HOW TO UNDERSTAND BELIEFS

In this response various possible objections to the critique of first-person-authority in Gopnik (1993), are considered. The heart of all three objections is that ''beliefs'' and other notions of commonsense psychology should not be construed as attempts to describe the functional character of our minds. Rather, they are 1) an evolutionarily determined technique for dealing with our conspecifics (Bogdan) or 2) the result of interpretation (Van Brakel) or 3) self-constitutive entities which exist only when we have the concept of their existence (Greve and Buchner). While the word belief might be construed in all these ways, they do not correspond either to the construals of our commonsense psychology or of a scientific psychology.