Intuitive and Reflective Beliefs

Humans have two kinds of beliefs, intuitive beliefs and reflective beliefs. Intuitive beliefs are a fundamental category of cognition, defined in the architecture of the mind. They are formulated in an intuitive mental lexicon. Humans are also ca able of entertaining an indefinite varie itionafatfiby other beliefs that describe the source of the reflective belief as reliable, or that provide an explicit argument in favour of the reflective belief. The mental lexicon of reflective beliefs includes not only intuitive, but also reflective concepts. of higher-order or ’reflective’ pro tudes, many of which are of a creda 7 sort. Reasons to hold reflective be l i e r r e provided I used to be a full-time anthropologist. Anthropologists often make statements of the form: ’The So-and-so believe that . . .’. Few of them have bothered to discuss what they mean by ‘belief‘ (the most notable exception being Rodney Needham, 1972). Over the years, I have raised several objections to these attributions of beliefs, and have tried to outline a more fine-grained account of the cognitive attitudes involved (Sperber, 1975,1982/1985,1990, 1994b, 1996). Just as the common term ’jade’ corresponds to two substances, jadeite and nephrite, with similar phenomenal properties but quite different chemical structures, the folk-psychological term ‘belief‘, I have argued, corresponds to two psychological categories, similar in some behavioural and epistemological respects, but different in cognitive organization and role. I call these two psychological categories ‘intuitive beliefs’ and ’reflective beliefs’. In this paper I would like to develop the argument in a manner that addresses questions and objections that I have received from psychologists and philosophers of mind. 1. Intuitive Beliefs When we claim of an organism that it possesses a cognitive system, we attribute to it at least two kinds of representations. The overall function of Many thanks to Ned Block, Susan Carey, Pascal Engel, Pierre Jacob, Gloria Origgi (and all the participants in her ’Metarepresentations’ seminar at the CREA), Francois Recanati (with whom I have been discussing the topic for years) and Deirdre Wilson. Address for correspondence: CREA, Ecole Polytechnique, 1 rue Descartes, 75005 Pans, France. Email sperber@poly.polytechnique.fr.