The contrast between permissions to act and permissions to believe

Abstract

There is an interesting contrast between permissions to act and permissions to believe. Plausibly, if it is permissible to believe something from a perspective with incomplete evidence, it cannot become impermissible to believe it from a second perspective with complete evidence. In contrast, it seems that something permissible to do for an agent in a perspective with limited evidence can become impermissible in a second perspective in which all the relevant evidence is available. What is more, an agent with incomplete evidence may be permitted to do something that she knows would be impermissible if she occupied a perspective of complete evidence. In this paper, I argue that this contrast is explained by a disanalogy between the role played by belief in epistemic deliberation and the role played by action in practical deliberation. Epistemic deliberation may be closed by adopting other attitudes than belief (e.g. accepting some hypothesis as the most likely one), whereas in general, practical deliberation can only be closed by endorsing some course of action. Thus, when there are pressures to close some practical deliberation, agents have to make a decision about what to do even if they lack relevant information. By contrast, lacking relevant evidence, agents may always refrain from forming a belief and close instead their epistemic deliberation by adopting some other attitude.

Keywords:

• practical permissions
• doxastic permissions
• perspectivism
• objectivism
• practical deliberation
• epistemic deliberation

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to Conor McHugh, Jesús Vega, Daniel Whiting and two anonymous referees for their helpful comments. I also want to thank the audience at the VIII meeting of the Spanish Society of Logic, Methodology and Philosophy of Science, in Barcelona, where a previous version of this paper was presented.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributor

Javier González de Prado Salas received his PhD from the University of Southampton in January 2016 and is now a Teaching Fellow at Universidad Autónoma de Madrid (Spain). He works on topics in normativity theory, epistemology, philosophy of language and aesthetics. He is particularly interested in investigating the nature of defeasible reasoning and its implications for different philosophical debates.

Notes

1. One may think that believing is something we do (perhaps even some type of mental action). If so, this paper can be read as an exploration of a contrast between permissions regarding two different kinds of doings: on the one hand, permissions to form beliefs, and, on the other hand, permissions to perform non-doxastic actions. In what follows, when I talk of permissions to do something, I will be referring to non-doxastic doings (i.e. to doing things other than forming a belief).

2. Plausibly, some attitude or action is sufficiently supported by the balance of reasons if the reasons in its favour are at least as weighty as the reasons against it, or in favour of alternatives (see Schroeder 2015a).

3. Perspectivist positions have been endorsed by authors such as Lord (2015), Kiesewetter (2011), Parfit (2011), Zimmerman (2006), Kolodny and MacFarlane (2010) and Dowell (2013).

4. Objectivist views are defended among others by Graham (2010), Bykvist (2011) and Thomson (1986).

5. My answer to this question is negative. I think that only real, actually good reasons determine practical obligations and permissions.

6. What determines what evidence is considered available to the agent – what facts the agent is supposed to acquire knowledge about? If the answer is that the reasons within her epistemic ken, it seems we will enter a regress (for I was trying to explain precisely what being within the agent's ken amounts to). There are several ways of tackling this issue (see Kiesewetter 2011 for discussion). For the purposes of this essay, it may be assumed that what information the agent is supposed to acquire is determined by the agent’s possessed reasons – more specifically, by the agent’s possessed evidence about her epistemic environment (i.e. about where relevant information may be found) and about the importance of her decision. For instance, if I have reasons to think that relevant information is likely to be found in a book in the library, I should, prima facie, try to read the book. Moreover, the importance of the decision will determine how hard the agent has to look for evidence (e.g. if I possess reasons to suspect that the life of people depends on my decision, I will have reasons to look harder for information than if my decision had lesser consequences). In general, the agent ought to try to acquire as much evidence as necessary for making an informed decision, within the limits imposed by her abilities, by time constraints and by the balance between the importance of the decision and the costs of the search for evidence.

7. Although this is not uncontroversial, see Thomson (2008) and Glüer and Wikforss (2009). It is worth noting that I do not need to commit myself to the view that correctness can be reduced to permissibility. For my purposes here, it is enough to assume that incorrect beliefs are impermissible. It also important to point out that, while on the views I will explore holding a false belief is impermissible, it can be a perfectly rational thing to do – if it was supported by what appeared to be good reasons (for the distinction between doing something impermissible or incorrect and doing something irrational, see Whiting 2014; Schroeder 2015b; Sylvan 2016; Williamson forthcoming).

8. I will not consider here the complementary view, that is, the claim that if something is true, it is permissible for one to believe it (see Whiting 2010, 2013).

9. An interesting question is how these considerations are affected by the possibility of relativist beliefs, in particular, beliefs relativized to epistemic perspectives (i.e. beliefs whose truth depends not only on the world of evaluation but also on epistemic perspectives). A possible candidate is epistemic modals (see MacFarlane 2014). Take (1):

(1) James may be in London, but he may also be in Bristol Arguably, (1) is true relative to a body of evidence e1 that leaves open the possibility that James is in London and also that he is in Bristol, while it is false relative to an enriched body of evidence e2 ruling out at least one of those possibilities. Thus, an agent may be permitted to believe (1) from perspective e1, even if she knows that from a perspective of complete evidence it is false. Of course, the relativist picture of epistemic modals can be disputed. Perhaps better accounts are offered by contextualism (Kratzer 2012; Dowell 2011) – according to which (1) would express different beliefs from different perspectives – or expressivism (Yalcin 2011; Schnieder 2010) – according to which speech involving epistemic modals does not express beliefs, but some other attitude.

I focus on non-relativist beliefs for the remaining of the paper.

10. For a discussion of reasons for withholding belief, see Schroeder (2012).

11. I will consider that forming an intention to act, or even making a normative judgement recommending the performance of the action, count as ways of endorsing a course of action. So, I remain neutral on the issue whether practical deliberation ends in an action, the formation of an intention or the endorsement of a normative judgement.

12. Nothing of what I am saying hangs, either, on whether suspending judgement counts as a way of concluding epistemic deliberations or only as a way of deferring such conclusion (see Friedman 2013).

13. Perhaps there are irresoluble practical dilemmas in which there is no rational way for the agent to choose among alternative actions (even if she is forced to make a decision). In these situations, it seems, the agent would be without rational guidance. But this is not what happens in scenarios like MEDICINE: intuitively, the agent can claim to have good reasons to give the safe drug – rather than doing nothing or taking reckless risks.

14. In particular, it would be wrong to assign 50% probability to the coin having landed heads up if one knows that the coin actually did land tails up.

15. Ross and Schroeder (2014) discuss arguments along these lines against the view of belief as high credence.

Additional information

Funding

This work was partly supported by the Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad [Research projects FFI2011-23267 and FFFI2014-57258-P] and by the Universidad nacional de Educación a Distancia [Doctoral grant FPI-UNED].