 544.

30   
consciousness of the impossibility of a contradiction is epiphenomenal—just

another effect of the underlying disposition.
I submit that a theory of belief ought to shed some light on what belief is
such that it gives rise to the various behaviors, thoughts, and feelings that a
dispositional theorist correctly views as characteristic of believers. And this is
precisely what my theory aims to do.
III. Objections
First, many readers will worry about the exclusion of non-human animals and
very young children from the ranks of the believers. To believe requires the
possession of the concepts of truth, belief, and the relevant sense of ‘should,’ in
addition to whatever concepts are required for grasping the believed proposi-
tions. Only someone who possesses these concepts can represent a proposition
as what should be represented as true. It follows that neither non-rational
animals nor pre-rational humans can hold beliefs. Many will consider this a
reductio of the account. That would be a mistake.
There is surely some truth to the contention that non-rational animals
(hereafter, animals) believe, despite their lacking the conceptual wherewithal
even to grasp propositions, let alone to represent them as to be believed. But to
find that truth we must answer the objection, which can take several forms. It
is worth disentangling them in order to isolate the deepest version.
The first version is methodological. By declaring my topic at the start to be
our beliefs, I might be accused of banishing non-rational animals from the
realm of believers by a kind of methodological fiat. But this is wrong. It is not
because of how I’ve elected to use the word ‘belief ’ in this book that cats, mice,
and owls cannot represent a proposition as to-be-believed. And it is because
they can’t do this that I conclude that we do not ascribe to non-rational
creatures what we ascribe to rational ones using the term ‘belief.’ Thus,
I have not simply defined animal belief out of existence.
The second version is semantic. Someone might say that, according to my
view, anyone who uses the term ‘belief ’ to describe a non-human animal is
speaking falsely. Hence animal psychologists and zoologists who explain
animal behavior in terms of belief are mistaken. And we should be very
reluctant to attribute this sort of widespread error to the experts. However,
my thesis is not about the words ‘belief,’ ‘think,’ et al., but about what they
normally designate when applied to adult humans. And what they designate,
I argue, has distinctive features that are in turn explained by aspects of its
 31
nature that also explain why non-rational creatures can’t be in such a state. It is
perfectly consistent with this thesis that the term ‘belief ’ can be correctly used
to refer to the states of non-rational creatures.
This brings us to the most worrisome version of the objection. It can seem
as if my claim that non-rational animals lack beliefs ultimately commits me to
the idea that animals are no more capable of thought than rocks and plants.
But plainly, animals learn about their environment on the basis of perception
and act on the basis of knowledge so acquired. Furthermore, they display, to
varying degrees, intelligence and ingenuity in deploying their perceptual
knowledge. We thus see in animals the same nexus of perception, thought,
and action that we find in humans, a nexus that is, as I have put it previously,
“subserved by significant anatomical and genetic overlap and ultimately
explained by a shared evolutionary history.”²¹ And it can seem as if the only
way of accommodating these facts is by holding that the nature of rational and
non-rational thought is precisely the same.
Yet there are excellent reasons for thinking that the specific cognitive
characteristics in virtue of which a statement attributing a belief to a non-
human is true are different from the truth-makers of the corresponding
attribution to a human. It is part of the truth-conditions of “S believes that
p,” where S is a person, that S has the conceptual wherewithal to understand
p. Even beliefs about which someone is in denial or beliefs that are repressed in
the Freudian sense are such that the believer is capable of grasping the relevant
propositions. Belief is thus linked to understanding. It could not be otherwise
given that believing that p puts one on the hook for answering questions such
as “what are your reasons for believing p?.” The requirement that beliefs be
eligible to be held on grounds thus goes hand-in-hand with the requirement
that the objects of belief be understood by the believer. And it is surely no
coincidence that animal thought does not meet either of these requirements
and that animals are not thought to possess distinctive first-personal knowl-
edge of their own thoughts. Given these interconnected dissimilarities, an
account of non-rational thought should differ sharply from an account of
rational thought. With our account in hand, many otherwise mysterious
aspects of belief become explicable: (1) why a fully adequate answer to the
question of why I believe p can be a statement of why one ought to believe p, (2)
why, in order to count as believing that p, I must have the ability to grasp the
proposition that p, (3) why merely holding a belief explains my ability to avow
²¹ Marcus (2012), 117. I also defend there (albeit differently) the view that non-rational animals are
not believers.
32   
it, and (4) why I cannot intelligibly assert that p and at the same time disavow
the belief that p. These points will be discussed at length in the ensuing
chapters.
The key question is whether one can affirm an account of the sort I advocate
without denying the obvious continuities between the minds of non-rational
and rational animals. I contend that one can, although I will here sketch the
way forward only in broad strokes. The core idea is that human thought and
non-human thought should be understood as distinct species of a single genus.
This is the truth underlying the objection. That both are species of a single
genus—and so we are not simply equivocating in speaking of thought in both
cases—is a function of the common role thought plays at the nexus of
perception and action in the lives of both kinds of creatures. That there are
distinct species of thought is a function of the fact that what one is saying about
an adult to whom one ascribes thought is different from what one is saying of a
non-rational animal to whom one ascribes thought. On this conception, the
acquisition by a species (or an individual) of rationality does not merely add to
existing perceptual, cognitive, and practical capacities, leaving them as they were
(though supplemented by additional capacities). Rather, rationality transforms
the original capacities themselves. Thought of any form puts thinkers in cogni-
tive contact with the world, but the form that this contact takes is different in the
case of rational and non-rational creatures.²² The task for a defender of this
transformative conception of rationality, as Matthew Boyle has called it, is to say,
in a detailed and plausible way, what it means to speak of distinct forms of
thought as opposed to simply of distinct thought-contents.²³
Much of what I’ve just said about animal minds can be said about the minds
of very young humans. But special difficulties for my argument might be
thought to arise about those who are becoming rational. One might suppose
that, at a certain stage of development, children possess concepts, but not the
concepts that make self-reflection possible, and hence that they believe before
they possess mental state concepts. However, this is neither intuitively obvious
nor empirically sound.
²² A full, historical account of human beings would, of course, explain how rational animals evolved
from non-rational animals. Such an account is well beyond the scope of this essay. However, it is worth
emphasizing that my view does not pose any sort of threat to the possibility of such an account. It does
follow from my view that human beings are, with respect of the properties that constitute their rational
nature, qualitatively dissimilar from our ancestors as well as from extant species on our phylogenetic
tree. But there is nothing odd from the point of view of evolutionary theory about the emergence of
qualitative differences.
²³ This understanding of rationality is defended in McDowell (1994). Boyle has gone farther than
anyone else in carrying out the project. See Boyle (2012).
 33
It should be noted, first, that children start to use mental state words (such
as ‘think,’ ‘remember,’ and ‘know’) to refer to mental states at around age two
and a half,²⁴ and that three-year-olds are beginning to acquire the concept of
belief—false-belief test evidence notwithstanding.²⁵ So the question comes
down to whether children between 18 and 36 months are able to make
assertions without the possession of the concepts of ‘belief ’ and ‘reason.’ An
affirmative answer is far from assured by the observation that children at this
age are beginning to string words together into sentences. For the question is
whether they are doing what we are doing when we string words together into
sentences. We are (often) putting forward a sentence as true. And because this
‘putting forward’ is intentional, it is (as argued in the next chapter) a putting
forward as what one believes.²⁶ There is no reason whatsoever to believe that
18-to-36-month-old children do this. Any child who possesses the conceptual
sophistication necessary to do this would also possess the conceptual sophis-
tication necessary to self-ascribe. Of course, this sophistication does not come
all at once. As a child slowly masters the network of interrelated concepts that
provide the necessary background, her grasp of the concept of ‘belief ’ is
incomplete and tentative, and so is her ability to assert.
Second, it might seem that I am simply assuming without argument that
people can never believe things because they want or intend to or have decided
or chosen to, and that a person cannot hold a belief for pragmatic reasons. But
I have no objection to the idea that we can get ourselves into a state that
manifests itself in p-ish behavior via desires, intentions, choice, and therefore
on the basis of pragmatic reasons. I also have no objection to calling those
states ‘belief ’: as I said above, I’m happy to grant anyone the right to use
‘belief ’ as they please. My point is just that such states are not the kinds of
states of which (i)–(vii) must all be true, and so such states are not the states
that I seek to understand. There is no compelling reason to think that every
state that manifests in p-ish behavior is a belief that p. (Again, this is a familiar
point from the ‘alief ’ literature.) Furthermore, nothing I have said about belief
even in my sense rules out the possibility that one might somehow cause
oneself to believe that p—that is, to represent p as to-be-believed—as the
result of desire, intentions, and choice and so on the basis of pragmatic
reasons. I simply deny that it is part of what it is to be in the relevant state
that one represents belief in the corresponding proposition as the object of
one’s desire, intention, or choice.
²⁴ Shatz, Wellman, and Silber (1983). ²⁵ Leslie (1994).

²⁶ Similarly, it is not obvious that children at this age can lie although they can utter falsehoods.
34   
Third, it might be charged that my account contains an unacceptable

circularity. I have explained what it is to believe a proposition in terms of
representing that proposition as what one should believe. But what, it might be
asked, is the attitude that constitutes conformity to this obligation? And can it
be specified without reusing the word ‘belief?
Note first that insofar as belief is on my account a self-reflexive act, the fact
that a specification of the attitude includes re-mentioning the concept of belief
is a feature and not a bug. Second, on the question of whether or not the
account provides illumination, the proof is in the pudding. I have argued as
follows: Someone who conforms to the ‘belief ’ obligation represents p as true,
where ‘representing-as-true’ is a genus that includes both beliefs and non-
beliefs (e.g., implicit biases and visceral fears). The distinguishing mark of
belief, as against the other members of the genus, is that in believing one
represents the proposition as what one should represent as true, in the sense of
‘should’ that is linked to truth-conduciveness. This means that someone who
believes that p views her own attitude toward p as responsive to the various
considerations that constitute her reasons for believing that p (supposing she
has any). I hope to have shed some light on the notion of a reason for belief in
the foregoing discussion and will have much more to say in what follows. This
is, to be sure, not an analytic reduction of the concept of belief to other
concepts. But no one can give an analytic reduction of any interesting concept,
so that is neither here nor there.
Fourth: Perhaps (it might be granted for the sake of argument) a conscious
belief is the representing of a proposition as to-be-believed, but this is not a
plausible view of unconscious beliefs. After all, unconscious beliefs may be
explicitly rejected by the subject. She may know perfectly well that it is false
that p, but yet she finds herself reacting to events in a manner that reveals that
she believes it.²⁷
To reply to this objection, it is worth rehearsing what I take to be a key
motivation behind my proposal. Identifying belief as a normative attitude—as
my answer to the question “what should I represent as true?”—explains why
my believing that p is immediately relevant to related questions, e.g., questions
about what to think about q, about whether to x, whether to be angry at S, etc.
This conception of belief explains why believing that p disposes the believer to
believe, do, and feel various other things. These dispositions are intelligible as a
function of the subject’s appreciation of the normative significance of the
²⁷ Leite (2019). The reply to follow also answers his argument concerning supposedly conscious but
unavowable beliefs.
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172. General Rules.
1. If the front is very extended, or if it runs through close or broken
country, it may be broken up into sections of defence.
2. When acting independently the officer commanding will himself
give the signal for the decisive counter-attack. This attack will, as a
rule, be commanded by the officer specially detailed to command the
general reserve.
173. Duties of the Commanding Officer.

1. He will see that the reserve ammunition is conveniently placed.
2. He will ensure that communication is maintained with the troops
on either flank.
3. He will report all movements of the enemy.
4. If he commands a section of the defence, he will watch for
opportunities for local counter-attack.
5. He will keep up communication by means of his signallers with
his brigadier.
6. He will fix on some central position, where he can receive
reports, and communicate rapidly with all portions of his force.
7. He will arrange for first treatment of casualties on the spot, and
for their transfer to the dressing station of the bearer company.
8. He will make himself acquainted with the best line of retirement
to the rallying position.
THE BRIGADE AND DIVISION IN DEFENCE.

174. General Rules.
1. The duties of a brigade or divisional commander are practically
the same as those of the officer commanding a battalion.
It may be repeated, however: (i) that the rule of detailing a
complete unit, with an adequate staff, for the delivery of the decisive
counter-attack, should always be observed; (ii) that the position of
the officer commanding should be carefully selected.
2. On an extended field of battle, and particularly in broken
country, it is not always easy to find a place where the firing-line can
be supervised, and the opportunities for counter-attack observed
before it is too late to take advantage of them; and in some cases,
the officer commanding will have to rely entirely on the reports of his
staff officers and the subordinate commanders. It is essential, then,
that the system of collection and transmission of information should
be complete and thoroughly understood; in peace exercises as much
attention should be paid to this most important point as to training
officers and men to make clear, concise and useful reports.
SUPPLY AND TRANSPORT OF S.A. (·303-INCH) AMMUNITION IN

THE FIELD.
175. Supply and transport of ammunition in the field.

1. Service ammunition and regimental reserve.—A battalion takes
with it into the field, in regimental charge,
100 rounds per rifle, carried by the soldier;
Service
4,000 rounds packed on the carriage of the
ammunition.
machine gun[8];
2 boxes on each of eight pack animals (i.e.,

one pack animal per company); and 16 boxes in
each of five S.A.A. carts, also 6,600 rounds per
Regimental
machine gun in one S.A.A. cart. (1,000 rounds
reserve.
for Short L.E. rifle and for machine gun, and
1,100 rounds for L.M. or L.E. rifle are carried in
each box).
On the march one pack animal will be in rear of each company;
four S.A.A. carts (including that carrying the machine gun
ammunition), will be in rear of the battalion; the remaining two carts
will form a brigade reserve.
Officers commanding battalions will arrange for the replenishment
of this ammunition at every favourable opportunity. They are
responsible that the ammunition carried by the men is complete, and
that when ammunition is expended, it is replaced with the least
possible delay.
2. Brigade Reserve.—A brigade reserve of small arms
ammunition will be formed by two S.A.A. carts being detached from
each battalion, these will follow in rear of the brigade. Each brigadier
will detail a mounted officer to take charge of the brigade reserve.
3. Divisional Reserve.—A divisional reserve of 100 rounds per
rifle and 8,800 rounds per machine gun is carried in the small arms
ammunition section of the ammunition columns of brigades of
divisional artillery, each of which will supply one of the infantry
brigades of the division to which they belong. The same number of
rounds for corps troops is carried in the special section attached to
the ammunition column of the horse artillery brigade. The divisional
reserves are in artillery charge.
4. Ammunition Park.—Fifty rounds per rifle and 9,000 rounds per
machine gun.
5. General arrangements in the action.—In action the ammunition
pack animals will be advanced as close as possible to their
respective companies, every advantage of cover being taken in
doing so; two S.A.A. carts will follow as close in rear of the supports
to the firing-line as the hostile fire will permit, one being usually in
rear of each wing; the remaining cart will follow in rear of the
battalion reserve. The cart carrying the machine gun ammunition will
move as directed by the officer commanding the machine guns.
During an action the regimental reserve ammunition carried in the
carts will be in charge of the serjeant-major, who should get into
communication with the supports and also the brigade reserve by
means of signallers.
The brigade reserve of ammunition will follow in rear of the centre
of the brigade, or as the General Officer Commanding may direct. It
should be accompanied by signallers, who should maintain
communication with the various regimental reserves.
When a S.A.A. cart with the supports is emptied, it will be
replaced by a full cart from the regimental reserve, the empty cart
being sent back to the brigade reserve, when it will be replaced by a
full one. As soon as there are four empty S.A.A. carts with the
brigade reserve the officer in charge will send a message as follows
to the officer in charge of the divisional reserve: “Send up four S.A.A.
carts to the —th brigade.” It is, however, unnecessary to wait till four
carts are empty, if ammunition is urgently required.
On the arrival of the carts from the divisional reserve, the horses
will be unhooked and changed, and empty carts sent back to the
divisional reserve.
In the event of a brigade in action being ordered to advance
through woods or over broken ground where communication cannot
be maintained, the S.A.A. carts of the brigade reserve may be
distributed between battalions, and the divisional reserve would
conform to the general movement.
In the case of a battalion being detached to any distance a similar
course would be pursued, a brigade reserve being reformed as soon
as possible.
6. Instructions for the officer in charge of the brigade reserve of
ammunition.
(i) He will as soon as possible open up communication with the
divisional reserve and also with the various regimental reserves.
(ii) A mounted orderly will be sent to him from the divisional reserve to
be used only for the purpose of communicating with the divisional
reserve. He will communicate with the regimental reserves by
means of signallers.
(iii) The earliest opportunity is to be taken (when four S.A.A. carts are
empty, or sooner if necessary) to fill up empty carts from the
divisional reserve. The brigade reserve should be regarded as
available for the brigade generally, and also in case of necessity it
will supply ammunition to any troops engaged.
(iv) Men and horses belonging to the brigade reserve are not to be
sent to the divisional reserve.
Men and horses belonging to the divisional reserve are not to
be sent further to the front than the brigade reserve, except in a
case of emergency.
(v) Empty S.A.A. carts are to remain with the brigade reserve until
they are replaced by full ones.
(vi) Receipts prepared by the officer in charge of the divisional reserve
will be signed by the officer in charge of the brigade reserve for
the number of full carts received by him.
(vii) After an action or during a pause in the engagement all
deficiencies of ammunition must be made good from the
divisional reserve.
7. Battalion arrangements for issuing extra ammunition.—Each
company commander will detail one non-commissioned officer and
two privates to act as ammunition carriers (if the company is strong,
three privates should be detailed). Only men of strength and activity
should be selected for this duty, the importance of which cannot be
overrated.
Whenever a serious engagement is imminent, officer commanding
battalions will issue to the men 50 rounds from the S.A.A. carts, so
that, if possible, every man shall carry 150 rounds on his person.
The extra ammunition should generally be issued before leaving the
halting place of the previous night.
During an action every opportunity will be taken for supplying
ammunition to the firing line by sending some up by carriers or with
reinforcements. The carriers bring the ammunition from the pack
animals (or from the S.A.A. carts) in canvas ammunition bags, and
distribute it to the men in the ranks. The bags, when not in use, are
carried on the pack animals. The loads are not to exceed 600 rounds
to each carrier.
When more ammunition is required by the firing-line it will be
taken forward by any men at hand, acting as carriers.
The carriers will move direct to the companies for which they are
destined. If there is a difficulty in their getting back they may be
retained in their ranks till the action is over.
It is the duty of section and squad commanders to make sure that
all ammunition from the killed and wounded is collected and
distributed.
The system of carrying ammunition by hand, here provided for, is
not to prevent every endeavour being made to push the S.A.A. carts
as far forward as practicable. They ought, in ordinary circumstances,
to get within 1,000 yards of the firing-line, and in broken and
undulating ground considerably nearer. With pack animals, it should
be practicable to get within 500 yards of the firing-line.
The immense importance of having a supply of ammunition out of
sight of the enemy, and yet within easy reach of the firing-line, will
justify great risks being incurred in getting it to such a position.
176. Entrenching Tools.

1. The entrenching tools of a battalion are carried on two tool
carts and on eight pack animals (i.e., one per company).
A brigade reserve of entrenching tools is carried on one G.S.
wagon.
2. On the march, the pack animals carrying the tools will be with
those carrying the ammunition, i.e., one in rear of each company.
3. In action, the pack animal carrying the tools will keep as close
to its company as the enemy’s fire will admit, but the driver must use
his discretion in doing so; for instance, on bare open country it will
seldom be advisable to advance the animals close to the firing line,
whereas when advanced positions have been secured, it will usually
be necessary to take tools at once up to the firing line, in order that
the position may be strengthened against counter-attacks.
The tool carts will usually accompany the ammunition cart with the
reserve, and will be under the serjeant-major, the tools, if necessary,
being carried forward when required by men from the reserve.
The brigade reserve of tools will remain with the brigade
ammunition reserve, and will be under the orders of the officer in
charge of the latter.
PART V.
ANNUAL COURSE OF TRAINING.
177. Description of Course.
1. The annual training of the soldier[9] will be conducted on
systematic and progressive principles. Militia and volunteer
battalions will, as far as circumstances permit, observe the spirit of
these instructions.
2. At home it will commence on the 1st March, and terminate on
the 31st October. At tropical or semi-tropical stations the course may
be modified to suit climatic and other conditions; but these
instructions will be observed as closely as possible.
3. The course will commence with company training, continue with
battalion training, which will be followed by brigade and division
training, and terminate with combined manœuvres of all arms.
4. Exercises in the field will as a rule be carried out in service
conditions as regards equipment.
5. Musketry classification practices will be carried out as may be
ordered by the general officer commanding; field practices will be
carried out periodically throughout the course.
178. Detail of the Course.

1. Company Training.—The first period of the annual training will
be exclusively devoted to company training. During this period each
company will be struck off all duties for 36 consecutive working days.
After a brief revision of elementary work the instruction of trained
soldiers will for the most part consist of exercises in the field to
practise subordinate leaders in the art of command and the handling
of men in all service conditions.
Company training will invariably conclude with a practical
inspection by the commanding officer.
2. Battalion Training.—As soon as the company training is
completed, battalion training will commence, for which purpose each
battalion, or portion of a battalion, will be struck off all duties, and be
at the disposal of its commander for at least 18, and if possible 24,
consecutive working days. The training will mainly consist of
exercises in the field, including firing, marching, &c.
(i) In the earlier portion of this period battalions may, if their
commanders consider it expedient, be sub-divided, and exercised
under arrangements similar to those laid down for the company.
(ii) At stations where single battalions are quartered, or where
detachments are formed, the spirit of the above instructions will
be observed.
(iii) The General Officer Commanding will hold his inspection towards
the conclusion of the training.
3. Brigade and Division Training and Manœuvres.—Brigade and
division training and manœuvres will take place during the remaining
months of the annual course, the time allotted to each being decided
by the General Officer Commanding.
4. In carrying out the course it is open to General Officers
Commanding, while conforming to the spirit of the above detail, to
modify it to suit the circumstances of any particular command. Thus
in some cases it may be more convenient to strike off for training
each company or battalion for three days during each week; or, at
stations where brigade and division training and combined
manœuvres cannot take place, more time may be allotted to
company and battalion training respectively. It will, however, be
exceptional for a battalion not to be trained annually with its own and
other arms of the service.
5. During the furlough season every facility is to be given to well
conducted men to visit their friends; but this period will be occupied
by such officers and men as are present with the battalion in:—
The training of officers in professional duties (see King’s Regulations,
para. 676, and “Combined Training,” S. 180.)
The special training of subaltern officers of companies as instructors
and leaders.
The special training of non-commissioned officers.
Instruction of scouts.
Company officers, non-commissioned officers and men should have at
least two hours physical training every week during the furlough
season.
Obstacle training.
Drill.
Visual training (see S. 18, Musketry Exercises).
Training and inspection of signallers.
Training of machine gun detachments, and range takers.
Training in semaphore signalling. All officers and non-commissioned
officers and 20 per cent. of the men to be trained.
179. Annual Course of Training of Auxiliary Forces.

1. The annual training of units will be carried out on the same
systematic and progressive principles as have been laid down for the
Regular Forces.
2. It is not possible for the Auxiliary Forces in the limited time for
training at their disposal to carry out the provisions of the annual
course as laid down for the Regular Army, but the spirit of the
instructions will be observed.
3. The annual training in camp will be confined to tactical
exercises and fire discipline, &c., except in the case of the Militia, by
whom drill may, in addition, in very exceptional circumstances be
practised.
180. General rules for annual training.

1. All ranks to be instructed.—Every available officer, non-
commissioned officer, and man, with the exception of private soldiers
of more than fifteen years’ service, bandsmen, pioneers, and such
as are exempted from the annual course of musketry, will be
present, and will be relieved of all other duties. Leave or furlough
will, on days of instruction, be granted only in very exceptional
circumstances.
2. During the course the battalion should, if practicable, go into
camp or bivouac in service conditions for four days; this may be
done separately by companies if more convenient.
181. Company training.

1. Method of instruction.—The duty of the officer commanding the
battalion is to supervise the training of the company and give
company leaders the benefit of his experience, but he should not lay
down the method to be employed in the training of companies. The
training must be carried out by the officers of the company without
undue interference on the part of superiors. It is only when the
methods are manifestly wrong, and would work harm, that there
should be interference.
Particular attention must be paid to the individual instruction of the
soldier, and to the improvement of his capacity to think and act for
himself. This can best be attained by explanation previous to and
during an exercise, and by repetition of the practice when necessary;
it should be remembered, however, that the interest of the men is apt
to flag if they are kept too long at one subject.
The basis of the whole system of training is careful individual
instruction, and gradual progression from the simple to the more
difficult.
During instruction in elementary principles companies should act
alone, or against a marked enemy and the company commander
should concentrate his attention on the individual instruction of his
men; but in many of the advanced exercises an opposing body gives
not only increased interest to the practice, but also makes it more
instructive.
When companies act as opposing forces, each practice should be
based on a definite supposition and object, a scheme should be
drawn up and executed as far as is possible in conditions of actual
warfare, and a mounted officer should be detailed to act as umpire.
The greatest attention must be paid to the development of section
and squad command. The capable leading of smaller units is an
important item of success in the attack.
During inclement weather, instruction will be given in the drill shed
or barrack room by means of lectures, explanations, &c.
Each day’s work should be carefully prepared by company
commanders, and short lectures of about 20 minutes on the
exercises to be carried out, given to all ranks.
At the practice of outpost duties a broad distinction should be
drawn between individual instruction and tactical training. During the
former every private should be posted as sentry, the company
should be exercised in the rudiments of outpost work, and the
prescribed duties should be carried out without reference to the
tactical situation, or the employment of the minimum number of men
in the sentry line; the main body of the piquet may, in order to save
time and give more practice in sentry and patrol duty, be indicated by
a flag. Daring tactical training outposts should be placed in
accordance with a scheme, strictly in service conditions.
2. Examination by the commanding officer.—At the end of the
course the officer commanding the battalion will devote one day to
an examination of the company. The scheme for this day should be
drawn up either under the direction of the general officer
commanding, or by the commanding officer.
3. General officers commanding.—They will personally supervise
the companies under training as much as possible, and when
circumstances permit be present at the examination by the
commanding officer.
4. Musketry course to be combined.—The field practices which
can be combined with training, should be carried out as part of a
tactical exercise.
In field practices in which the whole company fires at one time,
the exercise may, in the first instance, be practised with blank
ammunition, and afterwards be carried out with ball cartridge. During
the exercise the manner in which the men take advantage of cover,
and how they adapt the firing position to the irregularities of the
ground, will be carefully watched by the company instructor.
5. Equipment for instruction.—The tents and tools authorised
Equipment Regulations, Part I, S. X, “Camp Equipment and
Intrenching Tools,” and the bridging stores laid down in Regulations
for Engineer Services, will, in ordinary circumstances, be sufficient
for the instruction. Should any increased issue be required, a special
application will be made through the general officer commanding.
6. Returns.—To ensure that every man is accounted for, A.F. B
214 will be kept during the annual training and produced for the
inspection of the general officer commanding, if he desires.
5. Night Operations.—On days when night operations are to be
carried out the work during the day should be of a light nature,
although not suspended altogether.
Night outposts should be practised on four occasions at least.
6. Intrenched posts, &c.—Arrangements will, whenever possible,
be made by general officers commanding for a post to be placed in a
state of defence in order that the defences and obstacles mentioned
in para. 8 (vii) may be shown to the men. They should occasionally
place the services of an officer of the Royal Engineers at the
disposal of company commanders to give technical advice on the
entrenchments and field work executed by the company.
7. Blank ammunition.—Blank ammunition will be used in
practising the more advanced exercises.
8. Syllabus of Instruction.—The Syllabus of Instruction is given as
a guide; the captain being held responsible that his company is
thoroughly instructed. To ensure this it may be necessary to repeat
many, and combine some of the practices.
(i) Attack and defence; general principles; control of fire; effect of fire;
fire discipline; infantry formations with regard to fire; protection of
flanks; duties of half company, section, and squad commanders.
Infantry in attack; general rules; distribution; duties of several
bodies; the decisive attack; the assault; rallying and redistribution;
measures to secure a position won; holding attacks; feints; flank
attacks; surprises; issue of orders; formations generally and
formations to meet emergencies; frontage, direction, pace;
utilisation of cover and adapting formations to ground; fire
positions and mutual support of units, by fire, to cover advances;
practice of casualties. Infantry in defence; distribution; occupation
of a position; counter-attacks. Attack and defence of positions,
woods, defiles, bridges, houses, &c. Retirements. Action against
cavalry and artillery. Escort to guns. Supply of ammunition.
(ii) Composition, formation and action of advanced, rear and flank
guards, by day and night, in various circumstances.
(iii) Scouting. Conduct of patrols by day and night in varying country.
Reconnoitring positions, woods, defiles, villages. Importance of
observing and reporting accurately what is seen. Necessity of
transmitting information. Ambuscades.
(iv) Outposts, general principles; importance of vigilance of change
from day to night positions; attack by day and night. Opportunity
must be given for locating sounds and estimating their distance
by night. Night marching to be combined with surprise attacks on
the outpost line.
(v) Convoys; their escort, attack and defence.
(vi) Use of pick and shovel; marking out and execution of tasks;
extension of working parties by day and night. Execution of
shelter trenches and a portion of a field work; selection of site,
profile, construction by day and under cover of darkness.
(vii) Defence of hedges, banks, ditches, posts, houses, &c. Obstacles.
Construction of loopholes. Use of cutting tools. Revetments.
Penetration of bullets.
(viii) Knotting and lashing. The loading of pack animals Method of
packing wheeled transport.
(ix) Camping. Pitching, striking, unpacking and packing tents in the
valise. Telling off camp parties. Bivouacs. Sanitary precautions in
camp and on the line of march; position and construction of
latrines. Field kitchens; cooking in mess tins; kneading and
baking bread and chupatties; cooking of ration biscuits. Orders
concerning water supply and boiling of water. Expedients for
increase of men’s comfort in the field; care of feet.
182. Battalion Training.

1. Method of instruction—
The training of the battalion will be carried out on the principles
that have been laid down for the company.
SPECIAL TRAINING OF NON-COMMISSIONED OFFICERS.
183. Method of Instruction.

The non-commissioned officers of companies, and privates likely
to become non-commissioned officers, will be instructed by the
officers of the company in the following subjects. The value of the
instruction given to non-commissioned officers, and their knowledge
in map reading, &c., will be tested by general and commanding
officers.
1. Subjects—
(i) Map reading.
(ii) Duties as commanders of sections and squads.
(iii) Duties on outposts.
(iv) Duties on advanced, rear and flank guards.
(v) Scouting and the development of powers of observation.
(vi) Duties as commanders of patrols.
(vii) Writing brief reports of information gained.
(viii) Defence of small posts.
2. Method of instruction—
The training in the subjects enumerated in para. 1 will be carried
out partly by lectures, but chiefly in the field. The following points
may be mentioned to show the line which should be adopted in
carrying out the instruction.
(i) Map reading.—Having received theoretical instruction in this
subject, non-commissioned officers should be shown how to fix their
position on a map, how to identify places by means of it, and how to
use it in a strange country. They should next be assembled at a point
in the vicinity of the station; each provided with a map, and directed
to meet the officer at some other point at a given hour, to move by a
different road, and to march at a given rate.
(ii) Outposts.—By small outpost schemes, when the non-
commissioned officers’ knowledge of the subjects should be tested
by questions as to the positions they would suggest for the various
portions of the outposts.
(iii) Reconnaissance.—By sending the non-commissioned officers
out from an imaginary outpost line as commanders of patrols and
directing them to furnish short reports.
PART VI.
CEREMONIAL.
184. General Rules.
1. Except when it may be necessary to line the streets for
ceremonies, the instructions given in this Part are to be confined
exclusively to the occasions mentioned.
2. Formation of companies.—Companies will fall in in line, be
equalized and sized from flanks to centre, numbered from right to
left, and told off into half companies and sections. Squad
commanders will be in the ranks. The commanders of the outer
sections will be on the flanks of the front rank; they will carry out the
duties laid down in Part II for squad commanders in a similar
position, and will dress the company if required; they will fix bayonets
when the men do. In other respects the instructions in Parts II and III
are applicable to the formation of companies, and to the position of
supernumeraries. Signallers and pioneers will remain in the
supernumerary rank of their companies. When a non-commissioned
officer is in command of a company, he will, in marching past in
column, or column of double companies, take post three paces in
rear of the centre of the company.
3. Posts of mounted officers.—In line, the commanding officer will
place himself twenty paces in front of the centre of the line.
The second in command will be on the right, and the adjutant on
the left of the line of company commanders.
A third field officer, if present, will be on the right of the adjutant.
In column or quarter column the mounted officers will be in the
same positions as in Part III, with the exception that the adjutant will
be four paces from the centre of the directing flank of the rear half-
battalion.
When a column or quarter column is on the move, the second in
command will place himself in a position from which he can best
superintend the direction of the advance and the covering of the
section commanders on the directing flanks.
4. Posts of other officers.—The position of the other officers is as
detailed in Parts II and III, except that in marching past in quarter
column, in line of quarter columns, or in mass, the company
commanders will, when on the saluting base, take post on the
directing flank of their companies, covered by the section
commander (aligned with the rear rank).
5. The Colour party.—In line the Colours, each carried by an
officer (as directed in the King’s Regulations), will be placed between
the two centre companies; the King’s Colour on the right, the
Regimental Colour on the left, with a serjeant between them and two
non-commissioned officers or selected privates, covering them in
line with the rear rank. The officer carrying the King’s Colour will
command the party.
If the line is ordered to retire the Colour party will turn about, and
the centre serjeant, stepping forward two paces, will align himself
with the rear rank.
In column or quarter column, the Colour party will be in rear of the
leading centre company, its front rank aligned with the
supernumerary rank covering the fourth, fifth, and sixth files from the
directing flank.
In quarter column, as above, but the two non-commissioned
officers in the rear rank will move up respectively on the right and left
of the Colours.
In column of double companies the Colour party will be in rear of
the centre of the second double company.
6. Posts of staff officers, &c.—Posts of staff officers and staff
serjeants, band and drams (or bugles), machine gun, regimental
transport and stretcher bearers and cyclists, when present, are
shown in Plates IX and X.
7. Officers’ swords, when to be drawn and returned.—On
ceremonial parades, officers will draw their swords as they fall in; the
commander of a parade will not draw his sword unless a senior
officer be present on parade. Swords will be at the Carry when
colours are at the Carry, S. 189, on other occasions they will be at
the Slope.
8. Marking points and markers.—Flags or posts may be set up to
mark the line on which troops are to form, or the line may be picked
out, or marked by whitewash.
The section commanders of the inner sections of a company are
available to act as markers, and one or both may be employed, if
desired. The words on markers should precede the command
given when it is required to dress on markers. Markers in giving
points should turn towards the point of formation at arm’s length in
front of the alignment, with arms at the slope on the shoulder furthest
from the alignment. When the men approach they will extend their
inner arm at right angles to the body with the fist clenched, on which
the line will dress. When the dressing is completed markers will
resume their positions on the command steady.
185. Sizing a Company.

Companies will be sized in the following manner.
tallest on The whole will break off and arrange
the right, themselves according to their size in single rank,
shortest the tallest on the right and the shortest on the left,
on the carrying their rifles at the short trail, and take up
left. in their dressing by the right.
single
rank.—
size.
number. From right to left of the whole company.
slope The odd numbers will take one pace forward,

arms. odd and the even numbers will step back one pace.
numbers

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Belief, Inference, and the

Self-Conscious Mind Eric Marcus

Conscious Mind, Resonant Brain: How Each Brain Makes a

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The Implicit Mind: Cognitive Architecture, the Self,

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A Tripartite Self: Mind, Body, and Spirit in Early

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Target and Destroy Tom Marcus

The Tinkering Mind : Agency, Cognition, and the

Belief, Inference, and the

Belief, Inference, and the

For my daughters, Lola and Bea.

1. Belief and Judgment 9

6. The Unity of the Rational Mind 123

We do philosophy when we cannot see how something simple and obvious

Insofar as belief aims at truth, it is bad in some sense to hold contradictory

mind is what constitutes this causal–normative nexus. And what constitutes it

to this position, including—at length—the objection that the account is under-

in inferring q from p, this bringing-about happens in light of the subject’s

the reality of this phenomenon. To make further progress, we must go beyond

(i)To believe that p is to represent p as true.

10   

unproblematic uses of ‘belief,’ uses on which it refers to something else. For

¹ Bernard Williams introduces ‘aim’-talk to the literature on belief in Williams (1973).

   11

I. Belief and Truth

Nishi Shah and David Velleman argue that

(i) to believe that p is to represent p as true.

² Shah and David Velleman (2005).

12   

believe. Even if there is a sense in which I represent ‘cockroaches are danger-

(i)* to believe that p is to represent p as what one should represent as true.

To see how it can do this, i* itself must be clariﬁed. Responding to a pair of

   13

The butter example shows that i* is hopeless if ‘should represent as true’

(i)** To believe that p is to represent p as to-be-believed.⁵

⁴ Boghossian (2014). Cf., Lavin (2011).

14   

   15

16   

   17

necessarily the) product of engaged as opposed to disengaged deliberation. We

18   

   19

(i)** to believe that p is to represent p as to-be-believed

(ii) truth is a standard by which beliefs are assessed.

After all, if what it is to believe that p is to represent it as to-be-believed, in the

20   

(ii)* the believer understands her beliefs to be assessable by the standard of

This connection between belief and truth helps to explain (iii):

(iii) A certain sense of the question ‘why?’ has application to beliefs.

In formulating (iii), I borrow language from a famous passage in Anscombe’s

⁹ Anscombe (2000), 9. ¹⁰ The terminology is from Schwitzgebel (2011).

   21

What distinguishes beliefs from other sources of p-ish behavior? A certain

22   

performed or the proposition believed.¹² Since what it is to believe is to

II. Judgment and the Limits of Irrationality

(iv) Beliefs are governed by the law of non-contradiction.

      23

24   

(v) A belief is the sort of thing one can bring to mind.