1 BELIEF AND SPONTANEITY

discussion of Evans ’ views on non-conceptual content, John McDowell makes some remarks on belief and judgement. These remarks are somewhat orthogonal within McDowell’s general line of argument in the, which I shall not examine here1, but they seem to me both significant for his overall project and controversial. Evans is concerned with the distinction between informational content of perceptual experience and belief content and rejects the idea that the former could be “prima facie inclinations to believe”. He intends, reports McDowell, to reserve the term “belief ” to a more sophisticated cognitive state, connected to the notion of judgement and reason. McDowell adds: “That is, to put it in the terms that I have been using: we should reserve the idea of a belief for something that can be understood only in the contact of the idea of spontaneity, the idea of an active understanding in which the subject takes rational control of the shape of her thinking. Not that all one’s beliefs are the result of actively making up one’s mind. But there is a point in reserving the title of belief for a kind of cognitive state that is essentially within the scope of one’s powers of actively making up one’s mind; even in the case of a belief that one simply finds himself with, the question of one’s entitlement to it can always be raised. We can sum up wha