Résumé
Common forms of functionalism hold that one cannot have any types of propositional attitude without having a whole suite of them. Thus, one couldn’t (e.g.) have beliefs but not have desires, hopes, wishes, and the like. Accordingly, it is generally supposed that all attitudes are on equal footing—that is, they come as a package and none has priority over any other. However, this picture is in tension with a psychofunctional approach to propositional attitudes, which holds that it is an open empirical question as to which attitudes are governed by psychological law and are thus proper objects of study for cognitive science. In particular, belief seems to have a singular cognitive importance among the attitudes. Beliefs are acquired in a ballistic fashion, with people automatically (and often unconsciously) believing the propositions they encounter. Only after acquisition can one attempt to reject the information. After presenting some new data about automatic belief acquisition and fluency, I’ll introduce a picture of why belief has certain phylogenetic, ontogenetic, and causal priority among the attitudes. I’ll then examine the case study of antivaccination attitudes to show how belief can spur on behavior without the need to posit desire or any other propositional attitude.
