I explore the possibility and rationality of interpersonal mechanisms of doxastic self-control, that is, ways in which individuals can make use of other people in order to get themselves to stick to their beliefs. I look, in particular, at two ways in which people can make interpersonal epistemic commitments, and thereby willingly undertake accountability to others, in order to get themselves to maintain their beliefs in the face of anticipated “epistemic temptations”. The first way is through the avowal of (...) belief, and the second is through the establishment of collective belief. I argue that both of these forms of interpersonal epistemic commitment can function as effective tools for doxastic self-control, and, moreover, that the control they facilitate should not be dismissed as irrational from an epistemic perspective. (shrink)

_ Source: _Page Count 16 This paper deals with an apparent tension in Wittgenstein’s _Philosophical Investigations_: Wittgenstein holds an expressivist position with regard to avowals, but also claims that the _doxastic_ avowal “I believe that p” is a “hesitant assertion” of p. It is argued that the tension is apparent only and that Wittgenstein’s expressivism in fact justifies and explains his views on “I believe”: avowals typically are _explicit expressives_ and usually implicate the corresponding illocutionary acts. The hesitant (...) assertion of p is the result of an implicature of the explicit expressive “I believe that p”. The paper also addresses the ambiguity of avowals and the possibility of thereby undermining the Frege–Geach objection to psychological expressivism. (shrink)

This is surely a bit of Socrates' famous irony. He draws the analogy to explain how his friends should regard poetry as they regretfully banish it from the ideal state. But lovers were no more sensible then than they are now. The advice to banish poetry, undermined already by Plato's own delight and skill in drama, is perhaps undermined still further by this evocation of a 'sensible' lover who counts love so well lost. Yet Socrates' image is one of avowed (...) rationality and prudence. The sensible lover imitates the older literary example of Ulysses' tying himself to the mast. (The example belongs therefore to the class of problems treated in Elster (1979)). Both this lover and Ulysses foresee that under certain possible future conditions, their opinions, values and preferences will or would differ from what they are now, in a very definite fashion. To what extent is such foresight possible? Correspondingly (when we do not claim foreknowledge) to what extent is such opinion reasonable, rational, coherent, or consistent in some suitably broad sense? It is not easy to understand exactly what is possible or even logically permissible in this respect. In an earlier paper, "Belief and the Will", I argued for a principle ("Reflection") to govern such deliberation. Here I will both generalize the treatment of opinion in "Belief and the Will" and respond to criticism. Critical examples mainly resembled the story of Ulysses who foresaw a period of dysfunction (at the sound 2 of the sirens) in his epistemic and/or doxastic future. Other criticism focused on the model of opinion used (precise numerical subjective probability) and on the merits of Dutch Book arguments. The present argument will not rely on Dutch Book arguments and strategies, and the Reflection principle will be formulated so as to apply also to vague opinion. (shrink)

In Belief, Inference, and the Self-Conscious Mind (BISCM), Eric Marcus analyses and responds to a core set of puzzles concerning belief and inference. Most centrally on offer are: an explanation of non-evidential/non-observational doxastic self-knowledge, an explanation of the unintelligibility of Moore-Paradoxical statements, an account of inference (built on an interpretation of the ‘Taking Condition’) fit to solve the Lewis Carroll regress, and an account of what constitutes the unity of the rational mind. Marcus’ answers depend on viewing beliefs as (...) essentially self-known and expressible (through asserting their contents (“P”), or avowing them in a self-ascription (“I believe that P”)). Beliefs are also held to (metaphysically) necessarily exclude their contradictories, and (metaphysically) necessitate their implications. Or at least they do in their paradigm form; when they are ‘in mind’ (an important theoretical concept Marcus makes much use of throughout the book. In this paradigmatic form, Marcus terms them judgments. A significant achievement of BISCM is in how, despite the strength of these and other core commitments (theses variously acknowledged to be “very strong”, “wildly unpopular”, and “singularly anachronistic”, Marcus remains utterly clear-eyed about the need to pass the plausibility test. Nowhere, for example, does he lose sight of the fact that we are “distinctively liable to irrationality”, including to self-deception (which is analysed in terms of both belief and the doxastic self-knowledge which essentially accompanies it on Marcus’ view, being ‘out of mind’). A second, and related strength is in the connections Marcus traces between both expressive and rational mental capacities. This is relatively rare in many of the literatures Marcus is engaging with, especially in the first half of the book. Marcus (building on earlier work) shows how such a synthesis can bear serious fruit, not least in his excellent analysis of Moore-Paradoxical unintelligibility. There is a lot one could say about what is exciting and valuable about each element of Marcus’ discussion. And inevitably for a book so bold and full of riches, there is also a lot one might question about these elements. But as Marcus emphasises, what is on offer is “… not a collection of discrete solutions to putatively separate problems [but] a unified conception of the mind in its theoretical orientation”. And what I want to press him on is a big-picture question: what are the boundaries, and what is the internal structure, of the mind's ‘theoretical’ orientation? For, for all the important and detailed work throughout the book, in which a general conception of believing is suggested, tested, refined, and applied, I don't yet have a stable sense of Marcus’ answers to these questions. (shrink)

Ordinarily, if a person produces a nonreflective, ‘unstudied’ self-attribution of a present mental state – an avowal – we do not presume that they have produced the avowal on some specific epistemic basis; and we do not expect them to know how they know the self-attribution to be true. This no-‘how’ character of basic self-knowledge is puzzling, given that we regard avowals as manifesting factual, and indeed privileged, knowledge. I am here interested in views that accommodate both the baseless, (...) no-‘how’ and the factual, privileged character of basic self-knowledge. I argue that leading constitutivist views, which embrace both, fail properly to meet the doxastic (as opposed to justificatory) requirement on basic self-knowledge, thereby failing to preserve its genuinely factual character. I then argue that an alternative, neo-expressivist approach is better placed to meet the doxastic requirement, as well as being at least as well-placed as constitutivist views to address the justificatory requirement on baseless self-knowledge. (shrink)

Following Talia Mae Bettcher, many philosophers distinguish between ethical and epistemic conceptions of the first-person authority that we have over our gender identities. Rather than construing this authority as explained by our superior epistemic access to our own gender identities, many have argued that we should view this authority as explained by ethical obligations that we have towards others. But such views remain silent on what we ought to believe about others’ gender identities: when someone avows their gender identity, should (...) we believe them? Or is it enough to merely act as though we do? In this paper, I argue that mere action is not enough: we ought to believe what others say about their gender identities. I present several cases that motivate the claim that there is something distinctively wrong with merely ‘playing along’ with what another person says about their gender identity. I offer several answers for what explains why such cases involve wrongs. I argue that an adequate account of FPA cannot remain silent on belief but must instead take on an epistemic norm of FPA in addition to an ethical norm of FPA. (shrink)

When people avow their present feelings, sensations, thoughts, etc., they enjoy what may be called “first-person privilege.” If I now said: “I have a headache,” or “I’m thinking about Venice,” I would be taken at my word: I would normally not be challenged. According to one prominent approach, this privilege is due to a special epistemic access we have to our own present states of mind. On an alternative, deflationary approach the privilege merely reflects a socio-linguistic convention governing avowals. (...) We reject both approaches. On our proposed account, a full explanation of the privilege must recognize avowals as expressive performances, which can be taken to reveal directly the subject’s present mental condition. We are able to improve on special access accounts and deflationary accounts, as well as familiar expressive accounts, by explaining both the asymmetries and the continuities between avowals and other pronouncements, and by locating a genuine though non-epistemic source for first-person privilege. (shrink)

The paper comments on David Rosenthal’s claim that saying “p” is performance-conditionally equivalent to saying “I believe that p”. It is argued, by way of counterexamples, that the proposed performance-conditional equivalence does not hold in this generality. The paper further proposes that avowal expressivism gives necessary conditions for the performance-conditional equivalence: it holds only if the speaker’s utterance of “p” is a non-explicit expressive act expressive of the belief that p and the utterance of “I believe that p” is an (...) explicit expressive act expressive of the very same belief. If that is correct, the performance-conditional equivalence thesis provides an argument against Rosenthal’s preferred avowal descriptivism and in favor of avowal expressivism. (shrink)

The standard definition of knowledge and the concept of objective knowledge, as they were described in the epistemology sprung from the Vienna Circle, are too restricted in comparison with our natural disposal to admit different beliefs as reliable. The main guilt for this state of arts in epistemology belongs to the so- called, in Wolterstorff’s terms, “doxastic ideal”, namely, the traditional picture of the ideally formed beliefs. Locke’s view of entitlement was the modern expression of this ideal and Hume’s (...) analysis of beliefs about future was its first powerful criticism. If we succeed in rejecting this ideal, then it become possible to extend the epistemological analysis over other sorts of beliefs, religious beliefs included. (shrink)

Certain plausible evidential requirements and coherence requirements on rationality seem to yield dilemmas of rationality (in a specific, objectionable sense) when put together with the possibility of misleading higher-order evidence. Epistemologists have often taken such dilemmas to be evidence that we’re working with some false principle. In what follows I show how one can jointly endorse an evidential requirement, a coherence requirement, and the possibility of misleading higher-order evidence without running afoul of dilemmas of rationality. The trick lies in observing (...) the difference between attitudes it is rational to hold (= propositional justification) and rationally holding those attitudes (= doxastic justification). (shrink)

According to an orthodox account of the relationship between propositional and doxastic justification, basing one’s belief in P on one’s source of propositional justification to believe P suffices for having a doxastically justified belief. But in an increasingly recognized work Turri argues that this thesis fails and proposes a new view according to which having propositional justification depends on having the ability to acquire doxastic justification. Turri’s novel position has surprisingly far-reaching epistemological consequences, ruling out some common epistemological (...) positions that afford one propositional justification in the absence of an ability to acquire doxastic justification. In what follows I show Turri’s novel position to be problematic and go on to suggest a more modest revision to orthodoxy. The first section presents the orthodox view of the relationship between propositional and doxastic justification and Turri’s counterexample to it. The second section introduces Turri’s novel view of that relationship and draws out some of its epistemological implications. The third section gives counterexamples to Turri’s proposal. The fourth section defends a modest revision to orthodoxy. (shrink)

Nishi Shah has recently argued that transparency in doxastic deliberation supports a strict version of evidentialism about epistemic reasons. I argue that Shah's argument relies on a principle that is incompatible with the strict version of evidentialism Shah wishes to advocate.

This paper defends the avowal view of self-deception, according to which the self-deceived agent has been led by the evidence to believe that ¬p and yet is sincere in asserting that p. I argue that the agent qualifies as sincere in asserting the contrary of what they in the most basic sense believe in virtue of asserting what they are committed to believing. It is only by recognizing such commitments and distinguishing them from the more basic beliefs whose rational regulation (...) is automatic that the tension between the self-deceived agent’s actions and assertions can be explained in a core subset of cases of self-deception. (shrink)

Pragmatists have argued that doxastic or epistemic norms do not apply to beliefs, but to changes of beliefs; thus not to the holding or not-holding, but to the acquisition or removal of beliefs. Doxastic voluntarism generally claims that humans acquire beliefs in a deliberate and controlled way. This paper introduces Negative Doxastic Voluntarism according to which there is a fundamental asymmetry in belief change: humans tend to acquire beliefs more or less automatically and unreflectively, but they tend (...) to withdraw beliefs in a controlled and deliberate way. I first present a variety of philosophical, empirical and logical arguments for Negative Doxastic Voluntarism. Then I raise two objections against it. First, the apparent asymmetry may result from a confusion of belief with other doxastic attitudes like assumption, supposition, hypothesis or opinion. Second, the apparent asymmetry seems to vanish if we focus on doxastic states rather than just beliefs. Some rejoinders and their consequences for the vague concept of belief are sketched. (shrink)

This chapter is concerned with the mischaracterization of avowals of experience as descriptions of experience and the misconception of avowals and reports of experience as a matter of reading a description off the facts presented to one in introspection. One paradigm of description which Wittgenstein often employed as an object of comparison is giving a word‐picture of perceptible states of affairs, events or objects. To view avowals of pain as forms of pain‐behaviour akin to moans or cries (...) of pain is not to identify pain with pain‐behaviour. The affinity between spontaneous avowals and natural expressive behaviour must not mask the fact that the uses of first‐person psychological sentences are heterogeneous. Some approximate to primitive cries and gestures, and others are far removed from those paradigms. The spectrum of uses of first‐person psychological sentences to which Wittgenstein drew attention involves subtle gradations. (shrink)

Doxastic voluntarism is the thesis that our beliefs are subject to voluntary control. While there’s some controversy as to what “voluntary control” amounts to (see 1.2), it’s often understood as direct control: the ability to bring about a state of affairs “just like that,” without having to do anything else. Most of us have direct control over, for instance, bringing to mind an image of a pine tree. Can one, in like fashion, voluntarily bring it about that one believes (...) a specific proposition? Doxastic voluntarists hold that, at least in some circumstances—such as when the evidence is ambiguous—we can. Doxastic involuntarists, in contrast, maintain that we cannot. Some involuntarists hold that the concept of belief itself precludes the possibility of believing voluntarily. Others hold that the impossibility of voluntary belief is a contingent psychological fact. Historically, the issue of doxastic voluntarism has been connected to how many think about religious commitment: a prominent view of faith is that it is a voluntary decision to believe. Furthermore, the issue of voluntarism has also been viewed as having bearing on fundamental questions in epistemology. For example, are epistemic norms duties to believe in certain ways? Are there practical or moral reasons to believe? If the answer to either question is “yes,” it seems some measure of voluntary doxastic control is required. -/- In section 1, we expand on the definition of doxastic voluntarism, and survey various kinds of control (e.g. direct, indirect, long-range) and the doxastic attitudes we might control (e.g. outright belief, withholding, credences). In section 2, we discuss a number of historical views on doxastic voluntarism. In section 3, we survey motivations for rejecting doxastic voluntarism. There are two general strategies: arguments that appeal to psychological considerations, and conceptual arguments regarding the nature of belief. In section 4, we survey five approaches to defending voluntarism: those that appeal to epistemic permissivism, doxastic compatibilism, skepticism, one-off considerations, and non-standard views of belief. In section 5, we cover empirical work on doxastic voluntarism. The last two sections discuss two implications of voluntarism. In section 6, we discuss voluntarism’s implications for the ethics of belief, and in section 7, we discuss issues at the intersection of voluntarism and religious faith. (shrink)

In this paper I consider the project of offering an evolutionary debunking explanation for transparency in doxastic deliberation. I examine Nicole Dular and Nikki Fortier’s (2021) attempt at such a project. I suggest that their account faces a dilemma. On the one horn, their explanation of transparency involves casting our mechanisms for belief formation as solely concerned with truth. I argue that this is explanatorily inadequate when we take a wider view of our belief formation practices. I show that (...) Dular and Fortier overstate the extent to which adaptive non-evidentially supported beliefs are rare, and the implausibility of disjunctive evolutionary systems. They should allow a role for the non-truth directed behaviour of our mechanisms of belief formation. On the other hand, we might restrict the explanation offered by Dular and Fortier to the deliberative context, that is, we might understand them as allowing for non-evidential belief formation outside of the deliberative context, but as identifying the key to explaining transparency in the truth-directed evolutionary mechanisms as they operate in the deliberative context. However, this would land them on the second horn of the dilemma: we would then have no different an explanation to one I have offered elsewhere (2018), an explanation which Dular and Fortier explicitly put aside as engaged in a project different from their own. I finish by briefly considering some broader implications relating to explaining transparency, the nature of belief, and the prospects for pragmatism. I conclude that Dular and Fortier’s debunking explanation of transparency bestows an implausible role for truth in fixing our beliefs, or, if it doesn’t, then we simply have the restatement of a view explicitly disavowed by the authors. We are left, then, with an explanation we ought not want, or an explanation we already had. (shrink)

Hard determinism is hardly a new position, but the most common arguments are not widely convincing. Theological arguments rest on the oversight or control of a supernatural entity, and so are not convincing to any who do not share the metaphysical assumptions latent in the argument. Psychological arguments reston putatively scientific claims that, if examined more closely, seem not to be scientific at all. A doxastic argument avoids these pitfalls. According to this doxastic argument, beliefs are not freely (...) chosen, for to believe X is to be convinced of X, and it is not up to the agent to find something convincing or unconvincing. If an agent's allegedly free actions are based on beliefs, and if those beliefs cannot freely be chosen by the agent, then that agent's actions are not ultimately free. (shrink)

It is a curious feature of early modern epistemology and its contemporary heirs in analytic philosophy that belief is held both to be involuntary, and to be subject to a prescriptive norm of evidence. I begin by laying out these theses, pointing out the tension that exists between them, as well as discussing how they put pressure on religious faith. I then ask why the first thesis—doxastic involuntarism—has come to be so dominant. Following my diagnosis, I advance reasons to (...) think that the thin concept of belief presupposed by doxastic involuntarism is not faithful to our ordinary and more substantial concept of belief. I conclude by outlining an alternative understanding of what it means to believe that p, based on insights of St. Thomas Aquinas and Gabriel Marcel regarding belief and opinion, as well as the relationship between persons and their beliefs. (shrink)

There is a philosophical puzzle about blaming people for their attitudes that arises because we lack direct voluntary control over our attitudes. The fact that we lack direct voluntary control over our attitudes suggests that we are not responsible for them. Defenders of blaming people for their beliefs have appealed to various senses in which we are responsible for our beliefs, despite our lacking direct voluntary control over them. In this paper, I pursue a different strategy. I argue that it (...) is something fitting to be ashamed of your beliefs, or, to put this another way, that it is sometimes fitting to feel shame for believing something. I articulate an account of shamefulness, on which the shameful is a species of legitimate expectation violation. By contrast with blameworthiness, shamefulness does not entail responsibility. For this reason, the fittingness of shame for beliefs (i.e. doxastic shame), unlike the fittingness of blame for beliefs (i.e. doxastic blame), is orthogonal to questions of responsibility. Independent of whether we are responsible for our beliefs, doxastic shame can be fitting. (shrink)

Doxastic responsibility matters, morally and epistemologically. Morally, because many of our intuitive ascriptions of blame seem to track back to agents’ apparent responsibility for beliefs; epistemologically because some philosophers identify epistemic justification with deontological permissibility. But there is a powerful argument which seems to show that we are rarely or never responsible for our beliefs, because we cannot control them. I examine various possible responses to this argument, which aim to show either that doxastic responsibility does not require (...) that we control our beliefs, or that as a matter of fact we do exercise the right kind of control over our beliefs. I argue that the existing arguments are all wanting: in fact, our lack of control over our beliefs typically excuses us of responsibility for them. (shrink)

Neo-expressivism is the view that avowals—first-personal, present tense self-ascriptions of mental states—ordinarily express the very mental states that they semantically represent, such that they carry a strong presumption of truth and are immune to requests for epistemic support. Peter Langland-Hassan (2015. “Self-Knowledge and Imagination.” Philosophical Explorations 18 (2): 226–245) has argued that Neo-expressivism cannot accommodate avowals of one’s imaginings. In this short paper I argue that Neo-expressivism can, in fact, accommodate them.

Direct Doxastic Voluntarism — the notion that we have direct voluntary control over our beliefs — has widely been held to be false. There are, however, two ways to interpret the impossibility of our having doxastic control: as either a conceptual/ logical/metaphysical impossibility or as a psychological impossibility. In this paper I analyse the arguments for and against both types of claim and, in particular, evaluate the bearing that putative cases of self-deception have on the arguments in defence (...) of voluntarism about belief. For it would seem that if it is the case that self-induced cases of self-deception are indeed possible, then voluntarism about belief could be true after all. Bennett claims that Williams’ argument for the impossibility case proves too much in that if it is successful in ruling out direct doxastic voluntarism, it is also successful in ruling out cases of indirect doxastic voluntarism. If cases of self-deception can also be cases of indirect doxastic voluntarism, then such cases support the argument against the impossibility case. I argue that Bennett is right in claiming that Williams’ argument proves too much, that cases of self-deception are indeed also sometimes cases of indirect self-deception and so that they cause genuine trouble for the conceptual impossibility case. However, I also argue that this is the only genuine worry for Williams’ argument. I end, while considering whether cases of self-deception can tell us anything about the psychological possibility of direct doxastic control, by suggesting a way of establishing the conceptual impossibility of direct doxastic control that circumvents Bennett’s counter-argument. (shrink)

I argue that explanations of doxastic transparency which go via an appeal to an aim or norm of belief are problematic. I offer a new explanation which appeals to a biological function of our mechanisms for belief production. I begin by characterizing the phenomenon, and then move to the teleological and normative accounts of belief, advertised by their proponents as able to give an explanation of it. I argue that, at the very least, both accounts face serious difficulties in (...) this endeavour. These difficulties are a function of seeking an explanation of transparency at the agential level, either with the subject aiming at truth, or being guided by a norm of truth. I adopt a motivational account of belief, one which severs the connection between belief and truth, and supplement this with an account of actual world beliefs. My alternative explanation is found at the sub-intentional, non-agential level, secured by biology. This explanation casts transparency not as related to the nature of deliberation over what to believe, but rather as contingently characterizing the beliefs of some believers, namely those with a particular biological history. My explanation thus parts company with what has come before along two dimensions: it moves away from transparency being something related to the agent’s aims or commitments, and it understands it as a contingent phenomenon. I close by considering an objection to my view—that transparency must not be understood as a contingent phenomenon—and a nearby alternative position which avoids this consequence. I respond to this objection and give reasons not to endorse the nearby alternative. I conclude that my explanation does not face the difficulties of those offered by teleologists and normativists, and, that by moving away from agential explanations, and casting transparency as contingent, we can provide a successful explanation of it. (shrink)

The distinction between propositional and doxastic justification is the distinction between having justification to believe P (= propositional justification) versus having a justified belief in P (= doxastic justification). The focus of this paper is on doxastic justification and on what conditions are necessary for having it. In particular, I challenge the basing demand on doxastic justification, i.e., the idea that one can have a doxastically justified belief only if one’s belief is based on an epistemically (...) appropriate reason. This demand has been used to refute versions of coherentism and conservatism about perceptual justification as well as to defend phenomenal “conservatism” and other views besides. In what follows I argue that there is virtually no reason to think there is a basing demand on doxastic justification. I also argue that even if the basing demand were true, it would still fail to serve the dialectical purposes for which it has been employed in arguments concerning coherentism, conservatism, and phenomenal “conservatism”. I conclude by discussing the fact that knowledge has a basing demand and show why this needn’t raise the same sort of problems for coherentism and conservatism that doxastic justification’s basing demand seemed to. (shrink)

Doxastic voluntarism maintains that we have voluntary control over our beliefs. It is generally denied by contemporary philosophers. I argue that doxastic voluntarism is true: normally, and insofar as we are rational, we are able to suspend belief and, provided we have a natural inclination to believe, we are able to rescind that suspension, and thus to choose to believe. I show that the arguments that have been offered against doxastic voluntarism fail; and that, if the denial (...) of doxastic voluntarism is part of a strategy to defeat scepticism, it is inept, because knowledge presupposes doubt. (shrink)

There is a puzzle about Hume's is-ought gap involving an epistemic `ought'. From the premise `Snow is white,' we can infer `Sophia's belief that snow is white is correct.' `Snow is white' is paradigmatically non-normative, and that Sophia's belief is correct, a claim about what belief she ought to have, seems to be normative. The argument seems valid, so the is-ought gap is supposed to block this kind of inference. The puzzle is over whether we should give up on the (...) is-ought game or find another way to resolve the conflict. In the first chapter, I provide a formulation of the is-ought gap in a general semantic framework that avoids some other known problems. I turn in chapter 2 to discussing the puzzle about correct belief. I cast doubt on a solution proposed by Allan Gibbard by showing that it can admit of no epistemology of the normative. In chapter 3, I defend a solution to the puzzle while more directly tackling the question of the nature of oughts for belief. I offer a new explanation of why we ought to believe the truth. At the heart of the account is the idea that it's a conceptual truth beliefs ought to be true, which I provide a new argument for. I then claim that being an agent requires being subject to this norm of belief. This results in a non-moral, distinctly doxastic, account of why we ought to believe the truth. My conclusion is that asking why we ought to believe the truth is like asking why a bachelor must be unmarried: the answer is contained in the ideas that make up the question. In the final chapter, I respond to Gibbard's claim that an analogous story cannot work for `ought' claims for degreed belief. I pose a worry for Gibbard's proposed alternative explanation, and I undermine Gibbard's motivation for pursuing such an account in the first place. By taking belief to have an aim in a normative sense, I sketch how we can make sense of epistemic rationality in terms of that aim. (shrink)

In this article I will develop the first steps of a wholly general theory of how indexical and reflexive pronouns function in propositional attitude ascriptions. This will involve a theory of ascriptions of de se beliefs and de se utterances, which can probably be also generalized so as to apply to ascriptions of other attitudes. It will also involve a theory about the ascriptions of beliefs or other attitudes a person has at a time about what happens then (attitudes de (...) praesente, as they are sometimes called) and the beliefs of a person concerning the one whom he is addressing (which I might call beliefs de recipiente) etc.. The most distinctive aspect of the theory will be that I will argue that many phenomena associated with such ascriptions that are nowadays most often viewed as pragmatic are semantic. I will use a system of symbolic logic to formalize such ascriptions. I will start from David Kaplan’s Logic of Demonstratives and generalize it into a logic I call Doxastic Logic of Demonstratives, DLD. Crucial to the semantics of the logic will be an exact definition of the adjustments of a character from one context to another. (shrink)

According to doxastic normativism, part of what makes an attitude a belief rather than another type of attitude is that it is governed by a truth-norm. It has been objected that this view fails since there are true propositions such that if you believed them they would not be true, and thus the obligation to believe true propositions cannot hold for these. I argue that the solution for doxastic normativists is to find a norm that draws the right (...) distinction between those true propositions we are obliged to believe (“ordinary non-tricky propositions”) and those we are not (“tricky propositions”). I develop a norm which I argue does exactly this, and further argue that it can be used to salvage the idea that belief is constitutively normative. (shrink)

The doxastic zoo contains many animals: belief, acceptance, belief in, belief that, certainty, conjecture, guess, conviction, denial, disbelief in, disbelief that, judgment, commitment, etc. It also contains belief’s “strange bedfellows”: credences, partial beliefs, tacit beliefs, subdoxastic states, creedal feelings, feelings of knowing, in-between believings, pathological beliefs, phobias, aliefs, delusions, biases, besires. How to order the zoo? I propose to distinguish doxastic attitudes from non-doxastic epistemic attitudes. The criterion is the existence of correctness conditions. Most bedfellows do not (...) have such normative conditions. So they should not be allowed in the Doxastic Club. (shrink)

According to the doxastic wrongs thesis, holding certain beliefs about others can be morally wrongful. Beliefs which take the form of stereotypes based on race and gender and which turn out to be false and are negatively valenced are prime candidates for the charge of doxastic wronging: it is no coincidence that most of the cases discussed in the literature involve false beliefs. My aim in this paper is to show that the thesis of doxastic wrongs does (...) not turn on the truth-value or valence of beliefs. (shrink)

This paper responds to comments on the paper "True Faith: Against Doxastic Partiality about Faith (in God and Religious Communities) and in Defense of Evidentialism" (Australasian Philosophical Review). I begin with some clarifications on faith and its normativity (section 1). I then zero in on doxastic normativity (section 2), where an ideological rift emerges between evidentialism and partialist critiques (section 3). I then discuss evidentialist reason and its relationship to objectivity (section 4), and the sort of norms at (...) issue (section 5). (shrink)

In a recent paper on Goodman's paradox, I have argued that ‘grue’ is unprojectible because the grue-evidence is doxastically dependent on the evidence that the samples are examined before t. Christopher Dorst replies that doxastic dependence is unable to yield a language-independent asymmetry with respect to ‘green’ and ‘grue’ and hence cannot resolve Goodman's paradox. In this response I hope to show that Dorst's considerations are flawed: his argument for the language-relativity of doxastic dependence is inconclusive at best—even (...) if his construal of doxastic dependence were correct. It is incorrect, however: Dorst mistakes counterfactual dependence of beliefs for belief in counterfactual dependence. I will also argue that doxastic dependence properly understood is not threatened by any of his objections. (shrink)

In Philosophical Investigations §244, Wittgenstein suggests that we understand avowals (first-person psychological utterances) as manifestations or expressions of the speaker's mental states. An interesting philosophical theory, called expressivism, then develops from this Wittgensteinian idea. However, neo-expressivists disagree with simple expressivists on whether avowals are at the same time assertions, which are truth-evaluable. In this paper, I pursue the expressivist debate about whether avowals must also be viewed as assertions. I consider and reject three neo-expressivist objections against simple (...) expressivism. Then, I offer my own account of why we should understand avowals as assertions. (shrink)

Existing analyses of slurs emphasize how linguistic mechanisms make slurs derogatory. I will argue that, in addition to linguistic mechanisms, there are overlooked doxastic and epistemic features of standard slurring utterances that can be sources of offense. Additionally, I argue that the doxastic feature that distinguishes slurring utterances from other negatively valenced utterances is fundamental to understanding slurring terms. Clinical Trial Registration: Not applicable.

In this paper we defend the doxastic conception of delusions against the metacognitive account developed by Greg Currie and collaborators. According to the metacognitive model, delusions are imaginings that are misidentified by their subjects as beliefs: the Capgras patient, for instance, does not believe that his wife has been replaced by a robot, instead, he merely imagines that she has, and mistakes this imagining for a belief. We argue that the metacognitive account is untenable, and that the traditional conception (...) of delusions as beliefs should be retained. (shrink)

The paper challenges William Alston’s argument against doxastic deontology, the view that we have epistemic duties concerning our beliefs. The core of the argument is that doxastic deontology requires voluntary control over our beliefs, which we do not have. The idea that doxastic deontology requires voluntary control is supposed to follow from the principle that ought implies can. The paper argues that this is wrong: in the OIC principle which regulates our doxastic duties the “can” does (...) not stand for the ability to shape our beliefs voluntarily. As an examination of everyday examples shows, it stands for cognitive competence, the reliable ability to acquire beliefs in compliance with the epistemic norms. The doxastic OIC principle asserts, in brief, that one is only obliged to believe something if one’s cognitive capacities are sufficiently strong. It is also explained why the doxastic duties do not require voluntary control as opposed to moral duties. This understanding of doxastic duties saves our everyday doxastic deontic judgments from Alston’s argument, but does not help the deontological conception of justification, which understands justification as not violating one’s epistemic duties. It actually provides another argument against the deontological conception: if the OIC regulating our doxastic duties is construed as suggested, the deontological conception of justification implies that one’s doxastic duties and, consequently, whether one’s belief is justified depend on one’s cognitive competence. Since cognitive competence varies from person to person, justification will not matter to truth and knowledge in the way epistemic justification is supposed to do. (shrink)

F. E. Sparshott; IV—Avowals and their Uses, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Volume 62, Issue 1, 1 June 1962, Pages 63–76, https://doi.org/10.1093/arist.

I critique Matthias Steup’s account of exercising direct voluntary control over coming to have doxastic attitudes via doxastic decisions. I show that the sort of agency Steup argues is exercised in doxastic decision-making is not sufficient for agents to exercise direct voluntary control over their doxastic attitudes. This counts against such putative decisions being the locus of direct control in doxastic agency. Finally, I briefly consider what, if any, consequences the failure of Steup’s theory of (...) doxastic agency may have for epistemic deontologism. (shrink)

In the sixth chapter of his Theory of Knowledge Roderick Chisholm refers to an example suggested by Alexius Meinong in order to show that the traditional definition of knowledge is in need of some modification. In this paper I should like to show that Chisholm's argument rests on a mistaken assumption as to what an individual's doxastic responsibilities are.

Over twenty years after the publication of A Theory of Justice (1971), Rawls avowed that it was an error in Theory to describe a theory of justice as part of the theory of rational choice. This paper elucidates the reasons why Rawls had to make such an avowal of the error in connection with his contractarian rational deduction project of morality, i.e., rational contractarianism. Two major issues are involved here. They are about the construction of the original position and the (...) maximin derivation of the two principles of justice. Because of the moral irrelevancy of rationality in Hobbes’ model, Rawls tries to construct a fair original position. Hence Rawls’ rational contractarianism turns out rationality cum fairness model. However, this model of Rawls’ commits the circularity of moral assumptionsprior to rationality, which might be rationally arbitrary. Furthermore, because of its highly conservative psychological attitude of risk-aversion, Rawls cannot show the superior rationality in the maximin strategic derivation of the two principles of justice over the other strategies. These are the reasons why Rawls had to admit the error. After the avowal of the error, Rawls shifted to Kantian conception of free and equal moral persons for the justificatory device of his theory of justice. Several polemical issues around the Kantian conception are discussed and adjudicated. (shrink)

Propositional justification pertains to propositions: it is the sort of justification that a proposition enjoys for an agent when the agent is epistemically justified to believe it. By contrast, doxastic justification is justification of beliefs, i.e., of doxastic states actually instantiated by an agent. The ‘orthodox’ view of the relationship between propositional and doxastic justification is that the latter should be explained in terms of the former, so that an agent’s belief is (doxastically) justified just in case (...) (i) it is a belief in a proposition that is (propositionally) justified for the agent and (ii) it is held on the basis of that which (propositionally) justifies its content. This view has been challenged by John Turri in his paper ‘On the Relationship between Propositional and Doxastic Justification’ (Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 80, 2010, pp. 312–326). There he offers two putative counterexamples to the orthodoxy and goes on to argue that the order of explanation should be reversed: it is propositional justification that should be explained in terms of doxastic justification, and not vice versa. Though I share Turri’s feeling that there is something amiss with the way a number of contemporary epistemologists talk of propositional and doxastic justification, I do not believe he has managed to put his finger on the real trouble. So the first point I make is that his counterexamples fall short of refuting the orthodox view, which I argue should be maintained. Then I try to diagnose the real source of the trouble. It lies, I suggest, in the way a number of recent epistemologists talk of propositional justification, a way which commits them to the questionable view that the basis upon which facts concerning propositional justification supervene does not include facts concerning the doxastic states of agents, but only facts concerning the evidence to which agents have access. So I observe that there are different degrees of idealisation involved in judgments of ‘propositional justification’, propose to distinguish what an agent is propositionally justified to believe given his overall doxastic state from what an agent is propositionally justified to believe irrespective of his overall doxastic state, and argue that, whenever it is the former relation that is at stake, an agent can be propositionally justified to believe a proposition p at time t only if it is reasonably easy for him to form a doxastically justified belief in p at t. It is most likely an awareness of this fact - or of some fact in the vicinity - that encourages the belief that propositional justification should be explained in terms of doxastic justification. But I suggest that this fact, far from being evidence that the notion of doxastic justification is in any sense more fundamental than that of propositional justification, can be accounted for by paying attention to the relationship that links the relevant sort of (epistemic) justification to (epistemic) responsibility. So I conclude that there is an important sense in which facts concerning epistemic justification supervene not merely on facts concerning the evidential states of agents, but on facts concerning their overall doxastic states. (shrink)

Beliefs can cause moral wrongs, no doubt, but can they also constitute moral wrongs in their own right? This paper offers some grounds to be skeptical of the idea that there are moral norms which operate directly on belief, independently of any epistemic norms also operating on belief. The resultant skepticism is moderate in the following sense: it holds that the motivations underlying the doxastic morality approach should not be dismissed lightly; they are genuine insights and serve to bring (...) to light important new issues concerning the interaction between our notions of moral and epistemic responsibility. Nonetheless, it is also skeptical, in holding that these concerns are ultimately best voiced in more traditional categories which distinguish the epistemology of belief from the morality of action. (shrink)

We investigate the research programme of dynamic doxastic logic (DDL) and analyze its underlying methodology. The Ramsey test for conditionals is used to characterize the logical and philosophical differences between two paradigmatic systems, AGM and KGM, which we develop and compare axiomatically and semantically. The importance of Gärdenfors’s impossibility result on the Ramsey test is highlighted by a comparison with Arrow’s impossibility result on social choice. We end with an outlook on the prospects and the future of DDL.

Whether responsibility for actions and omissions requires the ability to do otherwise is an important issue in contemporary philosophy. However, a closely related but distinct issue, namely whether doxastic responsibility requires the ability to believe otherwise, has been largely neglected. This paper fills this remarkable lacuna by providing a defence of the thesis that doxastic responsibility entails the ability to believe otherwise. On the one hand, it is argued that the fact that unavoidability is normally an excuse counts (...) in favour of this thesis. On the other hand, three objections against this thesis are discussed and criticized. First, one might think that what suffices for doxastic responsibility is control over or influence on certain desirable or undesirable properties of beliefs. It is argued that this objection misrepresents the issue under consideration. Second, it may be objected that the thesis is contradicted by our intuitions in doxastic analogues of Frankfurt-style scenarios. It is argued that distinguishing between belief-universals and belief-particulars helps to see why this argument fails. Third and finally, one might draw an analogy with the asymmetry thesis in ethics by arguing that even if blameworthy belief requires the ability to believe otherwise, praiseworthy belief does not. It is argued that the main arguments in favour of this presumed asymmetry are wanting, partly because they fail to distinguish between two different kinds of praiseworthiness. Finally, the author sketches three implications of the thesis that doxastic responsibility entails the ability to believe otherwise: counterfactual construals of responsible belief might be tenable, the deontological conception of epistemic justification needs revision on an important point, and there might be an important asymmetry between beliefs on the one hand and actions and many non-doxastic consequences on the other. (shrink)