Neither belief nor non-belief

In an old post, I had said that anti-representationalism was first and foremost an ineffable attitude towards our drawing board. In a more recent post, I said that anti-representationalism wasn't an attitude, but that it “transformed” the attitude of “belief”.

What I'm thinking is that we could perhaps express this more clearly by drawing on the “semi-doxastic” attitudes of philosophers. There have been several occasions when philosophers were not satisfied with saying that something is a “belief” (as in philosophy of religion). Some have therefore started talking about “semi-doxastic attitudes”; attitudes that are close to belief, but which are not really beliefs, without being “just” emotions, desires, etc. They have identified, for example, acceptance, faith, assent, acquiescence, hope, assumption, and so on.

One way of conceiving what anti-representationalism produces, then, would be to consider that it transforms our beliefs (doxastic attitudes) into a type of semi-doxastic attitudes. I don't know exactly which one, perhaps a new word would have to be invented, but talking about a semi-doxastic attitude seems to make sense to me.

For example, Nagarjuna, in the middle of a text that has all the makings of a philosophical text defending views, asserted that he had no views. Interpreters struggle to understand this. Personally, I'm very fond of Nagarjuna's anti-representationalist interpretations, and if we use the idea I've been talking about, we could consider that when Nagarjuna asserts that he has no views, he's expressing that he no longer has any beliefs; that they've been transformed into semi-doxastic attitudes.

This could make sense given that what Nagarjuna says is supposed to have soteriological value, and that, as I've said in several posts, the transformation produced by anti-representationalism has a liberating aspect and eliminates many tensions.

I'm not an expert on madhyamaka and Nagarjuna, so I'm not going to say this is the right interpretation, but I do at least consider this idea to have value.

This idea also helps explain the impression that anti-representationalism has a “therapeutic” value (“a laxative that purges itself along with the dogmatic doctrines against which it is mobilized”), or the impression that one can be anti-representationalist even while denying being anti-representationalist (oddities I've touched on in several posts).

The impression of the therapeutic value of anti-representationalism (maybe) comes from the fact that it transforms our beliefs into semi-doxastic attitudes.
The impression that one can be anti-representationalist even while denying being anti-representationalist (maybe) comes from the fact that once anti-representationalism has transformed our beliefs into semi-doxastic attitudes, it transforms the epistemology (so that one may come to reject anti-representationalism), but the therapeutic effect persists and one continues to have semi-doxastic attiudes in place of beliefs.

I haven't always been clear about what anti-representationalism is; is it a philosophical position? a meta-semantic or ineffable position? or an attitude? Etc.

What I tend to think at the moment is that anti-representationalism is mostly a therapeutic thing. It's a set of meta-semantic positions and arguments which, when followed to the extreme, aim to transform beliefs into semi-doxastic attitudes. An anti-representationalist is therefore not necessarily someone who holds this or that meta-semantic position, but someone who has completed the path of transformation. The set of theses and arguments is therefore not the “essence” of anti-representationalism to be captured.

It's important to realize the extent to which anti-representationalism, taken to the extreme, produces paradoxical results. In a previous post, I said:

And you have to realize how radical and paradoxical this is. The answer to “does truth depend on the framework” itself depends on the framework. Read the sentence carefully, and realize how paradoxical it is, and how it completely breaks the realism/antirealism framework.

Anti-representationalism can, in a sense, be seen as something that breaks the doxastic system from within, and on its debris builds a semi-doxastic system of which it may not be a part (“a laxative that purges itself”).