06 Sep Belief Fragments and Mental Files
Abstract: Belief fragments and mental files are based on the same idea: that information in people’s minds is compartmentalized rather than lumped all together. While some authors (Cherniak 1986; Egan 2008) occasionally describe fragments as ‘mental files,’ philosophers mostly use the two notions differently, though the exact relationship between fragments and files has yet to be examined in detail. This chapter has three main goals. The first is to argue that fragments and files, properly understood, play distinct yet complementary explanatory roles; the second is to defend a model of belief that includes them both; and the third is to raise and address a shared dilemma that confronts them: They threaten to be either explanatorily lightweight or empirically refuted.
https://global.oup.com/academic/product/the-fragmented-mind-9780198850670?cc=it&lang=en&#