Acting Contrary to Our Professed Beliefs

in draft

There appears to be no ordinary language occurrent use of “believing”.  Further, using the phrase “occurrent belief” to describe instances of judgment can prevent us from recognizing that judgment is often insufficient for belief.  For example, someone may sincerely judge (even know?) that all races are of equal intelligence (or that death is not bad, or that the bridge is closed) without undergoing the broad dispositional transformation necessary to make us comfortable ascribing her the corresponding belief.  Our dispositions do not always fall neatly into line when we reach a judgment.  Often it takes work to fully, dispositionally believe something we occurrently judge to be the case.

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