Ought to believe

Journal of Philosophy

Volumn 105, Issue 7, 2008, Pages 346-370

  Chrisman, Matthew ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF EDINBURGH   (United Kingdom)

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EID: 61049187033     PISSN: 0022362X     EISSN: 19398549     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.5840/jphil2008105736     Document Type: Review

References (43)

1. The first example is from William Alston, "The Deontological Conception of Epistemic Justification," Philosophical Perspectives, II (1988): 257-99. I also include the second example because it illustrates that the issue is not whether you can voluntarily believe a false proposition in order to collect a reward but whether you can voluntarily believe a proposition for which you have countervailing evidence or even no evidence
2. and Beyond Justification: Dimensions of Epistemic Evaluation (Ithaca: Cornell, 2005)
3. See Plantinga, Warrant: The Current Debate (New York: Oxford, 1993)
4. In "Deciding to Believe," in Problems of the Self: Philosophical Papers, 1956-1972 (New York: Cambridge, 1973), pp. 136-47, Bernard Williams endorsed the stronger principle that the formation of one's beliefs cannot be within one's voluntary control. He thought that this is an implication of the idea that "belief aim at truth." There has been much discussion of what to make of this idea and the conclusion Williams draws from it
5. See especially Jonathan Bennett, "Why Is Belief Involuntary?" Analysis, L, 2 (1990): 87-107
6. Dion Scott-Kakures, "On Belief and the Captivity of the Will," Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, LIV, 4 (1993): 77-103
7. D. Radcliffe, "Scott-Kakures on Believing at Will," Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, LVII, 1 (1997): 145-51
8. David Velleman, "On the Aim of Belief," in The Possibility of Practical Reason (New York: Oxford, 2000), pp. 123-43
9. Nishi Shah, "How Truth Governs Belief," The Philosophical Review, CXII, 4 (2003): 447-82
10. and Shah and Velleman, "Doxastic Deliberation," The Philosophical Review, CXIV, 4 (2005): 497-534. For my purposes here, however, the weaker form of doxastic involuntarism stated in the text is strong enough, and here I will remain neutral about its relation to the idea that belief aims at the truth
11. Raising one's hand is an action over which we have what Alston refers to as "basic voluntary control" because it is something we can just do. Turning on the light is an action over which we have what Alston refers to as "nonbasic immediate voluntary control" because it is something we can do right away by doing something else (such as, flipping the switch). By in large, these details will not matter here, but it is worth mentioning that Alston claims that we have neither sort of voluntary control over our beliefs, although he allows that we have what he calls "nonbasic indirect voluntary control" of a very weak sort over our beliefs, comparable to the sort of control we have over our blood pressure. R. Feldman, "The Ethics of Belief," Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, LX, 3 (2000): 667-95, argues that there are some beliefs over which we exercise nonbasic immediate voluntary control. His example is the belief that the lights are on in his office. If offered a high reward to believe this, he could collect the reward by turning on the lights in his office and thereby coming to have the belief right away. Alston might respond that this is indirect rather than direct nonbasic voluntary control, but I think the line between the two is vague. What is important here is that (as Feldman recognizes) the sort of voluntary control over beliefs that his example illustrates is something we have over only a small class of potential beliefs. Basically it is just the beliefs for which we have the power to make their propositional contents true. For the purposes of my discussion here, this class of beliefs may be bracketed, since the sorts of ordinary doxastic oughts that generate the tension between doxastic involuntarism and epistemic deontology far outstrips this class of beliefs
12. Steup, "Doxastic Voluntarism and Epistemic Deontology," Acta Analytica, XV, 24 (2000): 25-56
13. and "Doxastic Freedom," Synthese (forthcoming)
14. Ryan, "Doxastic Compatibilism and the Ethics of Belief," Philosophical Studies, CXIV (2003): 47-79
15. This is a perhaps somewhat restricted way to use the term 'epistemic deontology', which a comparison to ethical deontology reveals: ethical deontologists, consequentialists, and virtue theorists all agree that actions are proper subjects of ethical oughts; what they disagree about is the source or justification for these ethical oughts. So, epistemic deontology might rightly be thought to involve something more to distinguish it from epistemic consequentialism, and epistemic virtue theory. For more on a pure form of epistemic deontology, see P.N. Turner, "Epistemic Deontology and the Consequentialist Consensus," Masters Thesis presented to the faculty of the University of North Carolina, at Chapel Hill, 2004. However, whatever more is required, the view will include a commitment to the idea that beliefs are proper subjects of doxastic oughts, and the cogency of this idea is what will be under discussion here
16. Compare also Steup, "Doxastic Voluntarism," p. 26
17. Hieronymi, "The Wrong Kind of Reason," this JOURNAL, CII, 9 (September 2005): 437-57
18. For a different use of the same distinction, see also Hieronymi, "Controlling Attitudes," Pacific Philosophical Quarterly, LXXXVII (2006): 51-52
19. See Hieronymi, "Controlling Attitudes," pp. 52-60, for a plausible explanation of why extrinsic reasons cannot directly motivate belief. The details are not important here, but what is important is that the no rewards principle shows that extrinsic reasons cannot motivate belief, which seems to undermine doxastic voluntarism
20. Steup, "Doxastic Freedom," p. 20 of ms
21. Of course, they seem to be responsive to a different kind of reason, but more on this below
22. drawing on Michael Stocker, "'Ought' and 'Can,'" Australasian Journal of Philosophy, XLIV, 3 (1971): 313-17
23. and Walter Sinnott-Armstrong, "'Ought' Conversationally Implies 'Can'," The Philosophical Review, XCIII, 2 (1984): 249-61
24. Later in Feldman, "Modest Deontologism in Epistemology" Synthese (forthcoming), he makes a compatible proposal, suggesting that "S ought to believe that p" should be analyzed as "Believing that p is the epistemically appropriate response to S's evidence." He takes this to be a way of spelling out the idea that in one's role as a believer one ought to follow one's evidence. Whatever way we spell out the details, I still think Feldman's proposal falls prey to the criticisms I go on to articulate above
25. Campbell Brown has suggested to me in conversation that Feldman's thought here involves a scope confusion. It is true that not all teachers can explain things clearly, but this undermines only a narrow scope reading of "Teachers ought to explain things clearly." The narrow scope reading is "For all x, if x is a teacher then ought (x explains things clearly)." The wide scope reading is "For all x, ought (if x is a teacher, then x explains things clearly)," and Brown's idea is that this is not undermined by the fact that not all teachers can explain things clearly. The ones who cannot could satisfy this obligation by quitting their jobs. There are naturally some questions about whether this wide-scoping move is fully defensible. But, in any case, it seems wrong to me to think of doxastic oughts as role oughts for reasons that emerge more clearly in the text below
26. For a similar point, compare T. Kelly, "Epistemic Rationality as Instrumental Rationality: A Critique," Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, LXIV (2003): 612-40
27. Kornblith, "Epistemic Obligation and the Possibility of Internalism," in A. Fairweather and L. Zagzebski, eds., Virtue Epistemology: Essays on Epistemic Virtue and Responsibility (New York: Oxford, 2001), pp. 231-48, see p. 237
28. Kornblith might not want to call these "categorical" oughts but rather a sort of hypothetical ought where the hypotheticality is cancelled for any agent with any desires - for the full view, see his Knowledge and Its Place in Nature (New York: Oxford, 2002), ch. 5
29. Kornblith, "Epistemic Obligation," p. 238
30. Sellars, "Language as Thought and as Communication," Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, XXIX (1969): 506-27
31. For a similar distinction, compare Lloyd Humberstone, 'Two Sorts of Ought's," Analysis, XXXII (1971): 8-11
32. See Paul McNamara, "Deontic Logic," in Edward N. Zalta, ed., The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2006 Edition), URL = 〈http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2006/entries/logic-deontic/〉
33. There are some attempts to modify the standard view to include a place for the agent in the proposition to which the ought-operator applies. For instance, by deploying a "stit" ("see to it") device in the statement of the proposition to which an ought applies, we can create a spot for an agent. For example, "It ought to be the case that Eric picks up Ellie on time" could be construed as "It ought to be the case that Eric sees to it that he picks up Ellie on time," in order to preserve reference to agency. See John F. Horty, Agency and Deontic Logic (New York: Oxford, 2001)
34. See also John Broome, "Normative Requirements," Ratio, XII, 4 (2000): 398-419
35. and Ralph Wedgwood, "The Meaning of 'Ought'," Oxford Studies in Metaethics, I (2006): 127-60, for other attempts to modify the standard view to preserve reference to agency. I will not discuss these views in any detail here. As will emerge below, although I think we need to preserve reference to a not merely grammatical subject of some oughts, this subject will not always be a agent
36. For other, more grammatical arguments for resisting the standard view in deontic logic, see Mark Schroeder, "Do Oughts Take Propositions" (manuscript)
37. Sidgwick, The Methods of Ethics, 7th edition (London: Macmillan, 1907), p. 34
38. See also Williams, "Ought and Moral Obligation," in his Moral Luck (New York: Cambridge, 1981)
39. That is to say that it is not merely in virtue of the logical form of the statements that an inference from one rule to the other is correct, rather it is in part because of the nature of the concepts deployed in the statements that such an inference is correct. For example, the inference from "x is a triangle" to "x has three sides" is materially correct. (Compare Sellars, "Inference and Meaning," Mind, LXII, 247 (1953): 313-38, on the materially correct inference from "Pittsburgh is to the west of Princeton" to "Princeton is to the east of Pittsburgh.")
40. Sellars, "Language as Thought and as Communication," p. 513
41. It also makes sense of David J. Owens's claim in Reason without Freedom: The Problem of Epistemic Normativity (New York: Routledge, 2000), p. 126, that "Some norms are not there to guide action, to govern the exercise of control: their function is to assess what we are." Because he thinks this, Owens argues that not all responsibility presupposes freedom to choose - in particular, epistemic responsibility does not presuppose voluntary choice of our doxastic attitudes. I agree with this. However, I would say that epistemic responsibility is intimately related to responsibility to do things, over which we do have voluntary control. The conceptual connection between rules of criticism and rules of action that I have been urging allows one to make this connection
42. For similar ideas, compare Christopher Hookway, "Cognitive Virtues and Epistemic Evaluations," International Journal of Philosophical Studies, II (1994): 211-27, on p. 225
43. and Linda Zagzebski, Virtues of the Mind (New York: Cambridge, 1996), pp. 219-31