Acceptance and deciding to believe

Journal of Philosophical Research

Volumn 29, Issue , 2004, Pages 173-190

  Buckareff, Andrei A ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF ROCHESTER   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 33845290597     PISSN: 10538364     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.5840/jpr_2004_17     Document Type: Article

References (45)

1. Carl Ginet, "Deciding to Believe," in, Knowledge, Truth, and Duty: Essays on Epistemic Justification, Responsibility, and Virtue, ed. M. Steup (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 63-76
2. See Alfred R. Mele, "Agency and Mental Action," Philosophical Perspectives 11 (1997): 231-249
3. and "Deciding to Act," Philosophical Studies 100 (2000): 81-108 for accounts of mental action from a causalist perspective
4. For a non-causalist, volitionist theory of mental action see Hugh McCann, The Works of Agency: On Human Action, Will, and Freedom (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1998), especially chap. 8
5. I am here indebted to Michael Bratman's discussion of the differences in his, "Practical Reasoning and Acceptance in a Context," Mind 101 (1992): 1-15, especially 2-9
6. I follow his treatment of the differences in what follows, although I part company with him on some points. Other helpful accounts are offered by Pascal Engel, "Believing, Holding True, and Accepting," Philosophical Explorations 1 (1998): 140-151
7. and Raimo Tuomela, "Belief versus Acceptance," Philosophical Explorations 3 (2000): 122-137. "Acceptance" as I am using the term comes closest to what Engel and Tuomela call "pragmatic acceptance."
8. Ralph Wedgewood, "The Aim of Belief," Philosophical Perspectives 16 (2002): 267-297, 267
9. Like Wedgewood, he emphasizes the normativity of the content of beliefs. Velleman, however, takes belief to be a species of acceptance, one that is truth-directed. I believe this feature of his account is incompatible with what I argue for in this essay. See also Jonathan E. Adler, "The Ethics of Belief: Off the Wrong Track," Midwest Studies in Philosophy 23 (1999): 267-285, especially 268-270
10. Bernard Williams, "Deciding to Believe," in Williams, Problems of the Self (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973), 136-151, especially 137
11. Peter Railton, "Truth, Reason, and the Regulation of Belief," Philosophical Issues 5 (1994): 71-93, 74
12. See William G. Lycan, Judgement and Justification (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 136-137, for similar reasons in defense of the claim that to believe that p is to believe that p is true
13. See Eddy M. Zemach, "Practical Reasons for Belief?" Nous 31 (1997): 525-527, for a critical treatment of the role of practical reasons in epistemic justification
14. See also Richard Foley, "Pragmatic Reasons for Belief," in Gambling on God: Essays on Pascal's Wager, ed. J. Jordan (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 1994), 31-46, for an argument for affording pragmatic reasons an occasional role as relevant to the rationality of belief
15. See Jeff Jordan, "Pragmatic Arguments and Belief," American Philosophical Quarterly 33 (1996): 409-120, for a case for the rational and moral permissibility of forming beliefs based on pragmatic reasons without adequate evidence
16. Blaise Pascal, Pensees and Other Writings, trans. H. Levi, ed. A. Levi (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 155-156
17. Bratman, "Practical Reasoning and Acceptance in a Context," 4
18. Audi, "Doxastic Voluntarism and the Ethics of Belief," 96
19. L. Jonathan Cohen, "Belief and Acceptance" Mind 98 (1989): 367-389, 368
20. This is an incomplete and simplistic description of what I take a belief to be. For a very attractive account of belief, but one I find problematic in some of its details, see Radu J. Bogdan, "The Manufacture of Belief," in Bogdan, ed., Belief: Form, Content, and Function (Oxford: Clarendon, 1986), 149-184
21. Audi, "Dispositional Beliefs and Dispositions to Believe," Nous 28 (1994): 419-434, especially 424
22. For more on the differences between belief and action see Audi, "Doxastic Voluntarism and the Ethics of Belief."
23. I owe this analogy to John Heil, "Belief," in A Companion to Epistemology, ed. J. Dancy and E. Sosa (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992), 45-48, especially 47
24. See Jaegwon Kim, "Events as Property Exemplifications." in Action Theory, ed. M. Brand and D. Walton (Dordrecht: D. Reidel, 1976), 159-177
25. Ginet, On Action (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 13
26. I like to think what I am offering is roughly in the spirit of Paul Grice's proposed method in "Method In Philosophical Psychology (From the Banal to the Bizarre)," Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association 48 (1975): 23-53
27. Keith Lehrer, "Acceptance and Belief Revisited," in Believing and Accepting, ed. Pascal Engel (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 2000), 209-220, especially 209
28. Harry Frankfurt, "Freedom of the Will and the Concept of a Person," reprinted in Free Will, ed. Gary Watson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982), 81-95, 83
29. Keith Lehrer, Self-Trust: A Study of Reason, Knowledge, and Autonomy (Oxford: Clarendon, 1997)
30. and Gary Watson. "Free Agency," Journal of Philosophy 72 (1975): 205-220, among others
31. See also Gilbert Harman, "Desired Desires," in Harman, Explaining Value and Other Essays in Moral Philosophy (Oxford: Clarendon, 2000), 117-136, for additional critique
32. Bratman, "Valuing and the Will," Philosophical Perspectives 14 (2000): 249-265, especially 258
33. See also Bratman, "Hierarchy, Circularity, and Double Reduction,"
34. Diego Fernandez-Duque, Jodie A. Baird, and Michael I. Posner, "Executive Attention and Metacognitive Regulation," Consciousness and Cognition 9 (2000): 288-307, especially 288
35. See Cesare Cornoldi, "The Impact of Metacognitive Reflection on Cognitive Control," in, Metacognition and Cognitive Neuropsychology: Monitoring and Control Processes, ed. G. Mazzoni and T. O. Nelson (London: Lawrence Erlbaum, 1998), 139-159, especially 156
36. See Timothy D. Wilson and Nancy Brekke, "Mental Contamination and Mental Correction: Unwanted Influences on Judgments and Evaluations," Psychological Bulletin 116 (1994): 117-142, especially 122
37. See also H. H. Price, "Belief and Will," reprinted in Philosophy of Mind, ed. Smart Hampshire (New York: Harper & Row, 1966), 91-116, especially 107-111
38. Wilson and Brekke discuss the difficulty involved in controlling attitudes, including belief, by focusing on the case of avoiding and correcting what they call "mental contamination." These are "cases whereby a judgment, emotion, or behavior is biased by unconscious or uncontrollable mental processes" (118). See also Daniel T. Gilbert, Romin W. Tafarodi, and Patrick S. Malone, "You Can't Not Believe Everything You Read," Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 65 (1993): 221-233
39. Timothy D. Wilson, Daniel T. Gilbert, and Thalia P. Wheatley, "Protecting our Minds: The Role of Lay Beliefs," in Metacognition: Cognitive and Social Dimensions, ed. V. Y. Yzerbyt, G. Lories, and B. Dardenne(London: Sage, 1998), 171-201, are more optimistic than Wilson and Brekke about the possible control that may be exercised. But they echo the sentiments of others doing empirical work, despairing of agents exercising anything like direct voluntary control over belief
40. Ginet, "Deciding to Believe," 70
41. See Cohen, An Essay on Belief and Acceptance, 4
42. "Belief and Acceptance," 370
43. Ginet, "Contra Reliabilism," The Monist 68 (1985): 175-187, 183
44. Insofar as Richard Feldman's theory of justification is a species of epistemic deontologism, his position would qualify as an alternative theory that takes epistemic obligations seriously in evaluating the beliefs of epistemic agents without requiring that agents ever exercise direct voluntary control over their beliefs. See his "Epistemic Obligations," Philosophical Perspectives 2 (1988): 235-256
45. and "The Ethics of Belief," Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 60 (2000): 667-695. His theory may best be regarded as a very modest epistemic deontologism