Abstract: Beliefs play a central role in our commonsense practice of predicting and explaining behavior. For example, we appeal to Alice’s belief that vaccines are dangerous to predict and explain her refusal to get vaccinated against Covid-19. Recently, philosophers have argued that, in addition to enabling the prediction and explanation of behavior, commonsense psychology serves the normative function of regulating behavior. In this paper I consider what beliefs must be to successfully play their various roles in our commonsense practices. Prevailing philosophical opinion has it that beliefs are relations between subjects and internal representations, and literally have meanings and truth conditions. I argue that beliefs and the other propositional attitudes are rather to be understood as properties of subjects that are modelled as linguistic objects. That is to say, we gloss beliefs as being language-like objects with meanings and truth conditions, though they do not actually have these properties.

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