In Defence of Ontic Austerity for Belief

The contributions to this volume all give answers to the question what is belief? Many extant and developing accounts of belief hear the question as one of modal strength— that is, as picking out the nature of belief across worlds—and theorise in such terms. I argue that if we want our account of belief to be explanatorily adequate, we should separate the modal question concerning the very nature of belief, from a more local question concerning the manifestation of its various guises in the actual world. I propose that what is necessary to belief is its motivational role, but that this is not where our explanatory gains lie. Rather, the contingent biological circumstances of belief’s manifestation in the actual world is where we find explanations of the behaviour of garden variety beliefs, as well as the resources to accommodate a couple of edge cases (i.e. religious belief and self-deceptive belief). I close by identifying three advantages delivered by my ontically austere account: unification, explanatory power, and parsimony.