June 05, 2009
New paper: How We Choose our Beliefs
by Gregory Salmieri (primary author, UNC/Chapel Hill)
and Benjamin Bayer (secondary author, Colorado College)
(June 5, 2009) (DOC) (PDF)
Recent years have seen increasing attacks on the "deontological" conception (or as we call it, the "prescriptive conception") of epistemic justification, the view that epistemology guides us in forming beliefs responsibly. Critics challenge an important presupposition of the prescriptive conception, doxastic voluntarism, the view that we choose our beliefs. We assume that epistemic prescriptions are indispensable, and seek to answer objections to doxastic voluntarism, most prominently William Alston's. We contend that Alston falsely assumes that choice of belief requires the assent to a specific propositional content. We argue that beliefs can be chosen under descriptions which do not specify their propositional content, and that these descriptions—which concern the method of inquiry whereby a belief is to be formed—nonetheless specify the features of the belief that make it epistemically responsible to adopt. More generally, we urge that the identity of a belief is not exhausted by its content.
Posted by Ben at 06:36 PM | Comments (0)
New paper: The elusiveness of doxastic compatibilism
While moral theorists regularly appeal to compatibilist accounts of freedom in order to reconcile the concept of moral responsibility with the prospect of determinism, few epistemologists are as concerned to find a workable doxastic compatibilism to underwrite the concept of epistemic responsibility. I suggest that, at least for internalists about justification, epistemic responsibility is crucial and so some version of doxastic compatibilism is necessary for those who take the prospect of determinism seriously. In this paper, I survey Matthias Steup's recent attempt to formulate just such a version of doxastic compatibilism, modeled along the lines of traditional proposals for compatibilism about the freedom of action. I argue, however, that Steup's proposal does not work, mostly on his own terms. After attempting to refine his proposal to meet my counterexamples, I express a general skepticism about the workability of doxastic compatibilism, and offer a brief libertarian account of doxastic freedom that I believe should be taken seriously by those internalist epistemologists who take epistemic responsibility seriously.
Posted by Ben at 12:34 AM | Comments (0)