I can’t shmelieve it! Sincere and insincere false belief reports

null, Neil Levy (Macquarie University)

Neil Van Leeuwen and Sebastian Dieguez have each argued that agents do not believe many of the things they report. Instead, agents report their “secondary cognitive attitudes” or “croivances”, which they imagine to be beliefs. In this paper, I survey the evidence for sincere and insincere false belief reports. I argue that shmeliefs (as I will call them) are less common that Van Leeuwen and Dieguez claim. I will then advance some speculations on how shmeliefs are acquired and sustained. Contra Dieguez, I will suggest that agents fall into shmelieving. They are sustained in the face of rational pressure in part because shmeliefs are penumbra surrounding genuine beliefs, and the evidence that supports the belief is taken to support the shmelief.