Belief and Acceptance

Conditions for the rationality of believing that p, and conditions for the rationality of accepting that p, have been treated indistinguishably in much of the recent philosophical literature about rationality.1 Also belief has been discussed ad nauseam in the literature of cognitive science, and next to nothing said therein about acceptance.2 The result has been a widespread tendency to ignore the fact that there are many important differences between belief and acceptance, which are relevant to quite a range of issues in epistemology, the philosophy of science and cognitive science. I have tried to articulate some of those differences elsewhere,3 in the context of an enquiry into the nature of the 'intuitions' which, whether under that name or another, have been frequently invoked by post-1945 analytical philosophers on both sides of the Atlantic as supplying premisses for their arguments. Specifically, my thesis was that any such intuition belongs to a distinctive species of belief, which I tried to characterize, and that the content of such a belief-normally a proposition about the validity of a particular argument, the absurdity of a particular locution, the moral rightness of a particular decision, etc.-may justify, or help to justify, the acceptance of an appropriately general philosophical conclusion. What I want to do in the present article is not to say anything more about philosophical intuition but to trace out, in a similarly exploratory fashion, the not unimportant consequences of drawing the distinction between belief and acceptance in some other areas. In particular, I want to survey its consequences in regard to, first, the implications of certain kinds of speech-acts; secondly the explanation of purposive action; and, thirdly, the characterization of knowledge (and especially of scientific knowledge). Some of these consequences may seem fairly obvious when they are stated. But I have not seen any statement of them elsewhere.