On Tuesday October 12^th (12.20-13.20) Harmen Ghijsen will pitch his VIDI-project “Varieties of Belief” in order to get some helpful feedback. You can find the summary below, so you know what to expect.

The lunch seminar will take place in E15.39/41, but will also be screened via Zoom (https://radbouduniversity.zoom.us/j/82970632005?pwd=ZThQMHE1eUdIU1IvbVJheGJkNDdGUT09). If you are at the Radboud and you would like to join the meeting, please send an email to Nina de Boer (nina.deboer@ru.nl)

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There’s an enormous variety among the things we call ‘beliefs’. For example, we can believe that there’s milk in the fridge, that equality and solidarity should be prioritized by our politicians, that God exists, or that the earth is a globe that travels through space at approximately 1.3 million mph. It’s not at all clear that all of these beliefs have the same properties. Some are short-lived, others are more enduring; some are central to our personal identity, others are of little importance; some have a large impact on our daily behaviour, others have almost no impact at all.

Despite these apparent differences, all of these examples are often counted as instances of a single mental type, i.e., belief. This project will investigate to what extent this classification of the varieties of belief is justified. Its working hypothesis is that a dispositionalist account of belief, which stresses a continuum of kinds of believing, provides a useful framework from which to characterize the varieties of belief (Part A). It develops this account of belief further in an interplay with several case studies of belief: that of implicit bias, conspiracy beliefs, and religious belief (Part B).

Given the ubiquity of the notion of belief in philosophy, this project has widespread consequences for a multitude of philosophical areas: for instance, if the category of belief is far more heterogeneous than expected, then there might not be just one theory that can explain how, say, beliefs relate to our actions (action theory), or how beliefs are justified (epistemology). In addition, the project also has clear societal relevance by means of its case studies. Investigating in what way implicit bias, conspiracy theorizing and religious beliefs are (un)like more mundane cases of belief can help to understand and deal with them appropriately.