Disagreement and Belief II: Managing the Puzzles

The major conclusion emerging from this chapter is that a certain understanding of the phenomenon of belief, underlying most theorizing on the epistemology of disagreement, obscures important aspects of the phenomenon of interpersonal disagreement. According to this understanding, beliefs are attitudes toward objects of thought denoted by that-clauses used for attributing beliefs. The chapter presents a more exact and more realistic picture of what believing is, and what it is for beliefs of different people to be in conflict. It is loosely based on Robert Stalnaker’s and Akeel Bilgrami’s theories about mental content.