🧵I've got a new paper forthcoming in Philosophical Perspectives called "Symbolic belief in social cognition." I argue that we've got two folk psychological concepts of belief: one that's mostly for mindreading, and another that's mostly for mindshaping. philpapers.org/rec/WESSBI-2 The basic idea is that the mental state concept we express when we say "I think/believe it's raining" is very different from the mental state concept we express in signs like this:

Here's a heuristic that I think people rely upon too much in everyday moral reasoning: "People I find moralistic and annoying must be wrong." The background assumption here is that good moral arguments for social change should go down smoothly. However, (1/8) I think we should expect most genuine moral progress to be experienced as irritating. Widespread moral progress inevitably requires some changes to social norms. The problem is most people are habituated to the existing norms, to the point that they're barely noticeable (2/8)