ABSTRACT
True belief is boring. When writers portray belief, they prefer characters whose outward manifestations of faith belie inner conflicts. By doing so, they intuitively exploit cognitive instabilities inherent to the folk-psychological understanding of belief (which confuses intuitive and reflective beliefs). This essay brings together literary studies and cognitive anthropology (e.g., research by Pascal Boyer, Hugh Mercier, and Dan Sperber) to show how writers use the ontologically messy concept of belief to generate the kind of subjectivity that readers have come to associate with literary subjectivity.
