What is it to believe something? There seems to be some kind of important relationship between belief and truth. After all, you can’t just decide to believe that you are ten feet tall because it makes you feel commanding. This course will examine this relationship between belief and truth and its implications for thinking about the mind more generally. We will touch upon our responsibility for and control over what we believe, the nature of religious belief, and various kinds of phenomena that have traditionally been understood to involve irrational belief, such as self-deception and delusion.  

• understand central questions about the nature of belief and their interconnectedness 

• understand a range of answers to these questions about the nature of belief 

• clearly and concisely express both of the above in their own words 

• critically assess a range of ideas about the nature of belief 

• clearly state and defend their own views (which need not be novel) about the nature of belief 

The module will be delivered through a mix of large group and small group sessions, including, where relevant, asynchronous materials such as lecture recordings. Full details on the delivery mode of this module will be available on Learning Central at the start of the academic year – and may be, in part, determined by Welsh Government and Public Health Wales guidance.   

Students will practise and develop the following skills: 

• Critical thinking: the ability to understand, structure and critically evaluate the key claims and arguments made in complex written texts and discussions – achieved through reading, small-group discussion in seminars, plenary discussions in seminars, reflecting on lecture materials, essay and exam preparation and writing. 

• Oral communication: the ability to formulate and articulate critical thinking orally in a clear and respectful manner that others can grasp and engage with and to contribute to collaborative inquiry through oral discussion – achieved through small group and plenary discussions throughout the module. 

• Writing: the ability to structure a written report that builds a high-level argument on the basis of precise analyses–achieved through explicit training in preparation for the formative essay. 

• Organisation: the ability to organise and coordinate workloads – achieved through balancing reading and note-taking, critical analysis, post-seminar reflection and note writing, and essay and exam answer planning and writing. 

• Collaboration: developing ideas and inquiry collaboratively and responding sensitively to points made by others – achieved through small-group and plenary discussions throughout the module contact and non-contact time. 

A blend of coursework and portfolio assessments.

What is it to believe something? There seems to be some kind of important relationship between belief and truth. We will begin the course by considering whether this is because the believer aims at truth, like an archer at a target, or rather because truth is belief’s norm – that a true belief is in some sense a ‘correct’ belief. We will then discuss how, if truth is belief’s norm, we can be held accountable to this norm. It makes sense to say that you shouldn’t lie. But isn’t this precisely because you have voluntary control over whether or not you lie? Given that you don’t have voluntary control over what you believe, how can we make sense of the claim that you shouldn’t believe something? We will close the first half of the course by investigating religious belief, which is often considered praiseworthy within faith communities. How can this be made sense of if belief is involuntary? Is religious belief different from ordinary empirical beliefs like the belief that today is Monday and, if so, what, if anything, unites these two kinds of belief? 

In the second half of the course, we will turn to consider some cases that have traditionally been thought to involve irrational belief and think about how they impact our understanding of what it is to believe something and of the mind more generally. Take so-called ‘epistemic akrasia’. Can you judge that you should believe something and yet be unable to bring yourself to, for example? Or, what about self-deception: is the self-deceived person both the deceiver who believes the truth and the deceived who believes a falsehood? Do we need to think of the mind as divided in some sense in order to account for this possibility? Finally, does someone who is deluded that something is the case really believe that it is? If they don’t, then what does delusion involve instead of belief?