In this opening chapter I shall introduce my core claim, provide an overview of the chapters to follow, and make some remarks about the aims and scope of the project.

THE CORE CLAIM

The concept of belief is a multi-faceted one. A belief ascription may pick out an episodic thought or a long-held opinion, a considered conviction or an unthinking assumption, a deliberate judgement or a perceptual impression. In the first person, it may express a tentative suggestion or an item of profound faith, a speculative hypothesis or a confident assertion, a routine recollection or a revelatory self-insight. This diversity is not in itself a problem; many everyday concepts have a similar richness of structure. The concept of belief is special, however. For many philosophers and psychologists believe that it can be co-opted to play a very precise role. They believe that our everyday practices of psychological description, explanation, and prediction – practices often referred to as folk psychology – are underpinned by a primitive but essentially sound theory of human cognition, whose concepts and principles will be central to a developed science of the mind. That is to say, they believe that the concept of belief, together with those of other folk-psychological states, can be integrated into science and applied to the business of serious scientific taxonomy. I shall refer to this view as integrationism.