Abstract
My main aim is to argue that most conceptions of doxastic agency do not respond to the skeptic’s challenge. I begin by considering some reasons for thinking that we are not doxastic agents. I then turn to a discussion of those who try to make sense of doxastic agency by appeal to belief’s reasons-responsive nature. What they end up calling agency is not robust enough to satisfy the challenge posed by the skeptics. To satisfy the skeptic, one needs to make sense of the possibility of believing for nonevidential reasons. While this has been seen as an untenable view for both skeptics and anti-skeptics, I conclude by suggesting it is a position that has been too hastily dismissed.
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Notes
Skepticism is sometimes expressed about whether one can exercise agency in believing and sometimes about whether agency can be exercised in forming, maintaining, or abandoning, beliefs. Often, the target of the skepticism is not clearly delineated, and it what follows, depending on the particular view I am discussing, the two positions—which can come apart—will be largely treated as one view. The first way of expressing the skeptical view better captures the spirit of the concern, which is essentially a concerns about the nature of belief. The idea is that if in believing I am not doing anything, it cannot be appropriate to say that I am exercising agency. Most will admit that I can do many things that predictably result in believing, but that the actual “forming” of a belief which results from, either automatic mechanisms, or deliberation and judgment is not something that I do. For a clear and useful discussion of how these positions can come apart see Chrisman (2016, p. 10).
For a helpful recent discussion of normativism about belief see Nolfi (2015). Among those Nolfi cites as endorsing normativism (a number of whom I will be discussing here) are Jonathan Adler, Allan Gibbard, Peter Graham, Peter Railton, Nishi Shah, Ernest Sosa and Ralph Wedgwood. Leary (2016) argues that the strategy of appealing to the constitutive standards of correctness of belief to rule out non-evidential reasons for beliefs fails.
He defines evidentialism as the view that “only evidence can be a reason for belief” and the pragmatist is one “committed to the existence of at least some non-evidential reasons for belief” (Shah 2006, p. 482).
Levy (2007) is most clearly committed to this view. He says “our lack of control over belief typically excuses responsibility for them” and most of our actual attributions of doxastic responsibility are false. Adler thinks that it is “deeply misleading” to apply deontological language to beliefs. When he says “one ought to believe that p only if one has adequate reasons that p” this “ought” is not pointing to a duty or a direction. Because Adler argues it is conceptually impossible to believe without taking yourself to have adequate reasons for your belief the “ought” is taken as more of a “must” and thus “when I recognize that the evidence establishes (fails to establish) that p, it makes no strict sense to say I ought (or that it is not the case that I ought) to believe p” (Adler 2002, p. 51). Thus when we use this kind of language we are either saying something false or meaningless. Others who argue that the nature of belief precludes a robust form of doxastic agency offer some way of understanding our normative assessments. This is the case with Chrisman, for example, whose view I will discuss further below.
In trying to articulate what it means for a belief to be based on a reason, many would deny that this relationship could be reduced to this conjunction. One may hold both these beliefs, but unless the appropriate causal relationship exists between them one will not be based on the other, or, as Boyle puts it, one will not hold the first belief for the reason that one believes the second. How to capture the nature of the appropriate relationship is difficult and controversial, as it is in the case of intentional action. In a recent discussion, Ernest Sosa argues that one can find this same type of problem about how to offer content to the idea of “in the right way” emerging for theories of action and perception. What is “the right way” for an intention to be related to the intended act for it to count as a case of acting intentionally? What is “the right way” for a subject to relate to an object to count as a case of perceiving the object? (2015, p. 27). I will return to this question about the basing relation when thinking about whether one can believe for a non-evidential reason.
For Frankfurt, “the notion of the will is not coextensive with the notion of what an agent intends to do. For even though someone may have a settled intention to do X, he may nevertheless do something else instead of doing X because, despite his intention, his desire to do X proves to be weaker or less effective than a conflicting desire” (1971, p. 8). Those who identify will and intention more closely may question how settled his intention was given his failure to act.
See footnote 6. For a thorough discussion of different ways of thinking about what count as reasons for belief and the basing relation see Sylvan (2016). Some view the relationship as essentially causal, but attempt to characterize the “appropriate” kind of causation so as to rule out deviant cases, while other have abandoned the causal approach for what have been termed “doxastic” accounts. These accounts argue that for a belief (P) to be based on a reason (Q), one must judge that Q is good evidence for P. Only doxastic characterizations of the basing relation clearly rule out non-evidential reasons, but such accounts have been widely criticized for ruling out a lot more as well, and ultimately seem to commit one to a strong internalist view of justification. I do not have the space here to fully defend this view though will say some to motivate it in what follows.
Jonathan Way (2016) has argued that for the constraint on reasoning to preclude non-evidential reasons for belief it needs to be this very strong constraint, but unlike the weaker constraint that just says it needs to be capable of motivating or of operating in deliberation or reasoning “the condition looks gerrymandered to support an argument for evidentialism” (812). Susanna Rinard (2015) has recently argued that the characterizations of the basing relation which rule out non-evidential reasons for belief rule out a lot more, namely they rule out non-evidential reasons for action as well.
Once one recognizes this wider sense of “practical” it can be argued, as both I (2015) and Rinard (2015) have, that the reason we have to believe as the evidence dictates is ultimately practical. Here is Rinard: “In most ordinary cases, evidence in favor of P constitutes a pragmatic reason to believe it. Typically, evidence that the store is closed now is a pragmatic consideration in favor of believing it, as one would (typically) be inconvenienced by having false beliefs about the store’s hours. Evidence that one’s spouse has pneumonia is (typically) a pragmatic reason to believe it, as one will (ordinarily) be better suited to care for them if one has true beliefs about the nature of their illness” (219).
Rinard makes a similar point. In many cases of acting for pragmatic considerations “the causal connection between the pragmatic consideration for Φ-ing, and the agent’s actually Φ-ing is complex and indirect. But this does not prevent the consideration from constituting a genuine reason for Φ-ing” (2015, p. 213).
In a recent discussion of doxastic control, Kate Nolfi (2013) argues that her view is preferable to alternatives because it allows a “unified account of when and why we are appropriate targets of prescriptive evaluation in virtue of how we form, revise, and sustain the range of different types of mental attitudes that we are capable of having.” She argues that we have doxastic control when our normative judgments of how we ideally ought to believe causally influence our belief-regulating dispositions. While I think her view ultimately shares some of the problems with character-based views of doxastic agency and responsibility which I discuss in detail (2015), I also think that finding a unified account of our prescriptive and reactive practices is important.
This view of agency being exercised in the activity of maintaining a system of beliefs shares much in common with Boyle’s view and Chrisman admits as much. His preference for it has to do with its being more careful and precise in respecting traditional metaphysical (and linguistic) categories. One of the problems with Boyle’s “active state” view, according to Chrisman is that is should allow that a proper response to “what are you doing?” should be “believing” which seems very odd. But how much less odd would it be for me to respond to that question by saying “maintaining my belief system”?
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Acknowledgements
I am grateful to the audiences at the Workshop on Doxastic Agency and Epistemic Responsibility, Ruhr-Universität Bochum, June 2–3, 2014, the Eidyn Epistemology Research Group, University of Edinburgh, October 1, 2014, and the participants in Erasmus Mayr’s colloquium at Humboldt University (Fall 2014) for helpful discussion of earlier versions of this paper. Thanks to Matthew Chrisman, Nioklaj Nottleman, Alexander Dinges, and Simon Gaus for their extensive comments on and discussion of earlier drafts. Finally, I would like to thank the anonymous referees for Erkenntnis for very helpful written comments.
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McCormick, M.S. Responding to Skepticism About Doxastic Agency. Erkenn 83, 627–645 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10670-017-9906-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10670-017-9906-2