Thursday, June 12, 2014

Eric Mandelbaum - 2014/06/13



Date: 13th of June
Time: 11:30 am
Place: Conference room, Pavillon Jardin - 29, rue d'Ulm - 75 005 Paris
Speaker: Eric Mandelbaum (Harvard Univ.)
Title: Fragmentation of Thought and the Web of Belief.”
Abstract: At least since Quine, it has been thought that beliefs are stored in a web-like structure. The web of belief model has three main commitments: that all the beliefs one has are synchronically causally related; that the beliefs in the center of the web correspond to the necessary truths, while contingent truths are housed at the periphery; and that strength of belief is a function of how centrally stored the belief is. However, this view is generally supported on epistemological, not psychological, grounds. The cognitive science of belief appears to falsify all three Quinean commitments. In this talk, I’ll discuss how a psychofunctional theory of belief reformulates our models of belief storage and updating.