Over the years readers will have seen me challenge the idea of representationalism as a theory of mind, learning and belief. Here's another expression of the same sort of argument, posing an alternative called 'dispositionalism', which is closer to what I would favour. "According to dispositionalism, to believe that P is to be disposed to act and react in ways that are characteristic of believers-that-P." Now what really matters (to me) is how we cash out this notion of 'disposed to act', which I talk about in terms of pattern recognition and characteristic responses. But what matters is that we both reject "a particular type of cognitive architecture - the storage of representational contents matching the contents of the believed propositions." Anyhow, this article looks at the dispute in some depth, and traces some methodological implications (for example, 'the problem with questionnaires').
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