Abstracts

Aliefs and Pushmi-Pullyu Representations

Kengo Miyazono Keio University

Tamar Gendler (2008a, 2008b) introduced the notion of “alief” in accounting for the irrational mismatches between what people believe and how they behave. An alief is, according to Gendler, “a mental state with associatively linked content that is representational, affective and behavioral”. It is a sui generis mental state. It cannot be reduced to the familiar mental states such as belief or desire. Rather, it is more basic, developmentally and conceptually, than the familiar states.

Gendler’s claims about aliefs are controversial. Roughly, two kinds of objections have been raised (e.g., Bayne & Hattiangadi 2013; Currie & Ichino 2012). First, it turns out that we do not have to introduce aliefs in order to accounting for the irrational mismatches between beliefs and behaviors. We can explain them in terms of the familiar mental states such as beliefs, desires, imaginations, perceptions or emotions. This suggests that what Gendler called “alief” is, at best, the hodgepodge of the familiar mental states. (hodgepodge objection) Second, Gendler discussed wide range of cases in which beliefs are incoherent with behaviors and argued that aliefs play the key role in those cases. But, it is psychologically unrealistic to expect that those cases have such a unified explanation. For example, it is implausible to expect that the experience of vertigo and the racial implicit associations (Gendler’s own examples) share the same psychological explanation. (disunity objection)

These objections are serious. But, even if we accept the objections, it is still possible to defend most of Gendler’s claims about aliefs. In this paper, I will defend an alternative account of the irrational mismatches between beliefs and behaviors. The account is compatible with most of Gendler’s claims and, at the same time, it avoids the objections to Gendler’s account. In particular, I will argue that the mismatches between beliefs and behaviors are very often explained in terms of what Ruth Millikan (2004, 2005) called “pushmi-pullyu representations”. According to Millikan’s theory of representations, there are three kinds of representations; descriptive representations, directive representations and pushmi-pullyu representations. The job of descriptive representations is to describe states of affairs. The job of directive representations is to direct behaviors. And, the job of pushmi-pullyu representations is to describe states of affairs and direct behaviors at the same time.

In this paper, I will focus on Gendler’s skywalk case, and provide the pushmi-pullyu account of the case. The pushmi-pullyu account shares many features with the alief account because pushmi-pullyu representations share many features with aliefs. Unlike the alief account, however, the pushmi-pullyu account avoids hodgepodge objection and disunity objection. I will also suggest the possibility of applying the pushmi-pullyu account to Gendler’s other cases.