Prog Brain Res. 2008;168:105-14. doi: 10.1016/S0079-6123(07)68009-1.
Progress in brain research
Rajesh Kasturirangan
PMID: 18166389 DOI: 10.1016/S0079-6123(07)68009-1
Philosophers as well lay people often think of beliefs as psychological states with dubious epistemic properties. Beliefs are conceptualized as unregulated conceptual structures, for the most part hypothetical and often fanciful or deluded. Thinking and reasoning on the other hand are seen as rational activities regulated by rules and governed by norms. Computational modeling of the mind has focused on rule-governed behavior, ultimately trying to reduce them to rules of logic. What if thinking is less like reasoning and more like believing? I argue that the classical model of thought as rational is mistaken and that thinking is fundamentally constituted by believing. This new approach forces us to re-evaluate classical epistemic concepts like "truth", "justification" etc. Furthermore, if thinking is believing, then it is not clear how thoughts can be modeled computationally. We need new mathematical ideas to model thought, ideas that are quite different from traditional logic-based mathematical structures.
