Arts and Humanities Commons^™

What Is A Belief State?, Curtis Brown

Philosophy Faculty Research

What we believe depends on more than the purely intrinsic facts about us: facts about our environment or context also help determine the contents of our beliefs.¹ The observation has led several writers to hope that beliefs can be divided, as it were, into two components: a "core" that depends only on the individual's intrinsic properties; and a periphery that depends on the individual's context, including his or her history, environment, and linguistic community.