Contemporary Epistemology E-Book

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Serie: Blackwell Philosophy Anthologies
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 1149

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2019

Beschreibung

A rigorous, authoritative new anthology which brings together some of the most significant contemporary scholarship on the theory of knowledge

Carefully-calibrated and judiciously-curated, this strong and contemporary new anthology builds upon Epistemology: An Anthology, Second Edition (Wiley Blackwell, 2008) by drawing a concise and well-balanced selection of higher-level readings from a large, diverse, and evolving body of research.

• Includes 17 readings that represent a broad and vital part of contemporary epistemology, including articles by female philosophers and emerging thought leaders
• Organized into seven thoughtful and distinct sections, including virtue epistemology, practical reasons for belief, and epistemic dysfunctions among others
• Designed to sit alongside the highly-successful anthology of canonical essays, Epistemology: An Anthology, Second Edition (Wiley Blackwell, 2008)
• Edited by a distinguished editorial team, including Ernie Sosa, one of the most influential active epistemologists
• Highlights cutting edge methodologies and contemporary topics for advanced students, instructors, and researchers

Leseprobe

Table of Contents

Cover

Preface

Part I: The Ethics of Belief

1 Deontological Desiderata

i. Preliminaries

ii. Basic Voluntary Control of Believing

iii. Other Modes of Voluntary Control of Believing

iv. Indirect Voluntary Influence on Believing

References

2 Voluntary Belief and Epistemic Evaluation

I. Introduction

II. Voluntarism About Belief

III. Ought and Can

IV. Is This Epistemic Deontologism?

Part II: Practical Reasons for Belief?

3 The Wrong Kind of Reason

Reasons as Considerations in Relation

Counting in Favor of Attitudes

An Alternative Account

Sorting Reasons: Content‐ and Attitude‐related

Sorting Reasons: Constitutive and Extrinsic

The Scope of the Constitutive/Extrinsic Distinction

Constitutive Reasons and Justification

The Current Discussion

Conclusion

4 No Exception for Belief

Introduction

1. Equal Treatment

2. Comparing Equal Treatment and Evidentialism

3. Comparing Equal Treatment and Different Sense

4. Doxastic Involuntarism and Equal Treatment

5. Taking the Agent’s Perspective into Account

6. Other Objections and Replies

7. The Argument from the Basis of Belief

8. The Argument from Transparency

9. Equal Treatment and Skepticism

10. Conclusion

References

5 Promising Against the Evidence

I The Evidentialist View

II Sincerity, Rationality, and Responsibility

III Epistemic Evasion

IV Rational Belief Against the Evidence

V Rational Trust Against the Evidence

VI The Case of Professor Procrastinate

VII Conclusion

Part III: Reliance

6 Evidentialism and Pragmatic Constraints on Outright Belief

1 Introduction

2 Arguments Against Evidentialism

3 The Bayesian Evidentialist Reply

4 Pragmatic Constraints on Outright Belief

5 The Renewed Case Against Conventional Evidentialism

References

7 Alief and Belief

I Introducing Alief

II Alief and Other Attitudes

III Automaticity

IV Alief, Persuasion, and Habit

8 Can It Be Rational to Have Faith?

1

I. Introduction

II. Preliminaries

III. Going Beyond the Evidence: Three Views

IV. Faith and Examining Further Evidence

V. Epistemic and Practical Rationality

VI. Practical Rationality and Evidence‐gathering

VII. Commitment and Interpersonal Cost

VIII. The Costs of Postponement

IX. Risk Aversion and the Possibility of Misleading Evidence

X. Conclusion

Works Cited

9 Assertion and Practical Reasoning

1. Introduction

2. Epistemic Norms for Assertion and Practical Reasoning

3. Aims and Constraints

4. The Instance Argument

5. The Inheritance Argument

6. The Function of Assertion in Licensing Action

7. Conclusion

References

Part IV: Epistemic Dysfunctions

10 Testimonial Injustice

2.2 Testimonial Injustice Without Prejudice?

2.3 The Wrong of Testimonial Injustice

11 Cognitive Penetrability and Perceptual Justification

1. What Is Cognitive Penetrability?

2. Dogmatism

3. Some Cases of Cognitively Penetrated Experiences

4. The Challenge for Dogmatism

4.2 Is There a Defeater?

4.3 Other Potential Evidential Defeaters in the Problematic Cases

5. How the Challenge Generalizes

Part V: Virtue Epistemology

12 The Search for the Source of Epistemic Good

1. What Makes Knowledge Better Than True Belief?

2. The Value of True Belief

3. Knowledge, Motives, and

Eudaimonia

4. Conclusion

References

13 Why We Don’t Deserve Credit for Everything We Know

1 Introductory Remarks

2 Credit

3 Knowing Without Deserving Credit

4 Diagnosis

References

14 A (Different) Virtue Epistemology

1. The Genus‐Species Claim

2. A Theory of Knowledge?

3. Some Options for Understanding the Attribution Relation

4. A Different Proposal: The Attribution Relation Is Pragmatic

5. What Sort of Ability Is Required for Knowledge?

6. Barn Façades and Lottery Propositions

7. A Neo‐Moorean Response to Skepticism

15 Knowledge and Justification

A. Knowledge

B. Justification:  The Thinker With an Envatted Brain

C. Skepticism

Further Reading

Part VI: Disagreement

16 Epistemology of Disagreement:The Good News

1. Why Not Live and Let Live?

2. Some Simple Cases

3. Explaining Disagreements and Adjusting Beliefs

4. Some Tests and Clarifications

5. Disagreement and Asymmetries of Justification

6. Relaxing the Conditions

7. Qualitative Belief and the Threat of Skepticism

References

17 The Epistemic Significance of Disagreement

1. Introduction

2. Some Preliminary Distinctions

3. No Agreeing to Disagree?

4. The Appeal to Symmetry

5. Rationality and Merely Possible Disagreement

6. The Views of One’s Peers as Higher‐order Evidence

7. Actual Disagreement Reconsidered

8. Conclusion: Epistemic Egoism Without Apology

References

Part VII: Permissivism About Belief ?

18 Epistemic Permissiveness

1. Examples and Motivations for Permissive Epistemology

2. Objections to Extreme Permissivism

3. Alternative Permissible Standards?

4. Moderate Permissivism and Practical Deliberation

5. Responsiveness to New Evidence

6. Rationality and First‐person Deliberation

7. Conclusion

References

19 Permission to Believe: Why Permissivism Is True and What It Tells Us About Irrelevant Influences on Belief

1. Introduction

2. Permissivism (Defense of P1)

3. How Permissivism Bears on Irrelevant Factor Cases (Defense of P2)

4. A Problem

5. Disagreement

6. Conclusion

References

Index

End User License Agreement

Guide

Cover

Table of Contents

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: Contemporary Epistemology: An Anthology

Contemporary Epistemology

An Anthology

Edited by

Jeremy FantlMatthew McGrathErnest Sosa

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Preface

Contemporary epistemology is a vibrant and wide‐ranging field within philosophy. Some anthologies, including our earlier effort, Epistemology: An Anthology, aim at giving the reader more or less comprehensive access to influential works across the field. This anthology takes a different approach. It covers a set of interrelated topics which, taken together, comprise the materials for a unified course in epistemology, suitable either for graduate students or upper‐level undergraduates.

These topics in this volume fall under the broad heading the ethics of belief; they all concern, in some way or other, questions about what one may or should believe. William Clifford, who first used the term “ethics of belief,” thought of these topics as genuinely ethical: in asking what one should believe, we are asking what one morally should believe. Over time, the term “ethics of belief” has acquired a broader reference; it now covers any distinctively normative questions about belief – any questions concerning the shoulds, oughts, musts, and mays of belief. The ethics of belief asks whether there are indeed “norms” for belief and, if there are, what they are and what makes them possible. What sorts of factors bear on what one should, may, etc., believe: is it only a matter of evidence, or do the costs and benefits of believing for your life and others’ lives help determine what one should believe? Within the category of evidence, one might ask further questions: how does evidence about other’ beliefs make a difference to what one should believe? How does evidence about what oneself should believe make a difference?

Action, not belief, is what is most naturally subject to norms. Therefore, the ethics of belief is often developed with an eye to how belief and justified belief compare and relate to action and the ethics of action. It follows from this that the ethics of belief cannot be fruitfully pursued without some engagement with ethics proper. Likewise, some conclusions about the ethics of belief depend on considerations about the metaphysics of belief. Therefore, some of the readings in this volume could have found their way into ethics or philosophy of mind anthologies as well as an epistemology anthology. We think this is as it should be.

Editors of anthologies must also decide whether to include primarily influential articles and chapters, or important recent publications which have not yet had time to steer the field. This is a particularly difficult conundrum when one is anthologizing contemporary epistemology. Our policy was to create a balance. We have included a number of influential articles, though none published before 2000, as well as several very recent articles we expect to have influence on the field. We have also included several articles which we think deserve more attention from epistemologists.

Part IThe Ethics of Belief

Introduction

In 1877, the mathematician William Clifford published “The Ethics of Belief” in which he argued that “it is wrong always, everywhere, and for any one, to believe anything upon insufficient evidence.” Clifford’s contention concerned the morality of belief on insufficient evidence; just as actions can be morally wrong, beliefs can be morally wrong, as well. Furthermore, it was because actions could be morally wrong that beliefs could be morally wrong. Belief, Clifford thought, was partly characterized by a willingness to act in ways suggested by those beliefs. So for the actions based on those beliefs to be morally wrong, the beliefs would have to share in that wrongness. If the believer is blameworthy for the actions based on the beliefs, they can also be blameworthy for the beliefs themselves.

When contemporary epistemologists talk about the ethics of belief, they not only have in mind the moral wrongness of belief, but an epistemic wrongness, as well. While Clifford thought that beliefs (and believers) could be morally blameworthy, many contemporary epistemologists think that beliefs and believers can be epistemically blameworthy – blameworthy in a distinctively intellectual or epistemic way. But whether it’s epistemic or moral blameworthiness at issue, the view that beliefs and believers can be blameworthy is subject to a central worry: it doesn’t look like beliefs can be blameworthy, because it doesn’t look like believers are in control of their beliefs.

The view that people can control their beliefs is sometimes referred to as “doxastic voluntarism.” A majority of philosophers think that doxastic voluntarism is false. They point, for example, to the obvious difficulty of, while situated in a well‐lit room, choosing to believe that the lights are off. Furthermore, some argue, a plausible control condition on blameworthiness has it that you can only be blamed for something if you can voluntarily choose to do it. It follows that believers can only be blamed for their beliefs if they can choose what to believe.

This is the central contention of William Alston in the selection reprinted here. Alston argues against what he calls a “deontological conception of justification.” According to the deontological conception, justified belief is a matter of believing blamelessly – of believing as one ought. But, argues Alston, on the deontological conception of justification, we only have justified (or unjustified) beliefs if we are in control of those beliefs. And, he argues, we aren’t. We lack direct (or, in his word, “basic”) immediate control over our beliefs – the kind we have over simple movements, like raising our arm. And the kinds of long‐term, non‐basic control we might have over our beliefs is not sufficient to ground a robust deontological conception of justification.

Richard Feldman is more sympathetic toward a deontological conception of justification, though he does not think that we have the kind of control over our beliefs that Alston seems to require. Instead, Feldman argues that there is a natural deontological conception of justification that doesn’t require satisfaction of a control condition. According to Feldman, there is a range of obligations that accrue to us in virtue of our occupying certain roles. For example, parents might have certain obligations to take care of their children, etc. Feldman calls these obligations “role oughts.” Importantly, we might fail to satisfy role oughts even though we can’t help but do so. This, argues Feldman, does not get us off the hook; if our role demands certain acts of us, and we don’t do them, then we don’t do as we ought, regardless of whether we could have.

According to Feldman, one of our roles is believer. As believers, there are certain obligations we accrue. Though Feldman doesn’t want to take a stand in this paper on the nature of those obligations, we know from his other work what he thinks the primary – indeed, the only – doxastic obligation is: to believe what fits the evidence. This is an obligation whether or not you’re able to believe what fits the evidence or can control whether or not you believe what fits the evidence. If you can’t believe what fits the evidence, then you can’t believe in accord with your duty, and you have failed to fulfill the duties of a believer.

Further Reading

Clifford, William. (1886). The ethics of belief. In:

Lectures and Essays

. Macmillan.

Firth, Roderick. (1978). Are epistemic concepts reducible to ethical concepts? In:

Values and Morals

(ed. Alvin Goldman and Jaegwon Kim), 215−29. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers.

James, William. (1979).

The Will to Believe and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy

(Vol. 6). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Ryan, Sharon. (2003). Doxastic compatibilism and the ethics of belief.

Philosophical Studies

114: 47−79.

Wolterstorff, Nicholas. (1996).

John Locke and the Ethics of Belief

(No. 2). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

1Deontological Desiderata

William Alston

i. Preliminaries*

I now begin the detailed treatment of the items on my initial list of alleged epistemic desiderata. I will be concerned with clarification of the nature of each desideratum, how it should be construed. Where there are serious questions as to the viability of an item, those will be addressed. I discuss the deontological group first because it gives rise to crucial problems about viability, as a result of which I postponed consideration of it in Chapter 3 until and unless they can be resolved.

Here are the deontological candidates for epistemic desiderata of belief (B) that were listed in Chapter 3.

B is held

permissibly

(one is not subject to blame for doing so).

B is formed and held

responsibly

.

The causal ancestry of B does not contain violations of intellectual obligations.

First a word about my terminology. ‘Deontology’ and ‘deontological’ come from the Greek deon – ‘what is binding’ or ‘duty’. In ethics, deontology is the study of duty or obligation, and a deontological theory of ethics is one that takes duty or obligation to be the most basic ethical concept and treats it as an intrinsic ethical value of an act rather than in terms of the consequences of the act. My use is broader. I use it to range over any kind of requirement, not restricted to moral obligation, and not excluding requirements that are based on consequences of what is required. And I identify deontological considerations as having to do with the triad of statuses – required, forbidden, and permitted. Thus any way in which it would be epistemically desirable (desirable from the standpoint of an aim at true belief) for a belief to be required or permitted (i.e., not forbidden) would count as a deontological desideratum in my terminology.

Back to the above list, I think it will suffice to concentrate on 9 and 11. Each of these can be construed as focusing on something’s being permitted, not being in violation of any intellectual requirements. Desideratum 9 is matter of the having or the acquiring of the belief being permitted. Desideratum 11 is a matter of the permissibility or lack thereof of what one did that led to the acquisition of the belief. Although 10, the formation in terms of responsibility, is familiar in the literature, I think it is ambiguous between 9 and 11 and so does not require separate treatment. The basic difference between 9 and 11 is what is said to be permitted – either the believing itself or what led up to it. Thus, to foreshadow a major point in the ensuing discussion, 9 gives rise to problems about voluntary control of belief whereas 11 does not.

I have already pointed out […] that it is plausible to suppose that ‘justified’ came into epistemology from its more unproblematic use with respect to voluntary action. I am justified in doing something, for example, appointing someone to a Teaching Assistantship on my own, provided my doing so is in accordance with the relevant rules and regulations, provided it is permitted by those rules and hence that I could not rightfully be blamed or held to account for it, and was acting responsibly in doing so.1 The rules could be institutional, as in the above example, or legal or moral. Thus I would be morally justified in failing to make a contribution to a certain organization provided my doing so doesn’t violate any moral rule. Because of this provenance it is natural to think of believing, when taken to be subject to being justified or unjustified, as subject to requirement, prohibition, and permission. We say things like “You shouldn’t have supposed so readily that he would not return”, “You have no right to assume that”, “You shouldn’t jump to conclusions”, and “I ought to have trusted him more than I did”. Locutions like these seem to be interchangeable with speaking of a belief as being, or not being, justified. These considerations were introduced in this book prior to the abandonment of a justification‐based epistemology of belief, and in the new dispensation they have no force. Since we are thinking of 9 and 11 simply as states of affairs that are, or may be thought to be, important goals of cognition, the fact that they have often been thought to constitute a belief’s being justified, with all the associations that brings from talk of the justification of actions, has lost whatever meta‐epistemological significance it had under the old dispensation. The idea of a belief’s being required, permitted, or forbidden will have to swim or sink on its own, without support from the etymology of ‘justified’. I will now enter onto the elucidation of 9 and a critical discussion of its credentials as an epistemic desideratum. The criticism will mostly hinge on whether we have effective voluntary control of believings. I will argue that we do not.

It seems clear that the terms of the deontological triad, permitted, required, and forbidden, apply to something only if it is under effective voluntary control. By the time‐honored principle “Ought implies can”, one can be obliged to do A only if one has an effective choice as to whether to do A. It is equally obvious that it makes no sense to speak of S’s being permitted or forbidden to do A if S lacks an effective choice as to whether to do so. Therefore, the most fundamental issue raised by the claim of 9 to be an epistemic desideratum is whether believings are under effective voluntary control. If they are not and hence if deontological terms do not apply to them, alleged epistemic desiderata like 9 do not get so far as to be a candidate for an epistemic desideratum. It suffers shipwreck before leaving port. I will argue that believings are not subject to voluntary control. But before that, there are some preliminary points to be made.

First, if I considered the possibility of deontological ED for beliefs to be a live one, I would need to consider a belief’s enjoying the stronger deontological status of being a case of complying with an epistemic obligation, doing what is required, as well as the weaker status of merely being something that is epistemically permitted. But since I hold that no deontological status is possible for beliefs, I will not need to go into the different statuses separately. And since justificationists of a deontological bent have concentrated on a belief’s being epistemically permitted, I will go along with that focus.

Second, although the discussion […] thus far has been solely in terms of belief, we need to include consideration of other prepositional attitudes that are contrary to belief. Chisholm (1977, chap. 1) speaks in terms of a trichotomy of ‘believe’ (or ‘accept’), ‘reject’, and ‘withhold’ that p. Since rejecting p is identified with believing some contrary of p, at least not‐p, it brings in no new kind of prepositional attitude, but withholding p, believing neither it nor any contrary, does. The basic point here is that one has control over a given type of prepositional attitude only if one also has control over some field of incompatible alternatives. To have effective control over believing that p is to have control over whether one believes that p or takes on some alternative thereto. Therefore, to be strictly accurate we should say that our problem about 9 concerns voluntary control over intellectual prepositional attitudes generally. Though my formulations will mostly be in terms of belief, they should be understood as having this more general bearing.

Third, something must be said about the relation between the voluntary control of actions and of states of affairs. Thus far I have been oscillating between the two. A belief is a more or less long‐lived state of the psyche that can influence actions and reactions of the subject so long as it persists. And the same holds for other propositional attitudes. Thus, in speaking of voluntary control of beliefs, we have been speaking of the control of states. But couldn’t we just as well speak of the voluntary control of the action of bringing about such states: accepting, rejecting, or withholding a proposition? If the two are strictly correlative, we could equally well conduct the discussion in terms of either. Whenever we are responsible for a state of affairs by virtue of having brought it about, we may just as well speak of being responsible for the action of bringing it about. There are reasons, however, for proceeding in terms of states.

The main reason is this. If we hold that beliefs are subject to deontological evaluation because they are under voluntary control, we need not restrict ourselves to beliefs that are formed intentionally by a voluntary act. I could be blamed for believing that p in the absence of adequate evidence, even if the belief was formed automatically, not by voluntarily carrying out an intention to do so. Provided believing in general is under voluntary control, it is enough that I could have rejected or withheld the proposition by a voluntary act had I chosen to do so.

The final preliminary note is this. Our issue does not concern free will or freedom of action, at least in any sense in which that goes beyond one’s action being under the control of the will. On a “libertarian” conception of free will this is not sufficient; it is required also that both A and non‐A be causally possible, given all the causal influences on the agent. A libertarian will, no doubt, maintain that if deontological concepts are to apply to believings in the same sense in which they apply to overt actions, then all the libertarian conditions will have to apply to believings. Here, however, I am concerned only with whether believings are under voluntary control.

ii. Basic Voluntary Control of Believing

Locutions like the ones cited earlier as encouraging the application of deontological terms to believing – “You shouldn’t jump to conclusions”, “I had to accept his testimony; I had no choice” – also strongly suggest that belief is under voluntary control. Else why could we speak of what beliefs one should or shouldn’t form, or that one did or did not have a choice as to whether one forms a certain belief? Though this view is distinctly out of favor today, it still has its defenders.2 Such locutions also naturally suggest not only that believing is under voluntary control but that this control is of the maximally direct sort that we have over the motions of our limbs, the voluntary movements of which constitute basic actions. A basic action is one that we perform “at will”, just by an intention, volition, choice, or decision to do so. It is something we “just do”, not by doing something else. Let’s call the kind of control we have over states of affairs we can bring about by basic actions basic voluntary control. If we do have voluntary control of beliefs, we have the same reason for supposing it to be basic control that we have for supposing ourselves to have basic control over movements of our limbs, namely, that we are hard pressed to specify any action by doing which we get the limbs moved or the beliefs acquired. Hence it is not surprising that the basic voluntary control thesis has had distinguished proponents throughout the history of philosophy. Augustine, Aquinas, Descartes, Kierkegaard, and many others have usually been read this way.3 And discussions pro and con of the voluntary control of beliefs have mostly focused on the basic control version. Nevertheless, as the subsequent discussion will show, there are other forms of voluntarism about belief that need to be taken into account in a complete treatment.

But for now I am concerned to give a critical examination of the basic voluntary control thesis. Those who have attacked it are divided between those who hold that believing at will is logically impossible and those who hold that it is only psychologically impossible, a capacity that we in fact lack though one we conceivably could have had.4 I cannot see any sufficient reason for the stronger claim, and I shall merely contend that we are not so constituted as to be able to take prepositional attitudes at will. My argument for this, if it can be called that, simply consists in asking you to consider whether you have any such power. Can you, at this moment, start to believe that the Roman Empire is still in control of western Europe, just by deciding to do so? If you find it incredible that you should be sufficiently motivated to even try to believe this, suppose that someone offers you $500 million to believe it, and that you are much more interested in the money than in believing the truth. Could you do what it takes to get that reward? Remember that we are speaking of believing at will. No doubt, there are things you could do that would increase the probability of your believing this, but we will get to that later. Can you switch prepositional attitudes toward that proposition just by deciding to do so? It seems clear to me that I have no such power. Volitions, decisions, or choosings don’t hook up with propositional attitude inaugurations, just as they don’t hook up with the secretion of gastric juices or with metabolism. There could conceivably be individual differences in this regard. Some people can wiggle their ears at will, but most of us cannot. However, I very much doubt that any of us are endowed with the power of believing that p, for any given p, at will. The temptation to suppose otherwise may stem from conflating that power with others that are clearly distinct. If I were to set out to bring myself into a state of belief that p, just by an act of will, I might assert that p with what sounds like conviction, or dwell favorably on the idea that p, or imagine a sentence expressing p emblazoned in the heavens with an angelic chorus in the background intoning the Gloria of Bach’s Mass in B Minor. All this I can do at will, but none of it amounts to forming a belief that p. It is all show, an elaborate pretense of believing. Having gone through all this, my propositional attitudes will remain just as they were before; or if there is any change, it will be as a result of these gyrations.5

Don’t suppose that our inability to believe at will is restricted to what is obviously false. It also extends to beliefs that are obviously true. I have already made the point that voluntary control attaches to sets of contraries. To take the simplest case, if the sphere of my voluntary control does not extend both to A and to not‐A, then it attaches to neither. If I don’t have the power to choose between A and not‐A, then we are in no position to say that I did A at will, rather than just did it, accompanied perhaps by a volition. Thus, even if I willingly, or not unwillingly, form perceptual beliefs in the way I do, it by no means follows that I form those beliefs at will, or that I have voluntary control over such belief formation. It would have to be true that I have voluntary control over whether I do or do not believe that the tree has leaves on it when I see a tree with leaves on it just before me in broad daylight with my eyesight working normally. And it is perfectly clear that in this situation I have no power at all to refrain from that belief. So it is with everything that seems obvious to us. We have just as little voluntary control over ordinary beliefs formed by introspection, memory, and simple uncontroversial inferences from uncontroversial premises.

The above discussion may suggest to the voluntarist that he can still make a stand on propositions that do not seem clearly true or false and hold that there one often has the capacity to adopt whatever propositional attitude one chooses. In religion, philosophy, history, and high‐level scientific inquiry it is often the case that, so far as one can see, the relevant arguments do not definitively settle the matter one way or the other. I engage in a prolonged study of free will or causality. I carefully consider arguments for and against various positions. It seems to me that none of the positions have been decisively established, though there are weighty considerations that can be urged in support of each. There are serious difficulties with all the positions, though, so far as I can see, more than one contender is left in the field. So what am I to do? I could just abandon the question. But, alternatively, I could, so it seems, simply decide to adopt one of the positions. Is that not what I must do if I am to make any judgment on the matter?

There are also practical situations in which we are confronted with incompatible answers to a certain question, none of which we see to be clearly true or false. Here we often do not have the luxury of leaving the field; since we must act in one way rather than another, we are forced to form and act on some belief about the matter. It would be a good idea for me to plant these flowers today iff it will rain tomorrow. But it is not at all clear to me whether tomorrow will be rainy. I must either plant the flowers today or not, and if I just ignore the issue, that will be equivalent to assuming that it will not rain tomorrow. Hence the better part of wisdom would be to make a choice between the alternative predictions. On a larger scale, a field commander in wartime is often faced with questions about the current disposition of enemy forces. But often such information as he has does not tell him just what that disposition is. In disposing his own forces he must act on some assumption about the enemy’s forces. Hence he is forced to decide on a hypothesis as to that disposition and act on that basis. What else can he do?6

Despite the intuitive appeal of the idea that beliefs are formed at will in these cases, there are several alternative construals, one or another of which is a better reading of each. Begin with the philosopher who really does come to believe the libertarian account of free will or the epiphenomenalist position on the mind‐body question. Where that happens it is presumably because at least for the moment the considerations in favor of the position seem to be conclusive, even though previously they did not. And at that time the belief follows automatically from that momentary seeming of conclusiveness, just as it does in cases where it always seems obvious what the truth of the matter is whenever one turns one’s attention to it. At that moment, S is no more able to accept a compatibilist account of free will or a hard‐nosed materialism on the mind‐body problem than he would be if the positions he comes to believe had seemed obviously true from his first consideration of the problem. If, at a given time, it still seemed to the philosopher that libertarianism and compatibilism were approximately equally well supported, how could she simply decide to believe one rather than another? How could we do that any more than, lacking any reasons at all for one alternative rather than the other, we decide to believe that the number of ultimate particles in the universe is even rather than odd?

The above account in terms of a momentary sense of conclusive support for one alternative could also apply to our practical cases. It could be that the military commander, at a certain point in his deliberations, comes to think the reasons for a particular hypothesis concerning the disposition of enemy forces are conclusive. But I believe that there are other construals for both the theoretical and practical cases. For one thing, the subject may be resolving to act as though it is true that p, adopting it as a basis for action without actually believing it. This could well be a correct description of the military commander. He may have said to himself: “I don’t know what the disposition of enemy forces is. I don’t even have enough evidence to consider one hypothesis much more likely than any other. But I have to proceed on some basis or other, so I’ll just assume that it is H and make my plans accordingly”. If that’s the way the land lies, it would be incorrect to describe the commander as believing that the disposition of enemy forces is H or having any other belief about the matter. He is, self‐consciously, proceeding on an assumption concerning the truth of which he has no belief at all. One may also make an assumption for theoretical purposes, in order to see how it “pans out” in the hope that one will thereby obtain some additional reasons for believing it to be true or false. A scientist can adopt “as a working hypothesis” the proposition that the atomic nucleus is positively charged, draw various consequences from it, and proceed to test those consequences. He need not believe that the atomic nucleus is positively charged in order to carry out this operation. Indeed, he would be doing this because he does not yet know what to believe about the matter. Likewise a philosopher might take materialism as a working hypothesis to see how it works out in application to various problems.

Working hypotheses may also be involved in activities that are a blend of the theoretical and the practical. One may accept the existence of God, or some more robust set of religious doctrines, as a guide to life, trying to live in accordance with them, seeking to act and feel one’s way into a religious community, in order to determine how the doctrines work out in the living of them, both in terms of how satisfactory and fulfilling a life they enable one to live and in terms of what evidence for or against them one acquires. Again, at least in early stages of this process, one does not yet believe the doctrines in question.

There are other possibilities as well. S may be seeking, for whatever reason, to bring herself into a position of believing p, and she, or others, may confuse this activity, which can be undertaken voluntarily, with believing the proposition to be true. Or S may align herself with some group – a church, a political party, a group of thinkers – that is committed to certain doctrines, and this, which can be done voluntarily, may be confused with coming to believe those doctrines. Finally, there is the distinction between acceptance and belief that was briefly mentioned earlier. The basic distinction is that belief is something that one finds oneself with, something that springs into consciousness spontaneously when the question is raised. Whereas acceptance of a proposition is, at least in the first instance, a deliberate voluntary act of accepting a proposition as true. It differs from the “working hypothesis” or “assuming that p as a basis for action” in that, unlike these cases, S does commit himself to p’s being true. He “takes it on board” as one of the things he acts on and draws consequences from. It is, we might say, just like belief except that the commitment to p’s being true doesn’t arise spontaneously but, at least at the outset, has to be kept in activation by a deliberate voluntary act. Thus the philosopher and the religious seeker might accept, in this sense, a position on the free‐will issue or the mind‐body problem or various religious doctrines. The philosopher, even though libertarianism does not seem to him to be conclusively established, might accept it – take it as his position on the issue, defend it, draw various consequences for it, while seeking for conclusive evidence pro or con, and not yet finding himself believing it. And there is an analogous possibility for religious doctrines.7

Thus I take it that the analysis of a wide variety of supposed cases of believing at will reveals that in each case coming to believe that p may well have been confused with something else. Hence I think that there is a considerable case for the position that no one ever acquires a belief at will.

iii. Other Modes of Voluntary Control of Believing

The demise of basic control of belief is by no means the end of voluntarism about belief. Many deontologists, after avoiding any commitment to what they call “direct voluntary control of belief” (what I have called “basic voluntary control”), insist that beliefs are subject to what they term “indirect voluntary control”.8 They generally use this term in an undiscriminating fashion to cover any sort of voluntary control that is not basic. Hence they fail to distinguish the three kinds of nonbasic control I will proceed to enumerate.9 Some of their examples fit one of my three types and some another.

First, note that we take many nonbasic overt actions and their upshots to be under voluntary control in a way that is sufficient for their being required, permitted, or prohibited. Consider opening a door, turning on a light, and informing someone that p. Succeeding in any of these requires more than a volition; in each case I must make one or more bodily movements, and these movements must have certain consequences. In order for me to open a door, I must pull it, push it, kick it, or put some other part of my body into suitable contact with it (assuming that I lack telekinetic powers), and this must result in the door’s coming to be open. In order to inform II that p, I must produce various sounds, marks, or other perceivable products, and the product in question must fall under linguistic rules in such a way as to constitute a vehicle for asserting that p. Thus actions like these are not immediately consequent on a volition and are not strictly done “at will”. Nevertheless, I might be blamed for my failure to open the door when it was my obligation to do so and I was not prevented from performing basic bodily movements sufficient to bring it about that the door was open. In typical cases we take the extra conditions for success for granted. We suppose that if the agent will just voluntarily exert herself in a way that is open to her, the act will be done. Here we can say that the action and its upshot are subject to the immediate voluntary control of the agent (more strictly, nonbasic immediate voluntary control), even though more than an act of will is required. I call this control “immediate” since the agent is able to carry out the intention right away, in one uninterrupted intentional act, without having to return to the attempt a number of times.10 I will use the term ‘direct control’ for both basic and nonbasic immediate control. If beliefs were subject to one’s direct control in either way, that would suffice to render them susceptible to deontological evaluation.

But are beliefs always, or ever, within our immediate nonbasic voluntary control? As in the discussion of basic control we can first exempt most beliefs from consideration. Where it is perfectly clear that a certain proposition is true or false, as with typical perceptual, introspective, memory, and simple inferential beliefs, it is absurd to think that one has any such control over whether one accepts, rejects, or withholds the proposition. When I look out my window and see rain falling, water dripping off the trees, and cars passing by, I no more have immediate nonbasic control over whether I accept those propositions than I have basic control. I form the belief that rain is falling willy‐nilly. There is no way I can inhibit this belief or acquire a contrary belief. At least there is no way I can do so on the spot, in carrying out an uninterrupted intention to do so. What button would I push? I could try asserting the contrary in a confident tone of voice. I could rehearse some skeptical arguments. I could invoke the Vedantic doctrine of Maya. I could grit my teeth and command myself to withhold the proposition. But none of these will have the least effect on my doxastic condition. Since cases in which it seems obvious to the subject what is the case constitute an enormously large proportion of propositional attitudes, the above considerations show that immediate nonbasic voluntary control cannot be the basis for the application of deontological concepts to most of our beliefs and withholdings.

But what about situations in which it is not clear whether a proposition is true or false? Here I can simply refer the reader back to the last section, in which I argued with respect to basic control that the cases in which it may look as if one comes to believe a proposition at will are best construed in other ways. In those cases involving the philosopher, the general, and the gardener, it is, I claim, implausible to suppose that the subject acquired a belief voluntarily, whether by a mere act of will or by a series of basic or more nearly basic actions that led right away to the intended result. Here, as with the obviously true or false cases, we are at a loss to think what button to push, what bodily movements to make so as to bring about the formation of an intended belief. Until some plausible story can be told as to what one can do voluntarily to result in a belief’s being formed immediately, we can ignore the possibility of treating voluntary control of beliefs on the model of nonbasic but immediate voluntary control of doors being open and lights being on.

This brings us to a second grade of what is commonly called “indirect voluntary control”, what I will call long‐range voluntary control. It will be noted that the types of voluntary control I am considering are arranged in an order of increasing indirectness, increasing distance from the most immediate control. Here, as with immediate nonbasic voluntary control, we think of the belief as being produced by the carrying out of an intention by one or more actions that are designed to produce the belief rather than as being produced by a mere act of will, choice, or decision. But unlike the last case, the belief production is not carried out in one uninterrupted action. It involves a series of actions spread out over a greater or smaller period of time, the smallest period of which is too extended to accommodate a single uninterrupted act.11 A number of voluntarists seem to be thinking in these terms of the cases in which it is not immediately obvious whether a given proposition is true or false. After all, they say, that is what inquiry is for, to resolve such issues. One certainly has voluntary control over whether to keep looking for evidence or reasons, and voluntary control over where to look, what steps to take to find relevant considerations, and so on. It is suggested, in effect, that since we have voluntary control over these intermediate steps, this amounts to what I call long‐range voluntary control of a propositional attitude. Chisholm, for example, says:

If self‐control is what is essential to activity, some of our beliefs, our believings, would seem to be acts. When a man deliberates and comes finally to a conclusion, his decision is as much within his control as is any other deed we attribute to him. If his conclusion was unreasonable, a conclusion he should not have accepted, we may plead with him: “But you needn’t have supposed that so‐and‐so was true. Why didn’t you take account of these other facts?” We assume that his decision is one he could have avoided and that, had he only chosen to do so, he could have made a more reasonable inference. Or, if his conclusion is not the result of a deliberate inference, we may say, “But if you had only stopped to think”, implying that, had he chosen, he could have stopped to think. We suppose, as we do whenever we apply our ethical or moral predicates, that there was something else the agent could have done instead.

(1968, 224)

To be sure, the mere fact that one often looks for evidence to decide an unresolved issue does not show that one has voluntary control over one’s propositional attitudes. That would also depend, at least, on the incidence of success in these enterprises. And sometimes one finds decisive evidence and sometimes one doesn’t. But let’s ignore that complexity and just consider whether there is a case for long‐range voluntary control of belief in the successful cases.

No, there is not, and primarily for the following reason. Claims like those in the quote from Chisholm ignore the difference between doing A in order to bring about E, for some definite E, and doing A so that some effect within a certain range will ensue. In order that the phenomenon of looking for more evidence would show that we have voluntary control over propositional attitudes, it would have to be the case that the search for evidence was undertaken with the intention of taking up a certain attitude toward a specific proposition. For only in that case would it have any tendency to show that we have exercised voluntary control over what propositional attitude we come to have. Suppose that I can’t remember Al Kaline’s lifetime batting average, and I look it up in the baseball almanac. I read there the figure .320, and I thereby accept it. Does that show that I have voluntary control (of any sort) over my belief that Kaline’s lifetime batting average was .320? Not at all. At most it shows that I have long‐range voluntary control over whether I take up some propositional attitude toward some proposition ascribing a lifetime batting average to Kaline. So this is not at all parallel to cases where we definitely do have some (albeit fallible) long‐range voluntary control over other sorts of affairs. Suppose that I can perform voluntary actions that will result, subject to the usual chances that infect all human endeavor, in my losing twenty pounds. Here there is a completely definite and unique result toward which my voluntary efforts are directed, and success, or at least repeated success, will show that I do have long‐range voluntary control (within limits) of my weight.

What the situation described by Chisholm is closely analogous to is the following. I am a servant, and I am motivated to bring the door into whatever position my employer chooses. He has an elaborate electronic system that involves automatic control of many aspects of the household, including doors. Each morning he leaves detailed instructions on household operations in a computer. Doors can be operated only through the computer in accordance with his instructions. There is no way I can carry out an intention of my own, no matter how long range, to open or to close a particular door at a particular time. All I can is to actuate the relevant program and let things take their course. Since the employer’s instructions will be carried out only if I actuate the program, I am responsible for the doors’ assuming positions he specified, just as in the Kaline case I was responsible for taking up some attitude or other toward some proposition within a given range. But I definitely am not responsible for the front door’s being open rather than closed at a particular time, nor can I be said to have voluntary control over its specific position. Hence it would be idle to apply deontological concepts vis‐à‐vis the specific position of the door: to forbid me or require me to open it, or to blame or reproach me for its being open. I had no control over that; it was not subject to my will. And that’s the way it is where the only voluntary control I have over my propositional attitudes is to enter onto an investigation that will eventuate in some propositional attitude or other on what is being considered.

Or consider propositions concerning what is visible. I have the power to voluntarily open my eyes and look about me, thereby putting myself in a position, when conditions are favorable, to reliably form propositions about the visible environment. Again, with respect to past experiences, I can “search my memory” for the details of my experiences of the middle of yesterday, thereby usually putting myself in a good position to form beliefs reliably about my experiences at that time. No one, I suppose, would take these facts to show that I have voluntary control over what I believe about the visible environment or about my remembered experiences. What I can control voluntarily is whether I form (or am in a position to form) some accurate beliefs or other about my current visible environment or about my experiences of yesterday. And yet this is the same sort of thing as the search for additional evidence of which Chisholm speaks, differing only in the type of belief‐forming mechanisms involved.

I suspect that those who take positions like the one in the passage just quoted from Chisholm secretly suppose that the additional evidence, rather than “automatically” determining the propositional attitude, simply puts the subject in a position to make an informed choice of an attitude. That is, they really locate the voluntary control in the moment of attitude formation rather than in the preliminary investigation, thereby in effect taking the (basic or nonbasic) immediate‐control position. But then, faced with the implausibility of those positions, they think to save the application of deontological concepts to beliefs by pushing the voluntary control back to the preliminary search for decisive considerations. But their undercover attachment to the immediate‐control thesis prevents them from seeing that voluntary control of the investigative phase has no tendency to ground the deontological treatment of propositional attitudes themselves.

Despite the above arguments against false pretensions to the title of “long‐range voluntary control of belief”, I have no intention of suggesting that there could not be legitimate claimants. Let’s take a fresh start and lay out what it takes for a genuine case of such control in general (not restricted to beliefs). It requires