Abstract
Much of the force behind doxastic involuntarism comes from our pre-theoretical judgement that any effort to form a belief simply by intending to form it must remain unsuccessful. However, despite this, ordinary language use of locutions like “chose to believe” are common. In this article, we present new experimental data that shows that the prevalence of ordinary language talk of “chosen beliefs” is no obstacle to doxastic involuntarism in a standard sense (pace Turri et al. 2018). While we employ the methods of experimental philosophy, our argument also concerns the fundamental question as to what those methods can achieve: as is typical of philosophical debates, the debate over doxastic voluntarism involves a refined theoretical concept, specifically a refined concept of voluntary belief. In such debates, we cannot determine our pre-theoretical position by conducting surveys on those who may not yet own the requisite theoretical concepts.
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Notes
We are not here concerned with the even more refined differences between basic and direct control, or between indirect control and indirect influence, since these distinctions have been contested in ways that the direct/indirect distinction has not (for more, see Booth 2020).
Turri et al. prefer to talk about our “folk psychology” rather than our pre-theoretical judgements, or pre-theoretical grasp of concepts. Since it is standard practice in experimental philosophy to use the terms “folk psychology” and “pretheoretical judgements” as synonyms we interpret their results as applying to the latter. For a recent example, see Grossmann et al. (2020) where the terms “folk psychology”, “our intuitions” and “our pretheoretical judments” are treated synonymously. Also, we take seriously the fear that derogatory terms such as “folk” in a “folk-expert” or “lay-expert” dichotomy carry potentially harmful political connotations.
The latter type of question may seem methodologically problematic. Respondents could disagree for at least two reasons: They could fail to attribute responsibility, or they could attribute responsibility, but fail to link it to choosing. However, we saw no way around asking questions of this type here, since we hoped to confirm our prediction that respondents are particularly willing to attribute “choosing”, when simultaneously they also attribute responsibility. As this article makes clear, our prediction was confirmed for non-doxastic as well as doxastic cases. We regard this as a significant result. We thank a referee for this journal for pushing us at this point.
Rather than the partial eta-squared, we report the partial omega-squared (\( {\omega }_{p}^{2}\)), which is the estimated population effect size and is interpreted as the proportion of variance in the outcome accounted for by a factor once the variances of the other factors has been removed. This is described as a more precise estimate of effect size by Baldwin (2019).
Also, this claim of Turri et al. has since been contested by Cusimano and Goodwin: “Beliefs were indeed judged to be one of the most controllable sorts of mental state, though they clearly do not stand alone in this regard, as data from all of our studies showed. Evaluations, imaginings, and deliberations were judged just as controllable, if not more controllable, than beliefs. Desires were judged as less controllable than beliefs, although only when their contents were allowed to vary, and not when their content was tightly controlled.“ (2019, 1722).
With thanks to Corey Cusimano for raising this point in correspondence.
Cusimano and Goodwin (2019, 1706) asked a group of respondents a range of questions about a generic case of a female student intending to do well at an exam. They here registered a very high proportion of affirmative answers to questions such as “How much control did she have over intending that she did well at the exam?” and “Did she intentionally intend that she did well at the exam?” They conclude on this basis that generally we see other persons’ intentions as highly controllable and intentional. We fully recognize this result. Yet, again, it does not demonstrate that direct control has any role to play here. To their credit Cusimano and Goodwin draw no such conclusion. See also their (forthcoming).
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Acknowledgements
We are grateful to Andy Clark, Corey Cusimano, Mikkel Gerken, Lasse Suonperä Liebst, Alexa Morcom, and Ane Qvortrup for their advice and comments. We also wish warmly to thank two anonymous reviewers for this journal and its editors for insightful comments and kind assistance.
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Nottelmann, N., Booth, A. & Lomholt, R. Are We Pre-Theoretically Committed to Doxastic Voluntarism?. Rev.Phil.Psych. 14, 1077–1098 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13164-022-00615-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s13164-022-00615-3