The Causal Model of introspection has its more than fair share of critics and indeed in recent years the model has fallen out of favour in the philosophical world. In this paper I defend the model and argue that it is an excellent candidate, given a realist commitment about the mental, to explain our peculiar, but contingent, introspective access to beliefs.

Ortega famously distinguished between "ideas" as explicitly entertained intellectual convictions and "beliefs" as lived convictions, rarely expressed and possibly inexpressible, that actually guide our conduct. He also notes in History as a System that while our convictions might fail to cohere as ideas, they must cohere as beliefs; they must cohere in their vital articulation, he writes, while they might fail to cohere in their logical articulation. This paper attempts to concretize the notion that our convictions might surface under two different aspects, ideas and beliefs, and that they must cohere under the latter aspect. I begin by turning to a similar idea often read into Wittgenstein's On Certainty: that there are hinge beliefs that guide us in action yet cannot be propositionally articulated. I argue that this reading fails both exegetically and substantially, revealing that we cannot distinguish between vital articulation and logical articulation, if we read logical articulation as propositional articulation; the way we live by our beliefs is their propositional articulation, and this is in fact simply the Wittgensteinian dictum that meaning is use. I then rehabilitate the Ortegian distinction as one between vital articulation and intellectual articulation of our beliefs, and elaborate this in terms of Wittgenstein's discussions of religious belief.

Inquiry, 2019

Does knowledge entail belief? This paper argues that the answer depends on how one interprets 'belief'. There are two different notions of belief: belief as such and belief for knowledge. They often differ in their degrees of conviction such that one but not both might be present in a particular case. The core of the paper is dedicated to a defence of this overlooked distinction. The first two sections present the distinction. Section 3 presents two cases which are supposed to back up the claim that there is an important distinction here while section 4 offers some explanations concerning the structure of these cases. Section 5 adds further considerations in support of the core thesis, and section 6 discusses objections. The distinction is important as such but also has interesting implications concerning the much discussed 'entailment thesis' according to which knowledge entails belief. It is argued here that even if knowledge entails belief-for-knowledge, it does not entail belief-as-such. This constitutes an interesting middle position and compromise in the philosophical debate about the entailment thesis. One further implication of this paper is that the discussion about the entailment thesis needs to take degrees of conviction seriously. Still another implication is that epistemic contextualists can deal very well with the relevant phenomena.

Journal of Pragmatics, 2010

This paper argues that pragmatic considerations similar to the ones that Grice has shown pertain to assertability pertain to acceptability. It further shows how this should affect some widely held epistemic principles. The idea of a pragmatics of belief is defended against some seemingly obvious objections. #

Believing and accepting, 2000

2000

Philosophical and Phenomenological Research, 1998

Philosophy in Review, 2010

Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews, 2015

Grazer Philosophische Studien, 2003