Daniel Hoek (Virginia Tech): ‘The Trouble with Belief Fragmentation, Or: Why You Can’t Steer By an Atlas’

Abstract: According to fragmentation theories of belief, our decision making is guided by a multiplicity of independent, compartmentalized belief states. In this paper, I raise a challenge to this increasingly popular view, arguing that the purported benefits of fragmentation come at the cost of abandoning some of the central explanatory roles of belief. This is not a price worth paying. Adequately addressing this challenge, I suggest, requires a return to a holistic understanding of belief-guided choice. But the good news is that we can do so without relinquishing the goals that motivated the push to fragmentation in the first place, and in a way that preserves central insights from fragmentation theory.

Daniel Hoek is a philosophy professor at Virginia Tech and a Guest Researcher at the University of Amsterdam and its Institute for Logic, Language and Computation (ILLC).

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