Epistemic Freedom Revisited

Synthese, 2021

Some propositions are not likely to be true overall, but are likely to be true if you believe them. Appealing to the platitude that belief aims at truth, it has become increasingly popular to defend the view that such propositions are epistemically rational to believe. However, I argue that this view runs into trouble when we consider the connection between what's epistemically rational to believe and what's practically rational to do. I conclude by discussing how rejecting the view bears on three other epistemological issues. First, we're able to uncover a flaw in a common argument for permissivism. Second, we can generate a problem for prominent versions of epistemic consequentialism. Finally, we can better understand the connection between epistemic rationality and truth: epistemic rationality is a guide to true propositions rather than true beliefs.

The main goal of this paper is to show that Pettit and Smith's (1996) argument concerning the nature of free belief is importantly incomplete. I accept Pettit and Smith's emphasis upon normative constraints governing responsible believing and desiring, and their claim that the responsibly believing agent needs to possess an ability to believe (or desire) otherwise when believing (desiring) wrongly. But I argue that their characterization of these constraints does not do justice to one crucial factor, namely, the presence of an unreflective, sub-personally constituted, ability to spot the kind of situations in which the reflective critical abilities constitutive of responsible believing (and desiring) should be deployed.

2017

Can I be wrong about my own beliefs? More precisely: Can I falsely believe that I believe that p? I argue that the answer is negative. This runs against what many philosophers and psychologists have traditionally thought and still think. I use a rather new kind of argument, – one that is based on considerations about Moore's paradox. It shows that if one believes that one believes that p then one believes that p – even though one can believe that p without believing that one believes that p.

Manuscrito, 2023

This article discusses Rik Peels's response to Williams's argument against voluntary belief. Williams argues that voluntary beliefs must be acquired independently of truth-considerations, so they cannot count as beliefs after all, since beliefs aim at truth. Peels attempted to reply by showing that in cases of self-fulfilling beliefs, a belief can indeed be voluntarily acquired in conditions which retain the necessary truth-orientation. But even if we make two crucial concessions to Peels’s proposal, his argument ultimately fails. The first concession is that beliefs can be weakly voluntary—namely, we can acquire them at will though we do not preserve them at will but on the basis of evi-dence. Conceding this, however, only lands us in the “acquisition problem”: how a belief can be acquired qua belief when we still do not think we have justification for it. This leads us to the second concession: that knowing in advance that a certain belief is self-fulfilling provides us with such a justification. However, this concession lands us in the ultimate obstacle: that, precisely because such a justification is available both before and at the moment of forming the belief, the cognitive perspective of the subject is identical at both moments, which obscures what it even means to say that at a certain moment she started to have a belief.

Oxford Handbook Online, 2016

A fundamental puzzle about self-knowledge is this: our spontaneous, unreflective self-attributions of beliefs and other mental states—avowals, as they are often called—appear to be at once epistemically groundless and also epistemically privileged. On the one hand, it seems that our avowals simply do not rely on—nor do they require—justification or evidence. On the other hand, our avowals seem to represent a substantive epistemic achievement: they appear to represent beliefs that are especially apt to constitute genuine knowledge of our own present states of mind. Several authors have recently tried to explain away avowals' groundlessness by appeal to the so-called transparency of present-tense self-attributions—a feature that is best illustrated by considering present-tense self-attributions of beliefs. As observed by Gareth Evans, if asked whether I believe, e.g., that it's raining, I will typically not 'look inward' and attend to my own state of mind, but instead I will look outside, to the world—to see whether it's raining or not. Two recent and divergent construals of transparency agree that it shows avowals of beliefs (and perhaps other mental states) to be only apparently groundless. After a critical discussion of these two construals (Section 2), we present an alternative reading of transparency that explains—rather than explains away—the apparent groundlessness of avowals (Section 3). We then explore (in Section 4) a way of coupling this alternative reading with a plausible account of how it is that our ordinary avowals can represent genuine knowledge of our own present states of mind.

Australasian Journal of Philosophy

There are convincing counter-examples to the widely accepted thesis that we cannot believe at will. For, it seems possible that the truth of a proposition depend on whether or not one believes it. I call such scenarios cases of Truth Depends on Belief (TDB) and argue that they meet the main criteria for believing at will that we find in the literature. I reply to five objections that one might level against the thesis that TDB cases show that believing at will is possible, namely that (1) mind-reading is impossible, (2) in TDB cases, one’s belief is caused by one’s desire, (3) in TDB scenarios, one does not choose a belief, but something else, (4) TDB cases are reducible to Feldman cases, and that (5) if truth depends on belief, we are on the road to a regress. Of course, TDB scenarios hardly, if ever, occur in real life. For three reasons, they are nonetheless important. First, they show that the thesis that it is conceptually impossible to believe at will is simply false. Second, they provide us with an important constraint on any version of the thesis that it is psychologically impossible to believe at will. Third, they show us that, contrary to what several philosophers claim or imply, believing at will should not be identified with believing irrespective of – what one considers to be – the truth, nor should believing irrespective of the truth be considered a necessary condition for believing at will.

… manuscript, University of …, 2010

Most epistemologists hold that knowledge entails belief. However, proponents of this claim rarely offer a positive argument in support of it. Rather, they tend to treat the view as obvious and assert that there are no convincing counterexamples. We find this strategy to be problematic. We do not find the standard view obvious, and moreover, we think there are cases in which it is intuitively plausible that a subject knows some proposition P without -or at least without determinately -believing that P. Accordingly, we present five plausible examples of knowledge without (determinate) belief, and we present empirical evidence suggesting that our intuitions about these scenarios are not atypical.

Philosophers have long held that epistemic self-reliance has a special value. But, this view has recently been challenged by prominent epistemologist Linda Zagzebski. Zagzebski argues that potential sources of support for the claim that epistemic self-reliance has a special value fail. Here I provide a novel defense of the special value of epistemic self-reliance. Self-reliance has a special value because it is required for attaining certain valuable cognitive achievements. Further, practicing self-reliance may be all-things-considered worthwhile even when doing so is a less reliable way of getting to the truth than relying on others and even when doing so is flatly unreliable in getting to the truth.

2013

I defend the possibility of a form of doxastic voluntarism, by criticizing an argument advanced recently by Pamela Hieronymi against the possibility of believing at will. Conceiving of believing at will as believing immediately in response to practical reasons, Hieronymi claims that no form of control we exercise over our beliefs measures up to this standard. While there is a form of control Hieronymi thinks we exercise over our beliefs, “evaluative control,” she claims it does not give us the power to believe at will because it consists in the consideration of reasons “constitutive” of believing that are not, at the same time, practical reasons. I argue that evaluative control does amount to the ability to believe at will, because there is a practical reason the consideration of which also constitutes some acts of believing: the value of believing the truth. The form of voluntarism I defend is consistent with a robust evidentialism.