Moore's Problem

Abstract

Moore's problem, or Moore's paradox, arises from the fact that the holding by someone of consistent propositional contents of the form of (1) and (2) below strike us as being absurd: (1) It is raining but I believe it is not raining; (2) It is raining but I don't believe it is raining. Different attempts to trace the etiology of this experienced absurdity have led to the formulation of two main diagnoses - the linguistic diagnosis and the doxastic diagnosis. The linguistic diagnosis is based on a plausible analysis of the conversational constraints underlying the rules that defi ne an interpersonal linguistic game of information transfer and persuasion. Within such a game, a move displaying an instantiation of a sentence of the forms Moore highlighted does violate the rules that constitute it. However, a number of philosophers and logicians have voiced their dissatisfaction with the intrinsic limitation of this diagnosis to cases in which such linguistic games are actually being played. They claim that only a diagnosis produced at a deeper level of analysis will do justice to our intuition, namely, a diagnosis produced at a doxastic rather than at a linguistic level. Among them, Sorensen holds the more promising view. Sorensen claims that a di erent number of propositional attitudes have scopes smaller than the class of consistent propositions. Thus, some consistent propositions are inaccessible to the exercise of those propositional attitudes. According to his terminology, inaccessible consistent propositions are blindspots. In particular, Moore-like propositions are the blindspots for belief. The upshot of Sorensen's view is then the claim that Moore-like contents are unbelievable. In opposition to this view, I contend that the doxastic diagnosis is not able to pin down a plausible constraint in terms of the reference to which belief in contents of the forms Moore identi ed is adequately criticized as violating some constitutive condition of meaningful thought. Thus, I contend that there is no reason why such contents ought to be labelled as unbelievable.