Losing belief, while keeping up the attitudes

the case for cognitive phenomenology

Søren Klausen

pp. 188-208

in: Nikolaj Nottelmann (ed), New essays on belief, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2013

Abstract

Cognitive phenomenology has gained considerable support during the last decade. Several philosophers now defend the view that not only sensations and feelings but also cognitive mental states like thinking, judging, and understanding have a distinctive phenomenology — there is 'something it is like" to have them (see e.g. Siewert 1999; Pitt 2004; Klausen 2008; Bayne and Montague 2011). The notion of belief occupies an interesting position in this debate. It is a paradigm psychological notion and the epitome of a cognitive state, yet it does not seem amenable to the program of cognitive phenomenology. It is standardly categorized as a mental phenomenon of a completely different sort than sensations or feelings (McGinn 1982, 9; Tye 1995, 79ff.), and its claim to being a phenomenal or conscious state has been rejected by influential proponents of the phenomenological approach to the mind (Chalmers 1996, 19ff.; Crane 2001, 108).