We speak of beliefs as things we have.
We hold beliefs, acquire beliefs, revise beliefs, lose beliefs. They are described as internal states — propositions stored somewhere in the mind or brain — waiting to be expressed in words or actions. Cognitive science refines the picture with talk of representations and encodings, but the core assumption remains unchanged: belief is a mental object with a location.
Yet belief is one of the least object-like phenomena we know.
Beliefs contradict one another, shift with context, surface in action but not in speech, disappear under pressure and reappear without warning. People sincerely avow beliefs they do not act on, and act on beliefs they explicitly deny. If beliefs are inner states, they are remarkably ill-behaved ones.
The problem is not with belief. It is with the state model.
The temptation to locate belief
The urge to locate belief is understandable. Beliefs persist over time. They influence behaviour. They seem to explain why people do what they do. If something persists and has effects, surely it must be somewhere.
But this reasoning once again smuggles in a metaphysical assumption: that persistence requires storage, and that influence requires an inner cause. Belief is thereby turned into a thing, and the brain becomes the obvious place to put it.
What is missed is that belief does not persist as content. It persists as orientation.
Belief as orientation, not possession
From a relational perspective, a belief is not a proposition stored in the head. It is a stabilised way of taking the world — a patterned disposition to interpret, expect, respond, and act.
To believe that fire burns is not to host a sentence internally. It is to approach flames with caution, to withdraw when heat is felt, to warn others, to structure action accordingly. The belief is not behind these behaviours; it is their coherence across situations.
This is why belief can remain operative even when it cannot be articulated, and why articulation alone does not guarantee belief. Saying is one possible instantiation of belief, not its container.
Context sensitivity without contradiction
One of the persistent puzzles about belief is its context sensitivity. People appear to believe one thing in one situation and another elsewhere. This is often treated as inconsistency, irrationality, or failure of self-knowledge.
But if belief is orientation rather than state, this variability is exactly what we should expect. Orientations are activated, constrained, and reshaped by situations. Different contexts afford different actions and interpretations, and belief is enacted accordingly.
There is no hidden store of propositions being selectively accessed. There is only a system negotiating its way through varying circumstances, drawing on its history to stabilise behaviour where it can.
Neural correlates without stored propositions
As with memory and emotion, neural activity plays a crucial role in belief — but not as a storage medium for propositions.
Neural patterns reflect constraints on orientation: sensitivities to evidence, habits of inference, affective weightings, and learned associations. These constrain how situations are taken up, but they do not encode beliefs as discrete semantic objects.
To say that a belief is “represented in the brain” is to confuse the conditions under which a belief can be enacted with the belief itself.
Change, persuasion, and breakdown
Belief change is often modelled as updating internal representations in response to new information. But persuasion rarely works this way. Facts alone seldom overturn beliefs; shifts in trust, identity, emotion, and social alignment often matter far more.
This makes little sense if belief is a proposition stored internally. It makes perfect sense if belief is an orientation embedded in a network of relations. To change belief is to reorganise that network — to alter what counts as salient, credible, threatening, or desirable.
Beliefs do not flip; they reconfigure.
Belief without interiority
Once belief is understood as relational orientation, the question “Where is belief located?” loses its footing. There is nothing to locate.
Belief happens:
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in patterns of action,
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in expectations and interpretations,
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in the continuity of response across situations.
The brain is indispensable to these patterns, but it is not their container. Locating belief in the brain mistakes a necessary participant for the phenomenon itself.
From belief to possibility
Beliefs are often treated as constraints on possibility — limits imposed by what one takes to be true. But relationally understood, belief is also what makes coordinated action possible at all. It stabilises a way of moving through the world, allowing some possibilities to be pursued while others recede.
The myth of mental states dissolves, and with it the idea that belief must be stored, accessed, or located. What remains is a system oriented toward the world, continually re-stabilising itself as circumstances change.
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