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It is impossible to hold contradictory beliefs in mind together at once. Eric Marcus examines the nature of belief and inference, in light of the phenomenon of rational necessity, to reveal how the unity of the rational mind is a function of our knowledge of ourselves as bound to believe the true.
List of contents
- Introduction
- 1: Belief and Judgment
- 2: The Self-Consciousness of Belief
- 3: Making Nonsense of Moore's Paradox
- 4: The Challenge for an Account of Inference
- 5: Inference Without Regress
- 6: The Unity of the Rational Mind
- Conclusion: Philosophical Judgment
About the author
Eric Marcus is Professor of Philosophy at Auburn University. He works chiefly in the philosophy of mind and action, but has also published widely in epistemology, metaphysics, aesthetics, and the philosophy of language. He is the author of Rational Causation (Harvard University Press).
Summary
It is impossible to hold contradictory beliefs in mind together at once. Eric Marcus examines the nature of belief and inference, in light of the phenomenon of rational necessity, to reveal how the unity of the rational mind is a function of our knowledge of ourselves as bound to believe the true.
Additional text
Some of the most significant moments in the history of philosophy are those moments in which we find ourselves hard-pressed to make sense of something obvious and ordinary. Marcus's book marks such a significant moment: he begins from the ordinary observation that, although our beliefs are often false and inconsistent, it is nonetheless impossible to consciously believe what we know to be false. But what could explain this impossibility? Marcus shows that the only way to explain this observation is to conceive of belief as involving the believer's endorsement of it as true, and more generally to conceive of the various postures of the reasoning mind as each involving endorsement of its own correctness. The result is a compelling defense of self-consciousness as the mark of the reasoning mind.
