Dispositionalism vs. Representationalism -- What's the Core Disagreement?

I'm just back from a workshop on the nature of belief in Princeton. As usual, I defended my dispositional approach to belief (see here, here, and here), according to which to believe some proposition P (such as that there is beer in the fridge) is just to be disposed to act and react in the manner characteristic of a believer that P, as defined by a folk-psychologically available (alternatively, scientifically constructed) stereotype or dispositional profile for believers-that-P. The relevant dispositions can be behavioral (e.g., being disposed to go to the fridge if one wants a beer), phenomenal/experiential (e.g., being disposed to feel surprise should one open the fridge and find no beer), and cognitive (e.g., being ready to conclude that there is beer in the house). To believe that P is to be prone to act and think as a P-believer would.

To believe that P, on my dispositional account, is not just to be ready to sincerely say that P. It is broadly speaking to have a particular behavioral, experiential, and cognitive posture toward the world. To believe, for example, that all the races are intellectually equal is not just to be disposed to say so, but to actually live that way. This view is grounded in the pragmatist tradition in belief, back to Bain, Peirce, and James.

A prominent alternative account -- maybe the dominant approach among philosophers and cognitive scientists -- is representationalism. According to representationalism, to believe that P is to have a representation with the content "P" stored in one's cognitive architecture, ready to be retrived and deployed in relevant practical and theoretical reasoning. If asked whether there's beer in the fridge, you pull from your memory stores the representation "there's beer in the fridge", do a little bit of cognitive processing, and answer "yes".

These are somewhat simplified descriptions of the competing accounts. Dispositionalism, for example, typically treats the relevant dispositions as ceteris paribus (that is, all else being equal, or normal, or right) to deal with cases of faking, acting under duress, etc. Representationalism typically allows for tacit belief, where P itself isn't explicitly stored but instead is quickly derivable from some neighboring proposition that is stored (so that you don't need separately stored representations for "there's beer in the fridge", "there's Lucky Lager in the fridge", "there's Dan's favorite beer in the kitchen", etc.).

To get a sense of what this difference amounts to and why it matters, let me mention the two main reasons I prefer dispositionalism.

First, dispositionalism better captures what we care about in thinking about what people believe. A thought experiment: Space aliens arrive at Earth. We know nothing about their internal cognitive architecture, but it's nonetheless the case that they act and react exactly as creatures with belief. Alpha-1 is disposed to say there's beer in the fridge, to go to the fridge if they want a beer, to experience surprise if they open the fridge and find no beer, to think to themself in inner speech "there's beer in the fridge, yes!", etc., etc. This should be sufficient for us to regard Alpha-1 as a beer-in-the-fridge believer, regardless of what might or might not be true about the underlying cognitive architecture.

Second, I suspect that the representationalist architectural story is overly simple. The idea that we store and retrieve representations with simple ordinary-language contents like "there's beer in the fridge" seems to me likely to be merely a cartoon-sketch of a radically more complicated architecture (compare the complex, almost uninterpretable internal architectures of deep learning Artifical Intelligence systems). The explicit/tacit distinction mentioned above is likely the tip of an iceberg of dubious architectural commitments that follow from taking literally that acting on our beliefs requires storing and retrieving contents like "there's beer in the fridge".

Now, these two objections to representationalism operate at two different levels and therefore create two different types of contrast with representationalism. The first objection constitutes a commitment to what I call superficialism. What matters, or should matter, to our conception of whether someone has a belief, is what is happening at the dispositional "surface" rather than the deep architecture. By the surface, here, I don't just mean the behavioral surface but also the phenomenalogical/experiential surface and the cognitive surface -- such as what experiences the putative believer is disposed to have and what conclusions they are prone to draw.

Superficialism is compatible with thinking that there's a representational architecture underneath. You could be a superficialist and still hold that what explains why you act and react like a beer-in-the-fridge believer is that you have a stored representation with the content "there's beer in the fridge" that you're ready to deploy in your practical and theoretical reasoning. If so, there can be a partial reconciliation between dispositionalism and representationalism. There would still be a metaphysical difference: On dispositionalism, you're a beer-in-the-fridge believer in virtue of your dispositional structure, not in virtue of the cognitive architecture that underwrites that structure. On representationalism, the reverse would be true. But maybe this dispute is minor if we're primarily concerned with ordinary, real-world human cases where the dispositional and representational structures co-occur.

So it's possible to partially reconcile dispositionalism and representationalism. But that partial reconciliation concerns only the first of the two objections -- the a priori philosophical argument in favor of superficialism.

My second objection is more architectural and also more empirical. It's a guess or bet against a representationalist architecture according to which we literally store representational contents like "there's a beer in the fridge" and retrieve those contents when they are relevant to our reasoning.

Actually, there's a possibility of a partial reconciliation here, of a different sort. After all, what is it to literally have a stored representation with the content "there's a beer in the fridge"? Obviously, there's no literal slip of paper with that sentence written anywhere in the brain. Maybe a complex distributed process can count as literally storing that representation if certain other conditions are met.

Here, I think the representationalist faces a dilemma. On the one hand, the representationalist can be super liberal and say that there's a stored representation that "there's a beer in the fridge" whenever the system is such that it has the dispositional structure characteristic of a beer-in-the-fridge believer. In that case, there's no substantive empirical dispute between dispositionalism and representationalism: The so-called representationalist is really just a dispositionalist employing misleading language. On the other hand, the representationalist can make specific architectural commitments regarding how the cognitive system must be designed. The more specific, the riskier empirically, of course, and the closer to the simplistic cartoon sketch, and the less relevant to our superficialist interests as belief ascribers.

As participants in the Princeton workshop noticed, and as readers of the debate between Jake Quilty-Dunn, Eric Mandelbaum, and me (e.g., here) sometimes notice, although there's a bald top-line disagreement between dispositionalism and representationalism, a closer look suggests some paths toward reconciling the two views. However, I think a still closer look suggests that such apparent reconciliations can really only be partial. Understanding this back-and-forth helps us better understand the philosophical terrain and the real nature of the dispute.