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.
