0.7 Consciousness: perceptions and concepts

Beliefs are a large part of how the mind functions since they help form desires and drives. How could one carve out the mental faculties and processes responsible for belief formation and revision? Here is (Goldman, A):

• An initial phase of this undertaking is to sharpen our conceptualization of the types of cognitive units that should be targets of epistemic evaluation. Lay people are pretty vague about the the sorts of entites that quality as intellectual virtues or vices. In my description of epistemic folkways, I have been deliberately indefinite about these entities, calling them variously "faculties," "processes," "mechanisms," and the like. How should systematic epistemology improve on this score?
• A first possibility, enshrined in the practice of historical philosophers, is to take the relevant units to be cognitive faculties. This might be translated into modern parlance as modules, except that this term has assumed a rather narrow, specialized meaning under Jerry Fodor's (1983) influential treatment of modularity. A better translation might be (cognitive) systems e.g., the visual system, long-term memory, and so forth. Such systems, however, are also suboptimal candidates for units of epistemic analysis. Many beliefs are the outputs of two or more systems working in tandem. For example, a belief consisting in the visual classification of an object ("That is a chair") may involve matching some information in the visual system with a category stored in long-term memory. A preferable unit of analysis, then, might be a process, construed as the sort of entity depicted by familiar flow charts of cognitive activity. This sort of entity depicted by familiar flow charts of cognitive activity. This sort of diagram depicts a sequence of operations (or sets of parallel operations), ultimately culminating in a belief -like output. Such a sequence may span several cognitive systems. This is the sort of entity I had in mind in previous publications (especially Goldman 1986) when I spoke of "cognitive processes."
• Even this sort of entity, however, is not fully a satisfactory unit of analysis. Visual classification, for example, may occur under a variety of degraded conditions. The stimulus may be viewed from an unusual orientation; it may be partly occluded, so that only certain of its parts are visible; and so forth. Obviously, these factors can make a big difference to the reliability of the classification process. Yet it is one and the same process that analyzes the stimulus data and comes to a perceptual "conclusion." So the same process can have different degrees of reliability depending on a variety of parameter values. For purposes of epistemic assessment, it would be instructive to identify the parameters and parameter values that are critically relevant to degrees of reliability. The virtues and vices might then be associated not with processes per se, but with processes operating with specified parameter value.

So various mental faculties might be responsible for belief formation like memory and vision. I would think that emotional processes also would obviously be responsible as well (as beliefs are emotional). Unconscious or conscious processes could help form beliefs, and that in turn could determine what the persons goals and drives are like.