Abstract
In this paper I discuss the claim that believing at will is ‘conceptually impossible’ or, to use a formulation encountered in the debate, “that nothing could be a belief and be willed directly”. I argue that such a claim is only plausible if directed against the claim that believing itself is an action-type. However, in the debate, the claim has been univocally directed against the position that forming a belief is an action-type. I argue that the many arguments offered in favor of the ‘conceptual impossibility’ of performing such actions fail without exception. If we are to argue against doxastic voluntarism we are better off by resorting to more modest means.
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Notes
Audi (2001).
“Epistemic deontologism includes, among other things, a commitment to the idea that we can legitimately be reproached, scorned, and blamed for not believing what we ought to believe and that we can legitimately be praised and the like for believing what we ought to believe”. Ryan (2003).
Recent avid defenses of epistemic deontologism by appeal to (genetic) doxastic voluntarism include Steup (1988), Steup (2000), Ginet (2001) and Ryan (2003). Van Fraassen (1984) presents the rare case of a self-acclaimed voluntarist position without explicit deontic ambitions. However, upon closer inspection, Van Fraassens’ ‘voluntarism’ arguably amounts to nothing more than a conception of beliefs as analogous to some kind of reflexive contractual commitment, rather than an endorsement of doxastic voluntarism in any of the versions discussed here (see in Van Fraassen 1984). Doxastic voluntarism is a position with a huge legacy. For example, according to Sharon Ryan, figures no less than Saint Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, W. K. Clifford, William James, Blaise Pascal, Rene Descartes, Søren Kierkegaard, and Leo Tolstoy all line up in the voluntarist ranks (Ryan 2003). I do not wish to claim here that doxastic voluntarism is correlated with epistemic deontologism in a wider historical perspective, although I strongly suspect that it is in fact so.
Defenses of some form of non-voluntarist epistemic deontologism or other include Heil (1982), Kornblith (1983), Montmarquet (1993), Owens (2000), Heller (2001), and Toribio (2002). All unite in endorsing the legitimacy of deontic evaluations of beliefs and in providing an account of the legitimacy of such evaluations without presupposing doxastic voluntarism. However, the non-voluntarist accounts given are wildly divergent.
“...[T]he general consensus is that there is nothing like direct voluntary control over any of our beliefs.” Toribio (2002).
One possible exception is Matthias Steup, who in a passage of Steup (1988) writes: “Moreover, it seems to me, there are positive reasons for the view that having beliefs is a form of agency”. Steup (1988), my italics. Steup’s 1988 commitment to behavioural voluntarism is far from univocal, though. In another context in the same paper he ventures the following claim: “Whenever a belief is an appropriate object for the attribution of epistemic blame, it must have been within the agent’s power to do something that would have led him to refraining from this belief.” (Steup (1988). Further, his commitment to the genetic version of doxastic voluntarism has been outspoken in later papers, e.g., in Steup (2000) he takes the stance that often beliefs may at least be generated by a decision in exactly the same sense as the action of raising my arm under typical circumstances. Steup (2000).
See especially Gale (1999).
James defended the peculiar thesis that belief is identical to “the Will”: “Will and Belief, in short, meaning a certain relation between objects and the Self, are two names for one and the same PSYCHOLOGICAL phenomenon.” James(1981).
O’Shaughnessy(1980).
Scott-Kakures (1993).
O’Shaughnessy (1980).
Scott-Kakures (1993).
Williams (1973).
O’Shaughnessy (1980).
Scott-Kakures (1993).
Barbara Winters is a more difficult case. In Winters (1979) it is far from clear what kind of necessity is suggested by her use of the term “necessarily” , when she states that “Necessarily, ¬(∃x)(∃p): (x believes in full consciousness [x believes p & x’s belief of p is not sustained by any truth consideration])”. She appears to discuss her “general claim” on an equal footing with Bernard William’s version of the CIC (which she rejects), but also explicitly relies upon empirical premises in defending it.
Scott-Kakures (1993). It is not clear from this quote in isolation that Scott-Kakures is talking about conceptual impossibility. However, as should be clear from the quotes offered above, this is made explicitly clear earlier in the article.
A paradigm case of ‘causal luck’ would be the case in which an agent with a paralysed arm might still succeed in ‘raising’ it through her intention to do so, if e.g., the emotional stress of her incapacity causes a spasm to thrust upwards the paralysed limb. I take it that the term “unmediated” in Scott-Kakures formulation of the conceptual impossibility claim is meant to exclude the doxastic parallel of such cases. At least he later makes it clear that he takes actions like arm-raising as paradigmatic of the conception of belief-formation, which he wants to rule out (Scott-Kakures 1993).
At this point, Winters presents a problem, since she explicitly argues for the impossibility of “sustaining” a belief under certain circumstances (see note above). However, she ventures that “‘sustained at will’ applies to a belief originally acquired at will and still held for that reason”. (Winters 1979).
O’Shaughnessy (1980).
Bennett (1990).
Of course the possibility obtains that Bennett thinks of the ‘bio-feedback’ method as only one way in which a belief could (hypothetically) be acquired at will. However, there is no trace in the text that Bennett should not hold such ‘virtuosity’ necessary in order to achieve this feat.
O’Shaughnessy (1980).
O’Shaughnessy introduces the term “b-believing” in the following passage: “Now I shall begin this discussion by making the (almost certainly counter-factual) assumption that there might exist such an act as the immediate willing of belief, (modelled upon the familiar basic act that is the immediate willing of arm rise). I shall call it ‘b-believing’...”. Ibid. p. 22. One might well wonder whether O’Shaugnessy refers to a behavioral or a genetic version of doxastic voluntarism here, but immediately above he has made it clear that the genetic version is the intended one: “My question is altogether different. It is: can there be an act that is the bringing about of belief?”. Ibid.
Williams (1973). The left-out passage concerns so-called “B-states”, weaker surrogates of belief states that a machine may be in. Ibid p. 145. The issue of B-states is not narrowly relevant to the present context, where we are dealing with full-blow beliefs throughout.
Scott-Kakures (1993).
O’Shaughnessy (1980).
Williams (1973).
I take it that Williams’ argument is not violated by replacing “know” with “believe” throughout.
Williams (1973).
Williams (1973).
Ibid.
Ibid.
Govier (1976).
Williams (1973).
A perfectly parallel claim is made in O’Shaughnessy (1980) where O’Shaughnessy argues that “only the very mad” come near to consciously holding such incompatible belief, and that such beliefs would hardly qualify as “genuine” beliefs at all.
Or more accurately: Necessarily false conjunctions. However, any necessary falsehood p may of course trivially be turned into the necessarily false conjunction p & p.
As any false mathematical proposition, I take it, is necessarily false the conjunction of the proposition with itself is also necessarily false. Further an agent who believes a mathematical proposition p plausibly may also be attributed the belief p & p and vice versa.
Amazingly, the crucial shift from conceptual impossibility to psychological impossibility has gone unnoticed in the literature; neither proponents nor opponents of the retrospective self-defeat argument seem to have remarked it.
Williams (1973).
Winters (1979).
Scott-Kakures (1993).
Montmarquet (1986). I shall leave it open whether such ‘incontinence’ really deserves the coveted but controversial title of ‘epistemic akrasia’.
Dana Radcliffe seems to have gone for a prospective version of the stronger negative requirement: “There is no incompatibility between recognizing that I have not yet come to a belief that Tom is guilty and the absence of a second-order epistemic assessment of that possible belief...(...)... Does my lacking an opinion so far about the epistemc status of that belief prevent me from intending or willing to believe it? Surely not!” Radcliffe (1997). Now, as seen above, I take the prospective arguments to either beg the question or rely on the retrospective argument. Thus, I see no reason for pursuing such prospective concerns in detail.
Of course, as argued by Freud and others, unconscious beliefs may have other very significant causal roles to play in the human psyche.
Here we have an important disanalogy with reasons for action: It may well be the case that I have a good reason to perform an action and a good reason to perform its opposite. E.g. I may have a good reason to unfold my umbrella in case of rain (otherwise my cloth gets wet) but I may have an equally good reason to leave it down (I like rain in my hair). In the epistemic case, when I have a good reason to believe a proposition I have an equally good reason not to believe it’s opposite.
Winters consider two cases of capricious belief in the present sense: Beliefs about future matters of fact held by some self-acclaimed psychic and religious beliefs supposedly self-induced by some mysterious counter-rational “leap of faith”. Winters (1979). Here, I take it, only the latter category meets the specification. Surely, a psychic would normally quote the ‘fact’ that her belief about the future was produced by her psychic powers as a good rationalizing reason for holding it.
Scott-Kakures (1993).
Personally I doubt whether these airy notions can be made out to explain the difficulties involved in e.g., Davidson’s famous ‘timorous mountaineer example’. Here in one case the mountaineer lets go of a rope intentionally, in another his intention to let go causes him to let go by a ‘deviant causal chain’; it scares him to unintentionally drop the rope. Davidson (1980). Now in my opinion we have here simply a robust causal difference in no need of ‘internalist’ explanation: in the ‘deviant’ case, an emotion came after the intention to let go in the causal chain leading to the action, in the other it did not. Still, as shall emerge, we can safely concede Scott-Kakures’ roundabout reading of such examples (Scott-Kakures 1993) and still reject his conclusions.
Scott-Kakures (1993).
Scott-Kakures (1993).
These are bizarre cases, where simply holding the belief in itself generates a good reason to hold it. Scott-Kakures mentions the case, where someone credibly offers you $ 1.000.000 for forming the belief that you are a millionaire. If somehow you succeed in believing this, you instantly have a good reason for believing it. I believe we may safely ignore the relevance of this rare phenomenon to the wider issue of doxastic voluntarism.
Scott-Kakures (1993).
At least Steup (2000) and Ryan (2003) clearly aim to meet this challenge on behalf of doxastic voluntarism. Despite their intriguing arguments, I doubt whether any of these papers succeed in their aim. In my opinion the broadside directed against genetic doxastic voluntarism in Alston (1988) remains decisive, though not without need for refinenement.
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Acknowledgements
The author wishes to thank associate professor Jan Riis Flor, University of Copenhagen and professor Frederick F. Schmitt, Indiana University for valuable comments on an earlier draft of this paper. He also wishes to thank The Danish Research Council for the Humanities and The Carlsberg Foundation for financial support of his research.
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Nottelman, N. Is Believing at Will ‘Conceptually Impossible’?. Acta Anal 22, 105–124 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12136-007-0003-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12136-007-0003-z