2024.09.8 : View this Review Online | View Recent NDPR Reviews
Eric Marcus, Belief, Inference, and the Self-Conscious Mind, Oxford University Press, 2021, 172pp. $97.00 (hbk) ISBN 9780192845634.
Reviewed by Ryan Simonelli, Wuhan University
Stanley Cavell once remarked that “Kant depsychologized epistemology, Frege depsychologized logic, and Wittgenstein depsychologized psychology.” Eric Marcus’s Belief, Inference, and the Self-Conscious Mind, in opposition to a large amount of empirically oriented work in recent philosophy of mind, can be seen as aiming to develop the groundwork for a “depsychologized” conception of human mindedness, articulating core psychological notions such as belief and inference as essentially rational acts of the mind.
Marcus’s orienting commitment is that belief and inference are essentially self-conscious. That is, to believe or infer something is, in the paradigm case, to know that one does. Crucially, knowing that one believes or infers is not an additional act that just happens to go along with the first act in the usual cases. Rather,…
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