The Phenomenology of Belief Change

Odd that Colin McGinn's invitation to opine on the origin of values should (d)evolve into an amateur's inquiry into the phenomenology of belief change. (Well, not really all that odd -- one of the charms, and perhaps even virtues, of blogs is that their readers are so rarely able to stick to the point.)

In sum, my argument is that belief change about matters of fact is in some ways akin to shifts in aesthetic taste, in that a large part of the story takes place "under the hood of conscious rationality": 

When I comparatively assess a highly complex set of inductive arguments relating a broad range of observations to competing theories, I don't take an inventory of all the arguments, assign them each a persuasion-index, assign each ordered subset of arguments coherence indices, then run an algorithmic abduction routine to adjudicate between the contestants. Instead, over time, I just sort of "get the sense" that my (new) preference for one theory over the other is justified, and that I have ample evidence to back us up.

Naturally, our conscious rationality likes to take the credit for all the cognitive work done (wouldn't you?), and so casts a partially random assembly of facts as "the reasons" we changed our mind. I suspect this phenomenon is a function of conscious reason's confabulating a rational "cover" for the gradual change in the agent's "taste" in certain types and/or clusters of arguments. Or so I argue (in more detail) over at McGinn's original post.

The only reason (and I promise that it really is "the" reason) I bring this business up here is that the Edge World Question for 2008 is "What have you changed your mind about?" And, as you might expect, a few of the answers touch on this issue of (some of) what is involved when you change your mind. In case you're interested in the topic (and you got this far, so why stop now?), I'm passing them along:

• A. Garrett Lisi ("I Used To Think I Could Change My Mind")
• Ernest Poeppel ("Being Caught In The Language Trap -- Or Wittgenstein's Straitjacket")
• Mary Catherine Batson ("Making And Changing Minds")

Comments

[Dom]

I suspect you are right. But I know my own bias is toward self-doubt, and must try to correct for it.

I'm not sure how much to take notice or be wary of this "taste" in arguments or facts, though. Isn't it just a restatement of the truism that what convinces you is what is convincing to you? (Although, I get that it's the "partially random" part that's probably not the best for someone who's deluding them self they're making a rational change.)

[Q the Enchanter]

"I'm not sure how much to take notice or be wary of this "taste" in arguments or facts, though."

Neither am I. The fact that the narrative about how our belief change came about is largely confabulated doesn't mean that our belief change wasn't otherwise justified. I suppose the phenomenon is merely an extra bit of evidence in support of a modest externalism.

[Roman]

Just out of curiosity: do you really believe that it is the phenomenology of belief change that makes us think our belief-changes are rational?

Here's what I mean: we need to see belief-changes as rational in order to explain them. And by interpreting belief-changes as rational, we might come to believe that they are rational. But, frankly, when I examine my own mental states in cases of belief-change (at least, to the best of my abilities), I can't for the life of me see any rational process going on there.

[Q the Enchanter]

Hi Roman, I think (and I sense you agree) that our introspection-based explanations for our adjustments in complex beliefs are bound to be incomplete. But that's not necessarily an objection to believing that our beliefs change reliably in response to reasons -- to "see[ing] belief-changes as rational" in some sense. If you define rationality as response grounded in reasons that are accessible to consciousness and rationality* as response grounded in reasons that are inaccessible to consciousness, it's probably fair to say we routinely credit ourselves with being rational when (at best) we are merely being rational*. Nonetheless, even if that's so, rationality* is probably rationality enough.

[John]

Please check out this reference on the complete arbitariness of all beliefs.

http://global.adidam.org/books/transcendental-realism.html

Plus a related comprehensive discussion on the shallowness of our normal dreadful sanity.

http://www.aboutadidam.org