How Belief Functions by Ema Sullivan-Bissett

How Belief Functions by Ema Sullivan-Bissett

Beliefs seem to be related to truth. We cannot form them at will, and, when we deliberate over whether to believe some proposition, that deliberation is answerable to whether we take that proposition to be true. Many philosophers have taken these constraints to reveal something about what’s necessary to belief. In How Belief Functions, Ema Sullivan-Bissett argues that this is a mistake. She defends the view that all that’s necessary to belief is its motivational role, and that its relationship to truth is a contingent feature of the beliefs of creatures like us.

But belief has many faces. Sullivan-Bissett argues that her approach can also accommodate the more puzzling ones, including religious, self-deceptive, and delusional belief. By distinguishing what’s necessary to belief from the contingent ways it is realised, Sullivan-Bissett’s approach explains the familiar constraints under which our beliefs are formed, as well as the various ways belief can function in creatures like us.

How Belief Functions: A Philosophical Inquiry will be of interest to students and researchers in philosophy of psychology, philosophy of mind and psychology.

'How Belief Functions is a brilliant book offering a novel, systematic, and empirically informed unified theory of belief, its function, its nature, and behaviourIt is a must-read for epistemologists and philosophers of mind alike.' - Mona Simion, University of Oxford, UK

Ema Sullivan-Bissett is a Professor of Philosophy at the University of Birmingham, UK. She is the editor of Belief, Imagination, and Delusion (2024) and The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Delusion (2025), and the author of Irrationality (2025).