Abstract
Doxastic involuntarists, as I categorize them, say that it’s impossible to form a belief as an intentional action. But what exactly is it to form a belief, as opposed to simply getting yourself to have one? (Everyone agrees you could do that intentionally.) This question has been insufficiently addressed, and the lacuna threatens the involuntarists’ position: if the question isn’t answered, their view will lack any clear content; but, after considering some straightforward ways of answering it, I argue that they would make involuntarism either false or insignificant. I also examine several involuntarist arguments, and find them faltering at just this point: inadequate attention to belief-formation results in unsound arguments or insignificant conclusions. The viability of involuntarism as a meaningful position, I conclude, turns on whether the notion of belief-formation can be further developed.
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Notes
This way of casting involuntarism can be found at least in Ryan (2003: 72–73), Nottelman (2006: 561–57); Setiya (2008: 40); Hieronymi (2009: 157); Steup (2012: 154; 2017: 2674); Benbaji (2016: 1954); and McHugh (2017: 2746–48). Sometimes the involuntarist is understood instead as saying that we can’t believe something “at will” or “just like that” (Williams 1973: 148), or “just by deciding” to do it (Ginet 2001: 63); that our believing isn’t “free” (Weatherson 2008), or that our belief states aren’t under our “direct control” (Alston 1988). These differences in formulation aren’t trivial. For my discussion, I want to be careful about focusing on the question of intentional action.
Besides the authors named in this body paragraph, Scott-Kakures (1994), Steglich-Petersen (2006), and Ganapini (forthcoming) push versions of this thought. Alston (1988: 263), Nottelman (2006), Booth (2017), and Sullivan-Bissett (2018) take involuntarism instead as a contingent truth for creatures like us. Then there’s the voluntarist camp, which includes Ginet (2001), Ryan (2003), Weatherson (2008), Steup (2012 and 2017), Peels (2015), and Roeber (2019).
Special thanks to Sinan Dogramaci, here, for raising this possible interpretation of DI.
This is controversial, in fact, at least if confidence is a matter of credence. Setiya’s assumption would follow from a view on which there’s a stable threshold x (for all agents, or for a particular agent) such that someone believes that p just in case her credence in p is at least x. That thesis faces challenges, though—for surveys, see Jackson (2020: sec. 2.2) and Genin and Huber (2020: sec. 4.2.2)—and alternative views are friendlier to the prospect of belief-formation without an increase in credence. Weatherson (2008: 553), for instance, explicitly allows that possibility. Thanks to an anonymous referee for pointing out this way of resisting Setiya’s argument. My main objection, to be clear, doesn’t depend on the issue.
Hieronymi (2009: 175) resists the distinction here, arguing that believing isn’t apt for divvying up into a stage of active formation that ends with static belief as a finished product. Allow that: let the state of belief be a continuing, dynamic activity. My objection stands: the conditions of engaging in that activity are still being mistaken for conditions of intending to engage in it.
A recent paper from Mariana Bergamaschi Ganapini (forthcoming) seems to me to extend the pattern. Ganapini says it’s a conceptual truth that believing p entails being disposed to use p as a premise in reasoning. To this, she adds the claim that it’s irrational to reason from a premise that is unsupported by evidence, and the claim that it’s impossible to reason in a way you believe to be irrational. It’s impossible, she concludes, to intend to believe something you think is unsupported by evidence—for you know that it will be impossible to reason from it, which is what having a belief at all would require. (You can’t intend what you know is impossible.).
By now, maybe you can see my response coming: once more, the state of belief and the process of belief-formation have been conflated. By the time I have the belief, perhaps, I’ll need to regard its content as well-supported by evidence. (Grant this assumption.) That doesn’t show that I need already to regard it as well-supported while I’m doing the belief-formation, or deciding to do it. Recall the point about temporal indexing, from Sect. 2.2.
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Acknowledgements
I’m sincerely grateful to Bryce Dalbey, Andrew del Rio, Sinan Dogramaci, Daniel Drucker, James Gillard, Steven Gubka, Engel Hawbecker, Sam Krauss, Matthew Matherne, Marissa Neuman, Shmulik Nili, Hannah Trees, and participants in the UT–Austin graduate colloquium, for their discussion of the ideas in this paper.
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Vermaire, M. In search of doxastic involuntarism. Philos Stud 179, 615–631 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-021-01673-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-021-01673-6