Philosophical Ramblings #06: Heidegger, Beliefs and Choosing Ones Values

July 3, 2025

1. What is Belief?

In the philosophy of belief, we roughly differentiate between two approaches: representationalism and dispositionalism.

In dispositionalism, we say beliefs are our dispositions toward certain propositions. In other words, we believe something if we are willing to act upon it. For example, if we believe that a car is unsafe, we probably won’t drive it. It would certainly seem very strange if someone loudly proclaimed to believe the car is unsafe and then immediately got into it and started drifting around without a care in the world.

In the competing theory, representationalism, we instead say that to believe something means to have a mental representation of some fact about the real world. For example, we believe the Eiffel Tower is in Paris because this is a real fact of the physical world, and we have a mental mapping of this fact in our minds.

Both approaches have their problems. In dispositionalism, we face the issue that sometimes we seem to have beliefs without acting upon them. Imagine living in a totalitarian state that surveils your every move and harshly punishes dissent. It seems plausible in such a scenario to hold the belief that the regime should be abolished, while not acting on that belief for fear of punishment.

In representationalism, we encounter the problem that beliefs can weaken over time, for instance due to illness (e.g., Alzheimer’s) or simply because we have seen evidence contrary to the belief. In dispositionalism, this makes sense: a weaker belief means weaker dispositions, i.e. we act upon the belief less or more hesitantly. But in representationalism, it’s unclear what it means to have a “weaker” representation. Either you have the mental mapping or you don’t.

2. Changing Ones Beleif

There is another dimension to the philosophy of belief: how much control we have over our beliefs, i.e. to what extent we can change them. For this, we can distinguish between:

• Direct control: the idea that we can change a belief just by thinking hard enough, through pure will.
• Indirect control: the idea that we can change a belief by changing the world. For example, if I believe there is a tomato in front of me and there isn’t, I can place a tomato there to make it true.

Both of these have parallels to the concept of active inference, which I explored in part in this article about dream people, in the section “Motivation: Biological Imperative to Simulate Consciousness.”

Although most philosophers accept the second form of control, the first is controversial. To see why, try—right now—by sheer will alone, to stop believing that you’re currently sitting in your chair or reading something from your computer screen. It doesn’t seem feasible.

There is a third method of control called long-range voluntary control, which refers to how we can change our beliefs by changing what we pay attention to over time. For example, if you only consume news from sources with a particular disposition, it’s likely your beliefs will shift in that direction. Or let’s say you frequently attend church, read Christian literature, and listen to Christian music—almost certainly, you will become more “Christian.”

3. Heidegger and Belief

How does this relate to Heidegger’s concept of Dasein?

Heidegger argues that all meaning, purpose, and belief presuppose Dasein, i.e. human existence. This means that, as humans, we cannot believe the same things that an animal or alien might believe, our modes of existence are too different. This affects how we live in the world, how we think about the world, and what our beliefs presuppose.

For example, for a human, it would be unthinkable not to accept that if:

• A → B
• B → C
• and A is true,

then C must also be true.

Imagine someone told you they believed all humans are animals, and all animals are creatures, but did not believe that humans are creatures. You’d find this strange—excluding mentally ill or intoxicated individuals, most people can follow such basic syllogisms. Or imagine a friend told you they believe they don’t need food to survive. Both logic and basic human necessities are so obvious that not believing them seems almost impossible. Yet, for a dog, it seems equally impossible to hold such beliefs in the first place.

All of this is to say: we humans have a certain form of existence, and from this follows a set of beliefs and facts that we cannot help but believe.

The first problem that arises when trying to think about belief from a Heideggerian lens is that both dispositionalism and representationalism start to break down.

Let’s begin with representationalism. Central to Heidegger’s thesis of Dasein is the idea that all truths are filtered through the human lens and are, to a certain extent, subjective. This presents a problem for representationalism, which holds that belief is a mapping from an objective world to our minds. But according to Heidegger, we do not have direct access to this objective world. Thus, we need to revise representationalism so that belief becomes a mapping from our minds to how we experience the world.

This, however, introduces the problem that we no longer share a single objective world we can reference when using language.

Dispositionalism aligns more naturally with Heidegger. Just as meaning and purpose arise from Dasein, so too does belief. And what is Dasein? It is human existence, how we exist in the world, how we live in it, and, most importantly for dispositionalism, how we act in it, i.e, our dispositions toward the world.

The second problem is the idea of long-range voluntary control, which remains controversial. However, for the Heideggerian worldview to make sense, this form of control seems necessary. If we cannot change our beliefs by changing how we act in the world, then we cannot claim that Dasein is a presupposition of belief in the sense that it informs our belief structure.

Personally, I don’t think this is a difficult pill to swallow. Empirical studies on things like positive self-suggestion or self-reinforcement support this idea.

A related article, is Donald Davidson’s paper Rational Animals, in which he proposes that language is a requirement for belief. His argument, that beliefs cannot exist independently, but only as part of a network of other beliefs, has clear parallels to the Heideggerian concept of Dasein discussed above. Namely, this network is the product of the human mode of existence and includes all beliefs that are necessitated by human life.