The Murder of Quilty

 

 

The enthralled and stricken reader of Lolita reaches chapter 35 of the book, the penultimate chapter, in a tragic state of mind, weeping hot tears. This is the chapter in which Clare Quilty is brutally murdered by a drunk and deranged Humbert Humbert. Yet the chapter unfolds as farce, played for laughs, and featuring a pair of clownish combatants—jet-black farce, to be sure, but farce nonetheless. What is going on here? Why does Nabokov engineer such an abrupt and startling change of mood and style? We know that Humbert is a murderer from the first chapter (“You can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style”), but we are not prepared for the revelation that he murders comically. This is the only chapter of Lolita that veers into farcical territory, though the book is hilarious throughout, and it cries out for explanation, or at least puzzled attention.

            We get a hint that the rules will be different early on: “A thunderstorm accompanied me most of the way back to Grimm Road, but when I reached Pavor Manor, the sun was visible again, burning like a man, and the birds screamed in the drenched and steaming trees.” We are told explicitly that the door “swung open as in a medieval fairy tale”, placing our hero at the center of a tale by Grimm. As if to emphasize the fictitious world we have entered, Humbert describes himself as “a familiar and innocuous hallucination” and a “raincoated phantasm”—at least in the eyes of the purple-robed Quilty, himself characterized as a “sleepwalker”. These are two literary men, men of fiction, and this is to be a fairy tale murder, though of the grotesque and fantastical kind. But it also takes place in a real place with a real gun and real blood. That gun has been bathed in oil by Humbert and is “black and awfully messy” (he thinks he got the “wrong product”): it is a filthy and vile object, not gleaming and ideal. This duality runs through the entire chapter: fiction and fact, the ideal and the real. As Humbert’s “heart pounded with tiger joy” at the prospect of killing his rival he accidentally “crunched a cocktail glass underfoot”—not the stuff of fairy tale but of dull irksome fact.

            Confronting Quilty (“Master met me in the Oriental parlor”) Humbert is interrogated “in a high hoarse voice” about who he is: “Are you by any chance Brewster?” That is not the reception Humbert was expecting as an avenging angel. But he rouses himself with the thought of the imminent execution: “foreglimpsing the punctures, and mess, and music of pain”—“oh, my darling, this was intolerable bliss!” Quilty, for his part, “cocked his head, looking more pleased than ever”. Humbert’s revenge narrative is being subverted by Quilty, who is refusing to play the cornered victim, denying Humbert the authorial power he craves. There then follows some tedious rigmarole from Quilty about long-distance telephone calls and who is to pay for them, again not very fairy-tale-like. Humbert interrupts him to force the story back to his punitive purposes, mentioning “a little girl called Dolores Haze”. He declares himself to be her father, to which Quilty responds that he is not her father but rather “some foreign literary agent” (not a very powerful one apparently). The preamble to the crowning act is not going as Humbert had hoped and envisaged, because Quilty is refusing to play his assigned part. Even when Humbert solemnly warns him that he is about to die he declines to take his would-be murderer seriously, pulling a cigarette apart and munching on bits of it, then bizarrely suggesting that Humbert is “either Australian, or a German refugee”. When he finally fires at Quilty’s foot the gun goes off “with a ridiculously feeble and juvenile sound”, the bullet entering the rug not the foot. He gloomily confides to us that “the rich joy was waning” and that “the weapon felt limp and clumsy in my hand”. This is not how the story was supposed to unfold.

            Quilty remarks pari passu that he had “no fun with your Dolly”, being “practically impotent, to tell the melancholy truth”.  Again, this is not part of Humbert’s preferred narrative, just a miserable medical fact about an ailing middle-aged man. When they commence to fighting, or at least sloppily tussling, Humbert addresses the reader directly: “Elderly readers will surely recall at this point the obligatory scene in the Westerns of their childhood. Our tussle, however, lacked the ox-stunning fisticuffs, the flying furniture. He and I were two large dummies, stuffed with dirty cotton and rags. It was a silent, soft, formless tussle on the part of two literati, one of whom was utterly disorganized by a drug while the other was handicapped by a heart condition and too much gin.” This is not a grand revenge epic but a suburban front-room farce, inspiring amusement not awe. Quilty himself describes the proceedings as a “pistol-packing farce” and then proceeds to deliver a meandering and bizarre monologue, offering Humbert “a house pet, a rather exciting little freak, a young lady with three breasts, one a dandy”, calling him Brewster again, promising him the royalties from his next play, drawing his attention to an upstairs collection of rare erotica, and promising that he can arrange for him to attend executions. Humbert interrupts this rambling litany with a gunshot; and now things turn nasty—shifting from the farcical to the murderous—though not before Quilty hunkers down at an obliging piano and plays “several atrociously vigorous, fundamentally hysterical, plangent chords, his jowls quivering”. The comedy will not stop just because bullets are flying and puncturing. Death will not put an end to farce.

As Quilty walks up the stairs, already shot twice, Humbert shoots him three or four times (who’s counting?), “and every time I did it to him, that horrible thing to him, his face would twitch in an absurd clowning manner, as if he were exaggerating the pain”, all the while speaking in a phony British accent and “smirking”. It was as if “the bullets had been capsules wherein a heady elixir danced”. Still, the man is mortally wounded, multiply punctured, and not long for this earth. Humbert coolly informs us that he “reloaded the thing with hands that were black and bloody”. He finds Quilty wrapped up in bed: “I hit him at very close range through the blankets”. He then watches a pink bubble of blood with “juvenile connotations” form on his victim’s lips. But with the deed done Humbert’s feelings are not those of jubilation but of disappointment: “The whole sad business had taken more than an hour. He was quiet at last. Far from feeling any relief, a burden even weightier than the one I had hoped to get rid of was with me, upon me, over me. I could not bring myself to touch him in order to make sure he was really dead. He looked it: a quarter of his face gone, and two flies beside themselves with a dawning sense of unbelievable luck.” This is a grisly image (the phrase “dawning sense” is particularly nasty), reminding the reader that for all the farce and fun this was a true-life honest-to-God murder—not a fictitious murder, not a fairy tale murder.

            But the pitch-black humor has not quite come to an end: downstairs a few of Quilty’s friends have arrived and are busy drinking in the kitchen. Humbert tells them that he has just killed Quilty, which triggers much jocularity about how it was about time, should have been done long ago, etc. So Humbert can’t even bask in the reality of his murderous act—his narrative is still being subverted. At this point Quilty himself crawls out onto the balcony, “flapping and heaving, and then subsiding, forever this time, in a purple heap”. Even then the visitors still don’t believe he is dead, just exceptionally hung over. Humbert glumly concludes that this was “the end of the ingenious play staged for me by Quilty”, adding: “With a heavy heart I left the house and walked through the spotted blaze of the sun to my car.” He has some trouble squeezing out between two other cars. Reality has resumed its leaden hold after the farcical fairy tale, with its real-life accompaniments.

            Two general themes stand out for me in this challenging material, aside from the interweaving of fiction and fact. Both strike me as specifically American, and the novel certainly takes America as one of its central topics. The first is the romantic idea of the singular cleansing act of violence, especially gun violence. Terrible things are done in this novel, both by Quilty and Humbert, and it is natural to desire some rectification, some justice, some payback. Humbert decides he will execute Quilty for his crimes, thus restoring the moral order, cleansing the world of sin and sordidness. He will also feel good about annihilating his rival (male competition being another American theme). It is to be expected then that American popular culture will come into play—the gunslinger, the gangster, the armed cop. But once the deed is done—and it was a bloody and clumsy deed—Humbert feels only languor and disappointment, a heavy sense of bathos. Quilty is dead, the world has been cleansed of him, but nothing has fundamentally changed—Lolita, in particular, remains as damaged and ravaged as ever. The cleansing act of violence was gory, chaotic and messy, and ultimately ineffective. Quilty’s death does nothing to expiate Lolita’s suffering, or Humbert’s. The violence was essentially pointless (and does Quilty really deserve to be executed for his sins, real as they were?). The fantasy of violent justice is exposed as precisely that, a fantasy. Humbert is a European, but in this chapter he takes on an American persona—the holy killer. The result is ugly and absurd, formless and pointless. This is capital punishment at its direst. The gun (“Chum”) is not romanticized; it is denigrated, with its coating of black filth. The “bliss” of righteous murder turns to dull and dismal banality (those happy flies!). Humbert is no glamorous avenging angel, just a pathetic drunk madman carrying a foul weapon. In this chapter the myth of cleansing violence (celebrated in much American fiction) is revealed as a kind of self-deception, a dark moral illusion.   

            The second theme I detect has to do with the influence of fiction on reality. Humbert cannot carry out his act of violence without placing it in a fictional context: he sees himself as a character in fiction—of the hardboiled variety. Quilty too cannot help seeing himself as a character in fiction; this is why he keeps playing fictional characters. They are both involved in a scene they have witnessed many times before—the murder scene. They cannot help adopting the roles they have observed so often; they have been penetrated by these fictional roles. There is real violence and there is the fictional representation of violence, and the two interact. But they are not the same, so Humbert’s fantasy of violence is not matched by the reality of it. In this theatrical chapter he and Quilty cannot help but act out a fiction—a dominant fiction of American culture. Is it not true that any American murderer must see himself through the lens of fictional murderers? He will have these before his mind as he murders: the gangster has seen himself on the cinema screen; the serial killer has seen his fictional likeness; the gun-wielding policeman has seen his TV image. The American imagination is accordingly alive with gunfire, fictional and other. In America violence is bound up with the representation of violence; there is no escaping it. So Humbert is not really himself in this chapter; or rather, he is refracted through the lens of his adopted country. He is Americanized for the duration. He becomes a stock American character: the man with a gun bent on justice and not too fussy about how he achieves it. He sometimes refers to his movie-star good looks; here he appears in a murder movie (a “thriller”).  [1] Quilty is American all along and in every way, but Humbert becomes temporarily American in his capacity as killer, though not completely so. Hence the switch of tone in this chapter: for a while the novel becomes a different kind of book (“American farce-gothic”). Nabokov decided to play the murder of Quilty as a kind of parody of America, which accounts for its stylistic discontinuity. Thus the chapter is a mishmash of forms and a cacophony of voices. Nabokov has staged an American murder in the psychological precincts of Europe. The result is a mixture of fact and fiction, genre and case study. In the end Quilty is indisputably and literally a dead man, but he has been fictionalized in the process.

 

Colin McGinn

 

   

  [1] It will be recalled that in Stanley Kubrick’s film of Lolita the murder of Quilty is the first scene of the film not placed somewhere toward the end. It is indeed a strongly cinematic scene with much spectacle and bravura performances by the actors. It alludes to other movie genres; it contains action sequences and loud noises, as well as broad comedy. It is conscious of itself as fiction. We think we know what we are watching, but really we don’t. James Mason plays Humbert straight with nary a wink or nudge, but Peter Sellers gives Quilty the full thespian treatment—the wild accents, the physical comedy, the twitches and grimaces, the actorly brilliance. This Quilty is a quilt of roles, a patchwork of fictional characters—just as he is in the rest of the film. While no one could describe Humbert as just an empty shell of a man that description seems apt for Quilty—the playwright composed of a cast of characters. In the murder scene he cycles through a series of roles, never finding the authentic individual; he ends as an empty bubble about to burst.

                                   

 

 

 

The Meaning of Realism

 

 

The task of saying what realism is is not a trivial one. We need an account that generalizes across all areas in which philosophers have found it natural to speak of realism and anti-realism. So the account must be abstract and topic-neutral not restricted to one or two specific examples. A standard attempt invokes the notion of mind-independence: to be a realist about a certain subject matter is to hold that this subject matter is mind-independent. The trouble with that formulation is that it doesn’t apply to realism about the mind itself—it is not mind-independent! Also, why exactly is this thought to be the import of realism? How can mere independence from the mind constitute realism? It might be thought that we need to bring in the notion of existence explicitly: to be real is simply to exist. But that doesn’t work either because even an anti-realist believes that the subject matter in question has existence—for example, material objects exist for an anti-realist just because they are constructions from sense experiences, and they exist (similarly for behaviorist anti-realism about the mind). The intended meaning of realism in these cases is surely something like the following: material objects exist apart from sense experiences (as mental states exist apart from behavior). The mind-independence idea was not wrong for realism about material objects but only as a general rubric; instead, we can generalize by saying that realism about the mind takes it to be independent of something else, namely behavior. Schematically: to be a realist about X is to hold that X exists independently of Y, where Y is the thing an anti-realist identifies with X. Thus to be a realist about material objects is to hold that material objects exist independently of sense experiences, while to be a realist about mental states is to hold that mental states exist independently of behavior. The realist holds these things to exist separately, while the anti-realist denies this: separate existence is the crucial point. Common sense affirms such separate existence and philosophical realism endorses it—while anti-realism disputes the thesis of separate existence. Realism thus asserts ontological plurality while anti-realism denies plurality (e.g., material objects are not different in kind from sense experiences). A metaphysical realist is a metaphysical pluralist: she insists that there are two things at issue not just one.

            Here we glimpse an essential feature of the realist position: the world is conceived as laid out in separate compartments connected in various ways, where these compartments exist apart from other compartments. That is the pluralism characteristic of realism: objects are not experiences; minds are not bodies. The realist is a pluralist separatist. The same structure is at work in other areas: properties (universals) are not predicates; moral values are not empirical facts; numbers are not numerals; possible worlds are not mental constructions. The global realist thinks that the former categories exist separately from the latter categories, while the global anti-realist asserts unity and assimilation. The realist denies the assimilationist tendencies of the anti-realist—that is the essence of her position.  Similarly for realism with respect to time: to be a realist about the past or the future is to hold that the past and future exist separately from the present—that they are distinct compartments of reality. The anti-realist contends that past and future can be viewed as somehow aspects of the present—constructions from it (memories, expectations). Even in cases where there is ontological dependence, the realist will claim that there is ontological separation: the mind may depend upon the brain but it exists separately from the brain, i.e. it has its own mode of existence (its own irreducible properties). Thus a materialist cannot be a realist about the mind—not really. He thinks there is one thing not two, so he denies separation. This is why monism always turns out to be a form of anti-realism. Take a case where anti-realism looks plausible—say, about color or fictional characters. Here the realist would double the ontology: in addition to dispositions to appear and creative mental acts there are alsocolors and fictional characters—they exist separately. This strikes us as too much pluralism: colors are just projections from appearances and fictional characters are just another way to talk about an author’s imagination. It is the thesis of separation that makes the difference between a realist view and an anti-realist view: the idea of ontological division, or the lack of it. If you were to draw up a big map of Reality, you would find different continents located in different places, according to the realist; by contrast, the anti-realist contends that there are fewer landmasses than we tend to suppose—it might all be Greenland, say.

            I just used the idea of spatial separation to explain the meaning of realism, and indeed I think this is the root of the general notion. Spatial separation is the paradigm expression of realism: when things exist in separate places they cannot be assimilated and must be regarded as existing independently. Let me illustrate this idea with a model case designed to bring out the conceptual structure of realism and its opposite. Consider a fishpond with surface swimming fish and a chalky bottom. People like to gaze into the pond and follow the antics of the fish, a lively reddish species. But there is something curious about this pond: there are also fishlike shapes moving around at the bottom of the pond, though they are difficult to see clearly. What is odd is that their movements are synchronized with those of the surface fish, as if the two are joined invisibly together: there are correlations, predictable dependencies. There are two schools of thought about these bottom-dwellers: one school holds that we have here a second species of fish that mimics the behavior of the surface species, perhaps for reasons of camouflage; the other school believes that there is only one species in the pond and these fishlike shapes are merely shadows of that species (a third group maintains that they are actually after-images caused by looking at the brightly colored surface fish). That is, one school believes in a separate species of fish in addition to the species open to plain view, while the other holds that the flitting shapes are just shadows cast by the fish they can see (or after-images of them). According to the latter, there is just one species of fish in the pond not two (no fish pluralism) and a kind of natural error occurs as a result of how the light is cast onto the bottom of the pond. According to the former, we have a separately existing species that happens to lie somewhat out of sight, but is no less real for that. The two schools of thought label themselves “realists” and “anti-realists” about the shapes glimpsed in the depths. The realists believe in a duality of separately existing species, while the anti-realists insist that there is only one species of fish in the pond, though our perceptions lead us to postulate two (we mistake shadows for fish). Intuitively, the issue turns on whether the shapes on the bottom have an independent existence relative to the fish near the surface. Let’s suppose that they don’t and the shadow school is right: then anti-realism turns out to be true–fish monism, no separately existing species.

            The realist view has it that there is a spatially separated species of fish in the pond: that is what makes their view realist. The anti-realists deny that there is any such species existing in a separate region of space: that is what makes their view anti-realist. And surely it is sufficient for realism that entities of a certain kind exist separately in a certain region of space. But is it necessary? Does the issue always turn on the contents of regions of space? In the case of material objects we can certainly say that realism is the view that material objects exist in space separately from sense experiences (which may or may not be in space); but what about realism concerning the mind—should we say that mental states exist in space separately from behavior? That presupposes that the mind exists in space, and realism about the mind surely does not depend on making that assumption. However, it has been common to formulate the matter in terms of subjective space and objective space: does the mind exist in a subjective space separate from objective space? If so, we have mental realism; if not, we have mental anti-realism. The important point is that the mind is conceived as occupying a quasi-space that exists alongside physical space—and this is what qualifies the position as realist. There is some sort of realm or region in which the mind has its being, and this realm or region is not the same as the realm or region occupied by the body (compare the bottom of the pond and the surface of the pond). Thus the situation is analogous to the situation in the pond: regions of physical space form the paradigm, but we can extend the notion of spatial separation beyond the simplest kind of case. The mind does not occupy the same kind of space as the body, but it exists in something analogous to that space, something that allows the notion of separation to gain purchase. The heart of mental realism is the thesis that the mind exists in a part of reality separate from the part occupied by the body—in a separate space in the simplest formulation. It is not that the mind coincides with the body (as the external world does not coincide with sense experience): that would deliver anti-realism. Realism involves parallel existence not single existence.

            But there are more difficult cases to contend with. What about Platonic realism? The allegory of the cave fits the general idea nicely: the world of forms exists outside the cave and can be reached only by an arduous climb—here the idea of spatial separation is rendered explicit. An anti-realist about universals would hold that there is nothing more to so-called forms than the shadows cast on the walls of the cave, no separate realm existing at some remove. In the cave allegory Plato even supposes that we could travel to the region of space in which the forms exist. But this is just a metaphor—how does Plato literally conceive the existence of universals? Well, the idea of Platonic heaven is regularly invoked: not another region of physical space, as in the cave allegory, but an analogous quasi-space. Without some such conception it is hard to see how Platonic realism could be given cogent content: for how could we make sense of a separate realm populated by universals except by means of some quasi-spatial way of thinking? The anti-realist will certainly insist that such a conception is deeply mistaken (while accepting that it captures what the realist has in mind): there is nothing to talk of universals except the earthbound language in which we describe things (the familiar space of linguistic use). So we can accommodate realism and anti-realism about universals by adopting some natural extensions of the basic idea of spatial separation.

            What about moral realism? Here things take a murkier turn and even metaphors are in short supply. In what sense are moral values for a realist located in some other region or type of space? Could we travel to the place in which they independently reside? Is there some moral quasi-space that houses them? Maybe we could devise a “parable of the pearls” according to which moral values exist in a splendid museum of shiny baubles, but no such ideas have gained traction in the history of thinking on this topic. Maybe the quasi-space of the divine might be recruited to contain moral values, but the moral realist surely doesn’t want to be committed to anything like that. All we have is the rather thin idea of the fact-value distinction—but nothing to give substance to the idea of separate existence. There is no grand pond at the bottom of which values might languidly swim. The anti-realist is thus tilting at windmills to some extent, finding nothing to get his dismissive teeth into. By the same token the moral realist is left with a rather schematic thesis; all she can say is that values are not reducible to facts.  [1]Perhaps this is because we are dealing with metaphysical questions about values, unlike the other questions that attract realist and anti-realist rhetoric. My own imagery in this area tends towards depicting values as some sort of iridescent color unlike any color seen with the human eye—with a softly glowing quality. But this is fanciful stuff.

            Realism about modality requires yet further extensions of the spatial paradigm. The idea of logical space presents itself. The actual world exists in one part of logical space, but possible worlds extend out from there across logical space. To be a realist about necessity is to accept that necessity resides in the existence of the space of possible worlds—a space removed from that of the actual world. The modal anti-realist, by contrast, holds that talk of necessity adverts to nothing beyond the actual world—there is no separate logical space in which modality has its being. The enormous size of logical space is testament to the robustly separate reality occupied by necessity and possibility; it is a very large pond in which possible worlds swim. Or maybe we should compare modal realism to what might be called “galaxy realism”: the thesis that those patterns of light we observe in the night sky are not just local optical phenomena in our atmosphere but remote collections of stars and planets just like our sun and its planets. The astronomical anti-realist denies the separate existence in space of other stellar systems, while the realist asserts that space is replete with star systems every bit as vast as ours. Similarly, our talk of necessity and possibility indicates no world beyond the actual world for the anti-realist, while the realist insists that a vast totality of possible worlds extends far out into logical space. Modal reality, like astronomical reality, consists of enormous objects made up of innumerable parts, according to the realist; while the anti-realist insists that there is nothing beyond the local and observable—no other possible worlds but this one, and no galaxies apart from the one we live in. Again, it is the idea of separate existence that captures what is at issue.

            We should not expect the issue between realists and anti-realists to be capable of rigorous formulation. These are intuitive and impressionistic concepts deployed to correspond to metaphysical pictures. Still, we should at least try to elucidate what constellation of ideas underlies these labels, aiming to articulate what is driving philosophical thought. The idea of separate existence in space, suitably extended and qualified, seems to be at the heart of the dispute between the realist and the anti-realist.  [2]

 

  [1] Could this be why moral realism has comparatively few takers? We just don’t have a vivid picture of what it would be for it to be true. The case contrasts sharply in this respect to realism about material objects. (None of this refutes the claim that it is true.)

  [2] The background to this essay is Michael Dummett’s attempt to find a definition of realism adequate to the full range of metaphysical debates in which that notion has been employed. He tried to make bivalence into the touchstone of realism; I think we need a richer and more metaphysically substantive notion if we are to do justice to the intended meaning of the word “realism”. 

                                   

 

 

The Bundle Theory of Belief

 

 

We have a tendency to suppose that beliefs are discrete states of mind, cleanly separated from each other. They exist like so many peas in a pod or sentences printed on a page. But this is not a realistic picture: beliefs come in groups. The unit of belief is the bundle. Take my belief that the goldfish in my pond are thriving: that belief comes with a set of other beliefs about how I acquired the goldfish, how they are cohabiting with the frogs, how they look, the number of them, the fact that I have a pond in my garden, that I don’t live in an apartment any more, etc., etc. This collection of beliefs may not be endless, but it is certainly large; and one belief gains comfort and support from the others. Many of my beliefs don’t belong to this bundle, having their own bundles, but it is really not possible to have a single belief in isolation. Beliefs proceed from premises or assumptions and they have consequences as well as corollaries and associations; they nestle in among these ramifying beliefs. Psychologically speaking, a belief is a component of a belief package, not merely one belief set beside others. Just as properties of objects always coexist with other properties, so beliefs coexist with other beliefs. I don’t just believe, I co-believe—I harbor bristling bundles of organically connected beliefs. The idea of a single isolated belief is an artificial abstraction; the psychological reality is more holistic (if I may appropriate an overused term). Words make up sentences (word bundles) and have no existence independently of that; similarly, beliefs make up belief bundles and have no existence otherwise.     

            We fail to see this, or to grasp its implications, because we like to individuate beliefs by their content: distinct content, distinct belief. Thus an array of distinct propositions is supposed to generate an array of distinct beliefs—one for each proposition. But that is really a non sequitur, since an array of propositions might be the content of a single complex psychological state. Call such a state of belief a T-belief (“T” for “total”): then we can say that the subject T-believes the whole set of propositions (those that make up its bundle). The idea, then, is that from a cognitive point of view the basic unit of assent is T-belief—a pattern of assent. Talk of isolated beliefs is just so much abstraction. Assent is always to multiple propositions, so we may as well recognize that psychologically beliefs are members of a family—they travel as a team. They are parts of something larger—though parts that cannot be broken off and expected to survive intact.

            Let me illustrate the point with a well-worn example. Suppose someone knows well enough that Hesperus is Phosphorous, so that they will assent equally to “Hesperus is F” and “Phosphorous is F”. We can agree that the two propositions are not identical, but surely there is no difference in the belief the subject has in respect of those propositions. It is a matter of indifference whether they express their belief state using “Hesperus” or “Phosphorous”. They have a single state of belief that can take either proposition as its content—just as many sentences could be used to express this belief. The distinct propositions correspond to no psychological distinction for them. If you ask them whether a certain planet (Venus) is pretty, they will respond with either name, since they believe the names refer to the same thing. Maybe the beliefs were once different, before the subject discovered the identity, but now they have merged, despite the distinction in the propositions. Or consider the beliefs of animals: we needn’t fuss over the precise proposition that captures the belief state of a dog or orangutan because any of a range of propositions will do to capture their tendencies to assent—their psychology is just not that fine-grained. In the case of my belief bundles all that matters is the overall pattern of assent—I assent to all of them simultaneously. I T-believe in a certain set of propositions: that is the basic fact, not the many discrete beliefs beloved of philosophers. I certainly don’t introspect discrete belief states that make up one of my bundles, as if each belief is an isolable inscription.

            Compare desire. Suppose I desire to see a certain film: isn’t this really a whole bundle of desires? I want to see a particular star, I want to see a certain genre of film, I want to sit in the dark and be entertained, I want to sit next to my significant other, I want to forget my troubles, I want to pass the time, etc. I have a complex desire state in respect of seeing this film, a whole set of pro-attitudes. If you ask me why I want to see the film, I could cite any of a large number of desires that motivate me. There is never just one; I contain multitudes. Desires come in bundles not as isolated elements. When I desire one thing I desire many things. The unit of desire is the collection—that is what motivates me. It makes little sense to try to abstract a single desire unconnected to other desires—what would it mean to say that I desire to see a film but have no other desires that go with that? The proposition is distinct enough, but the psychological state is embedded in a larger totality. All desire is really T-desire. We mustn’t reify propositions into psychological realities.

            The ontology of belief-desire psychology should therefore follow the bundle conception: bundles are what dispose to action and have functional properties. It is never the case that an action is prompted by a single belief and a single desire; rather, the action results from an interconnected web of beliefs and desires. The model of an ordered pair of belief and desire causing an action is at best an oversimplification. This is not merely the point that individual beliefs and desires necessarily belong with other beliefs and desires; it is the further point that psychological reality is not well represented by the model of discrete beliefs and desires. Instead we are to think of the mind as operating in larger more inclusive units—what I have been calling bundles.

            Think of the way you form beliefs. You don’t form them one at a time, now this one, now another. There isn’t a sequence of isolated beliefs laid out in time, like a series of inner explosions. Rather, a package inserts itself in toto—as when you take in a scene perceptually. Hundreds of beliefs may be formed in a matter of seconds. Nor is this the case only in perception: even in testimony cases we form multiple beliefs—about the speaker’s appearance, his history and character, the consequences of what he is asserting, and so on. At every waking moment you are updating your set of beliefs in big chunks not seriatim. It is done by the bundle, and without effort. It is entirely natural to operate with belief ensembles, because beliefs like to work in groups; lonely isolation is not their preferred mode of existence. So let’s recognize the gregarious character of belief: it’s never merely the belief that pbut always the beliefs that p, q, r, etc. We don’t so much have individual beliefs as we have belief patterns. If we think of beliefs as dispositional, then it is the bundle that has the disposition not beliefs singly.  [1]

 

  [1] Wittgenstein would say that we are captivated by a picture of belief (and desire—knowledge too) according to which beliefs are laid own like exhibits in a glass case, each self-sufficient and separate. This picture has many sources, some deriving from the physical world, some from language, some from aspects of the mind itself; but we should resist the picture and accept that our talk of belief implies something like a holistic pattern of assent. I have tried to avoid putting the point in Wittgenstein’s terms, but it may be helpful from an expository point of view.