Abstract
Control of our own beliefs is allegedly required for the truth of epistemic evaluations, such as “S ought to believe that p”, or “S ought to suspend judgment (and so refrain from any belief) whether p”. However, we cannot usually believe or refrain from believing at will. I agree with a number of recent authors in thinking that this apparent conflict is to be resolved by distinguishing reasons for believing that give evidence that p from reasons that make it desirable to believe that p whether or not p is true. I argue however that there is a different problem, one that becomes clearer in light of this solution to the first problem. Someone’s approval of our beliefs is at least often a non-evidential reason to believe, and as such cannot change our beliefs. Ought judgments aim to change the world. But ‘ought to believe’ judgments can’t do that by changing the belief, if they don’t give evidence. So I argue that we should instead regard epistemic ought judgments as aimed mainly at influencing assertions that express the belief and other actions based on the belief, in accord with recent philosophical claims that we have epistemic norms for assertion and action.
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Notes
This is of course intended only as a broad general characterization of the function of ‘ought’ judgments and so we should expect many exceptions, real and apparent. ‘Ought’ judgments about past occurrences are obviously not intended to change those past events, but as endorsements of implied standards they may influence similar future actions and occurrences. Conditional ought’s may have the ostensible aim of affecting how something is done, if it is done, while not urging anyone to do it, and even have the aim of discouraging the indicated conduct. “If you choose to major in philosophy, you ought to take business courses too.” Sometimes ‘ought’ judgments are predictions, as in “She ought to arrive by three o’clock” spoken in circumstances where there can be no question of influencing the arrival time. There is commonly still a normative component however—notice that if the speaker later came to believe the prediction was unreasonable the claim might be withdrawn. “I was mistaken in thinking that she ought to have arrived then, as the buses don’t run that frequently.” If the subject of the claim was at fault on the other hand, because she stopped to browse in a bookstore, upsetting the implied schedule, the ‘ought’ claim may not be withdrawn: “She ought to have arrived at three, but she stopped at a book store.” It failed as prediction, but it may still be correct as a normative judgment. Even if the prediction is “The weather ought to be fair” one may refuse to retract it when it rains. It ought to have been fair, given the forecast and all of past experience in June. One might hope for a taxonomy of ‘ought’ judgments that would clearly distinguish those that really aimed to change the world from those that (only) had some other purpose, but such a project even if successful seems unlikely to be more useful than just using our existing abilities to discern intentions of speakers given sufficient information about particular cases. (Thanks to Matthew Chrisman for comments that inspired this note.).
See Plantinga (1993) for extensive argument that it is a mistake to treat epistemic norms on the model of moral duty.
I think Sharon Ryan’s examples (Ryan 2003, pp. 50–56) do not indicate that this very narrow version of the principle is false. Wedgewood (2006) develops a semantics for this sort of ‘ought’, where (roughly) S ought to A iff A-ing is part of every correct plan for S. Different sorts of deliberation or deliberation analogs are supposed to allow the semantics to encompass other sorts of ‘ought’ judgments. ‘Ought’ implies ‘can’ is included in the semantics by requiring that the correct plans be realizable.
The cases where there is no surprise on finding the door unlocked, in spite of one’s persistent affirmations to oneself in the interim, are presumably cases of acceptance that don’t amount to genuine belief.
Hieronymi is also attempting to give a schematic answer to a larger question, how to give an account of the nature of the “wrong kind of reasons” for a variety of different sorts of attitudes, including fearing that, wishing that, intending to, and so on. Each attitude will have a different associated question, and answering the appropriate question will tend to produce that attitude by giving a constitutive reason for it. Answers to the wrong question will not be constitutive reasons to hold that attitude. An example involving a non-belief attitude: If I hear that fearing the results of X winning the election will obtain me a cordial meeting with very attractive person S, that might be a reason to desire to fear the victory of X. But it is not a constitutive reason to fear it, because it indicates no danger in that victory. Perhaps there are parallel problems for other propositional attitudes too—being told that we ought not to fear X is normally ineffective in removing our fears, unless supplemented by a reason for thinking X is not dangerous. But here I will focus on the case of belief, as quite enough for one paper. Thanks to an anonymous referee for Erkenntnis for pointing out the similarity of considerations here.
Processes where the subject invokes the concept of belief, and so cases of self-consciously considering what to believe, cannot be effectively so influenced, they maintain (Shah and Velleman 2005, p. 501). An apparent counterexample might be the creationist who deliberately tries to maintain his religious beliefs by avoiding scientific natural history. Even there the creationist probably doesn’t consciously think of himself as avoiding evidence against his religious beliefs, so much as refusing to risk being corrupted by what he is frequently told are only lies.
Chrisman claims it does (Chrisman 2008, p. 354) but his reasons for so holding are not clear to me.
Thanks to an anonymous referee for Erkenntnis for suggesting that I ought to clarify these points. Another point to notice that naturally arises in talk of motivation and comparison to act-motivation is that what the reason motivates need not be a direct consequence of recognizing the reason—visiting Boston may be something I do partly for the reason that my new acquaintance thinks I ought to, even though the visit itself takes a good deal of planning and preparation after the encouragement is expressed, and itself comprises numerous component actions such as walking to the train station, boarding the train, etc. Similarly the remarks about reasons for believing are in no way intended to suggest that something is a reason to believe only if one can “just” believe on recognizing it as a reason. For example, it may take much consideration to come to weigh a reason appropriately even after we recognize that it is a reason to believe.
Thanks to my colleague Bernard Kobes for bringing this option for an account of the function of ‘you ought to believe’ to my attention.
Thanks to Chrisman (personal communication) for correcting an earlier misunderstanding of his proposal.
“Someone ought to wipe your nose!”—author’s aunt, not addressing the author.
The example is Feldman’s (2004, p. 175). He compares such obligations to epistemic obligations, holding that both involve ‘role ought’s, which indicate the right way to play a certain role.
Lackey argues that one need not actually believe it, but that it must be “reasonable to believe” it for it to be the content of an acceptable assertion. Presumably if one epistemically ought not to believe it, then it is not reasonable to believe it, and so one should not assert it on Lackey’s view.
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Acknowledgments
Thanks to Bernard Kobes, Angel Pinillos, and Michael White for comments on earlier drafts and to the students in a seminar on doxastic voluntarism that I taught at Arizona State University for helpful discussion of these issues. This paper has also benefited from unusually thorough, perceptive, and informative comments from anonymous referees for Erkenntnis.
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Reynolds, S.L. Doxastic Voluntarism and the Function of Epistemic Evaluations. Erkenn 75, 19–35 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10670-011-9274-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10670-011-9274-2