Alief

Abstract: Preface Introduction PART I: THOUGHT EXPERIMENTS, INTUITIONS AND PHILOSOPHICAL METHODOLOGY Thought Experiments in Science 1. Galileo and the Indispensability of Scientific Thought Experiment 2. Thought Experiments Rethought - and Reperceived Thought Experiments and Personal Identity 3. Exceptional Persons: On the Limits of Imaginary Cases 4. Personal Identity and Thought-Experiments Intuitions and Philosophical Methodology 5. The Real Guide to Fake Barns: A Catalogue of Gifts for Your Epistemic Enemies 6. Philosophical Thought Experiments, Intuitions and Cognitive Equilibrium PART II: PRETENSE, IMAGINATION AND BELIEF Imaginative Resistance 7. The Puzzle of Imaginative Resistance 8. Imaginative Resistance Revisited Pretense and Belief 9. On the Relation between Pretense and Belief 10. Self-Deception as Pretense Imagination and Emotion 11. Genuine Rational Fictional Emotions 12. Imaginary Contagion Belief and Alief 13. Alief and Belief 14. Alief in Action (and Reaction)

Abstract: Despite its enduring popularity, theatrical magic remains all but ignored by art critics, art historians, and philosophers. This is unfortunate, since magic offers a unique and distinctively intellectual aesthetic experience and raises a host of interesting philosophical questions. Thus, this article initiates a philosophical investigation of the experience of magic. Section I dispels two widespread misconceptions about the nature of magic and discusses the sort of depiction it requires. Section II asks, “What cognitive attitude is involved in the experience of magic?” and criticizes three candidate replies; Section III then argues that Tamar Szabo Gendler's notion of “belief-discordant alief” holds the key to a correct answer. Finally, Section IV develops an account of the experience of magic and explores some of its consequences. The result is a philosophically rich view of the experience of magic that opens new avenues for inquiry and is relevant to core issues in contemporary aesthetics.

Abstract: The author argues for three interconnected theses which provide a cognitive account for why humans intuitively believe that others survive death. The first thesis, from which the second and third theses follow, is that the acceptance of afterlife beliefs is predisposed by a specific, and already well-documented, imaginative process - the offline social reasoning process. The second thesis is that afterlife beliefs are social in nature. The third thesis is that the living imagine the deceased as socially embodied in such a way as to continue to fulfill on-going social obligations with others. The author further suggests six reasons why the fantasy/reality distinction breaks down for the imaginer such that the continued existence of the decedent in the afterlife is believed to be real. Finally, the author suggests avenues for further research which would support this cognitive account.

Abstract: In a series of publications, Tamar Gendler has argued for a distinction between belief and what she calls ‘alief’. Gendler's argument for the distinction is a serviceability argument: the distinction is indispensable for explaining a whole slew of phenomena, typically involving ‘belief-behaviour mismatch’. After embedding Gendler's distinction in a dual-process model of moral cognition, I argue here that the distinction also suggests a possible (dis)solution of what is perhaps the organizing problem of contemporary moral psychology: the apparent tension between the inherently motivational role of moral judgments and their manifestly objectivistic phenomenology. I argue that moral judgments come in two varieties, moral aliefs and moral beliefs, and it is only the former that are inherently motivating and only the latter that have an objectivistic phenomenology. This serves to both bolster the case for the alief/belief distinction and shed new light on otherwise well-trodden territory in metaethics. I start...