reasons for belief roughly, bases of belief. The word ‘belief’ is commonly used to designate both a particular sort of psychological state, a state of believing, and a particular intentional content or proposition believed. Reasons for belief exhibit an analogous duality. A proposition, p, might be said to provide a normative reason to believe a proposition, q, for instance, when p bears some appropriate warranting relation to q. And p might afford a perfectly good reason to believe q, even though no one, as a matter of fact, believes either p or q. In contrast, p is a reason that I have for believing q, if I believe p and p counts as a reason (in the sense above) to believe q. Undoubtedly, I have reason to believe countless propositions that I shall never, as it happens, come to believe. Suppose, however, that p is a reason for which I believe q. In that case, I must believe both p and q, and p must be a reason to believe q – or, at any rate, I must regard it as such. It may be that I must, in addition, believe q at least in part because I believe p.
Reasons in these senses are inevitably epistemic; they turn on considerations of evidence, truth-conduciveness, and the like. But not all reasons for belief are of this sort. An explanatory reason, a reason why I believe p, may simply be an explanation for my having or coming to have this belief. Perhaps I believe p because I was brainwashed, or struck on the head, or because I have strong non-epistemic motives for this belief. (I might, of course, hold the belief on the basis of unexceptionable epistemic grounds. When this is so, my believing p may both warrant and explain my believing q.) Reflections of this sort can lead to questions concerning the overall or ‘all-things-considered’ reasonableness of a given belief. Some philosophers (e.g., Clifford) argue that a belief’s reasonableness depends exclusively on its epistemic standing: my believing p is reasonable for me provided it is epistemically reasonable for me; where belief is concerned, epistemic reasons are overriding. Others, siding with James, have focused on the role of belief in our psychological economy, arguing that the reasonableness of my holding a given belief can be affected by a variety of non-epistemic considerations. Suppose I have some evidence that p is false, but that I stand to benefit in a significant way from coming to believe p. If that is so, and if the practical advantages of my holding p considerably outweigh the practical disadvantages, it might seem obvious that my holding p is reasonable for me in some all-embracing sense. See also PASCAL, REASONS FOR ACTION. J.F.H.