The courage of conviction

Abstract

Is there a sense in which we exercise direct volitional control over our beliefs? Most agree that there is not, but discussions tend to focus on control in forming a belief. The focus here is on sustaining a belief over time in the face of ‘epistemic temptation’ to abandon it. It is argued that we do have a capacity for ‘doxastic self-control’ over time that is partly volitional in nature, and that its exercise is rationally permissible.

Keywords:

• Belief
• volition
• temptation
• self-control
• diachronic rationality

Acknowledgements

I’m grateful to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where I was employed as a visiting professor while writing this paper. Audiences at the 2015 Pacific APA, the BRAT conference at UW-Madison, UT Austin, the University of Vermont, the MIT work-in-progress seminar, the Midwest Epistemology Workshop at the University of Missouri, and Flickers of Freedom were all of great assistance. I’m especially indebted to Mike Titelbaum for written comments, countless conversations, and general inspiration. Thanks also to Richard Pettigrew, Matthew Silverstein, Nishi Shah, Berislav Marušić, Richard Moran, Matt Boyle, and Alex Byrne for very helpful comments and conversations.

Notes

1. This paper builds on Paul (2015) and is in part intended to be a further development of the view I sketched there, though it departs from the earlier view in some ways.

2. In particular, although discussions of doxastic voluntarism often take Williams (1973) as their starting point, the conception of ‘believing at will’ at work in that paper is not the one that I think should be defended, for reasons given in Shah (2002).

3. The argument here largely owes to Hieronymi (2013), though I have put some of these claims in ways that I am not sure she would accept.

4. This is importantly different from the notion Williamson (2000) terms ‘luminosity’. To claim that a mental state is luminous is to claim that if you are in that state, you are in a position to know that you are in that state. Transparency is more limited; it is meant to hold only in cases where the thinker’s belief is appropriately responsive to evidence. Further, it often holds not because the thinker is in a position to detect the mental state she is in, but rather because she is in a position to be in whatever state she thinks she is in.

5. To be clear, Hieronymi is not addressing questions about self-knowledge or even specifically investigating transparency; her interest is in understanding what beliefs would have to be in order to explain the kind of answerability we in fact exhibit.

6. An important exception is Lawlor (2013). Lawlor draws on a case originally offered by Foley (2001).

7. Although the word ‘temptation’ might suggest that it always involves finding some other belief more desirable than one’s current beliefs, this is not an essential feature of the phenomenon. The parallel with practical temptation concerns the distortion of judgment, not the conative aspects.

8. I offer some other examples in Paul (2015). One might object to this example on the grounds that we should rarely if ever believe that a philosophical thesis is true. Perhaps what we ought to do is merely ‘accept’ the view in the context of arguing for it at a conference, for instance, or act as if it is true. Though I cannot argue for this here, I think we should not settle for these simulacra of belief. For instance, it is plausible that there is a belief norm of assertion, such that I ought not go to the conference and assert that P unless I genuinely believe that P. The example is admittedly messy, but the real-world examples that I think should interest us generally are.

9. It might also be that after substantial experience with certain types of situations, we have a kind of evidence about how these situations can influence our judgment. This kind of insight can certainly help us deal with epistemic temptation, but I think it is a substantial achievement, and my aim here is simply to deny that it is necessary for weathering epistemic temptation in a rationally permissible way.

10. I make this argument in slightly more detail in Paul (2015).

11. Nagel (1969) argues for a similar view with respect to our desires and values over time.

12. The proponent of transparency might object here that I am interpreting the constraint too narrowly, and that the lesson to be learned from cases of epistemic temptation is simply that we should sometimes take the fact that we believed that P in the past to be a consideration that now bears on the truth of P. But if this suggestion is understood as claiming that the fact that I believed that P is evidence for P, in that it makes P more likely, then I think the evidence will generally be far too weak to make a difference – I have had any number of false beliefs in the past. On the other hand, if the suggestion is that it is one of the things that it is relevant to consider in thinking about what to believe, I could not agree more; my objection is to characterizing the relevance in terms of ‘bearing on the truth’ of P. If the bearing-on relation is understood this broadly, then the Transparency View becomes trivial.

13. Talk of ‘taking’ here might suggest a problematic multiplication of psychic entities. But I do not intend to be reifying a little ‘taker’ in the head; all we need here is the ordinary phenomenon of concluding deliberation by answering a question for oneself, however that normally happens. Thanks to Michael Bratman for raising this concern.

14. Weatherson (2008) has also discussed a notion of doxastic self-control that he thinks grounds a kind of voluntarism with respect to some beliefs. But Weatherson’s sense amounts to what I would call indirect control of belief, and is in that sense distinct from (though compatible with) mine; it concerns the thinker’s control over which possibilities she considers as live before proceeding to form a belief.

15. There is clearly more to be said here about what is involved in negotiating such situations. I am tempted to say that it involves a kind of cognitive skill or virtue, but I have no specific account to offer. I only wish to deny that it is a matter that is settled by one’s evidence.

16. The memory condition is important here. I do not think it follows from what I have argued here that learning about a past perspective in some other way – by reading about it in what happens to be one’s own diary, say – would suffice. The perspective has to be accessible first-personally.

17. Richard Pettigrew rightly objects that this would be the wrong response if confronted with two other people who disagree with one another about whether P on the basis of the same evidence, and where there is no univocal higher-order evidence about which person is more likely to be right. In this case, it is not permissible to simply pick one of the two people and adopt that belief. But a central theme of my project is that we are not required to treat our own past and future ‘selves’ as if they were other people.

18. Nefsky and Tenenbaum (manuscript) advance a similar argument concerning the question of whether one can autonomously act on past intentions.

19. Tenenbaum’s notion of ‘oblique cognition’ is helpful here: ‘An oblique cognition is a representation of a claim or an object … through which one understands (or seems to understand) that there are reasons to accept that the object is as one represents it, or that the claim is true’ (1999, 894).

20. Holton (2014) accentuates these points.

21. Thanks to Mike Titelbaum for emphasizing this to me in conversation.

22. One might have the worry here that what I am describing is higher-order reasoning, and that this could not rationally result in a first-order attitude. But I am in agreement with the Transparency View in thinking that the deliberative higher-order question cannot be answered by appeal to reasons bearing on whether to have the attitude, and thus that it is in some sense transparent. I am simply arguing that the first-order question need not be settled by one’s current assessment of the evidence. Thanks to John Broome for raising this question to me.

23. If the Uniqueness Thesis is true, then the thinker will never be correct in supposing that there are multiple permissible attitudes she can rationally take toward a body of evidence. Nevertheless, it might still be possible for her to do so.

24. Thanks to Richard Pettigrew for helping me to frame this point.