I’ll propose a tentative definition of belief also:
Belief is a rational agent’s intellectual state of proposition-acceptance which results from his will’s decision to push its intellect into assenting to some imperfectly-known proposition, the future fruits of which are expected to outweigh the risked error.
I also am inclined to think that the will’s decision is ultimately based on its desire to perfect the intellect, as reflective knowledge is the perfection of the intellectual faculty.
I’ll go ahead and copy/paste some of what I wrote in a thread on Pascal’s Wager a while ago. I’d be interested in anyone’s criticism, as I haven’t fully developed my ideas and mostly am toying with how this might fit into a Thomistic metaphysical scheme.
Q: Is A’s “doxastic incorporation” of p ultimately, or primarily, an act of the intellect or the will?
A: If the former, then the incorporation is in a sense “compelled” by a somewhat undeniable recognition of truth. If the latter, then it’s perhaps probably a selfish practical decision, arguably a “debasement” (of mind, of truth). The intellect is that which is naturally oriented to the true; the will is that which tends by naturally to the good.
The true: a thing’s internal, causally inert existence within an intellect. (The intellect passively receives an external object, whereby it takes on an intentional mode, truth, or being-as-seen/known.)
The good: the outward, or external, manifestation/realization of an intellect’s internal intention. (The will activates the passive intellect’s content.)
Q: What is the nature and purpose, or good, of A’s internal, intellectual representation of external reality?
A: A is acquainted with something intelligible and his intellect reflects its form into its own “ideal space”. This reflection is at the command of the will, which makes the decisions of which presented objects it desires to focus, or “shine the light of the intellect” on. The act of reflection amounts to abstraction; the form of the known object is abstracted from the thing itself and given its own sort of “conceptual matter”. (This may be brain matter, if you like. The abstraction of form, then, could be tantamount to the mind’s imposed organization of a neural network. In basically all cases, the brain’s reaction is influenced both by sensation of the thing and “itself”; but autonomy enters more w/judgment than w/conceptualization.)
. . . The mind’s map of the external world necessarily and by nature presupposes the existence of an external world. Whenever one makes any assertion or entertains a proposition, the underlying “assumption” is that it is about something pre-existent or pre-established, something out of its control at the time, already settled. In that sense, “external” might be closely identified by being outside of the will’s range of causal command. The external world is what the intellect receives as pre-existing, not what only exists due to its current action (like, say, an imagined witch – though technically that very imagined being would be “external” once it is presented to the intellect as a memory (which presumably is stored “in” the physical brain), since the new presentation would exist independently of the new intellectual action.
- Thing is presented to intellect;
- Intellect reflects thing internally;
- Will decides what to do with intellect’s intention;
4.(a) If good, the will manifests the intention externally via the body (belief; such as by informing the brain’s memory bank w/it and storing it for quick recall);
4.(b) If not good, the will may very well let it be forgotten.
. . . The perfection of the intellect is knowledge, and knowledge requires truth, conformity between internal intention and external object. Whenever the intellect has an unrealized good intention (lacks truth and knowledge), the will acts to make the external form of it, to realize it, thus bringing about truth and knowledge. In short, the will primarily seeks the good of the intellect, while the intellect seeks the truth of the world.
