Doxastic voluntarism is the thesis that our beliefs are subject to voluntary control. While there’s some controversy as to what “voluntary control” amounts to (see 1.2), it’s often understood as direct control: the ability to bring about a state of affairs “just like that,” without having to do anything else. Most of us have direct control over, for instance, bringing to mind an image of a pine tree. Can one, in like fashion, voluntarily bring it about that one believes a (...) specific proposition? Doxastic voluntarists hold that, at least in some circumstances—such as when the evidence is ambiguous—we can. Doxastic involuntarists, in contrast, maintain that we cannot. Some involuntarists hold that the concept of belief itself precludes the possibility of believing voluntarily. Others hold that the impossibility of voluntary belief is a contingent psychological fact. Historically, the issue of doxastic voluntarism has been connected to how many think about religious commitment: a prominent view of faith is that it is a voluntary decision to believe. Furthermore, the issue of voluntarism has also been viewed as having bearing on fundamental questions in epistemology. For example, are epistemic norms duties to believe in certain ways? Are there practical or moral reasons to believe? If the answer to either question is “yes,” it seems some measure of voluntary doxastic control is required. -/- In section 1, we expand on the definition of doxastic voluntarism, and survey various kinds of control (e.g. direct, indirect, long-range) and the doxastic attitudes we might control (e.g. outright belief, withholding, credences). In section 2, we discuss a number of historical views on doxastic voluntarism. In section 3, we survey motivations for rejecting doxastic voluntarism. There are two general strategies: arguments that appeal to psychological considerations, and conceptual arguments regarding the nature of belief. In section 4, we survey five approaches to defending voluntarism: those that appeal to epistemic permissivism, doxastic compatibilism, skepticism, one-off considerations, and non-standard views of belief. In section 5, we cover empirical work on doxastic voluntarism. The last two sections discuss two implications of voluntarism. In section 6, we discuss voluntarism’s implications for the ethics of belief, and in section 7, we discuss issues at the intersection of voluntarism and religious faith. (shrink)

Epistemic evaluation is often appropriately prescriptive in character because believers are often capable of exercising some kind of control—call it doxastic control—over the way in which they regulate their beliefs. An intuitively appealing and widely endorsed account of doxastic control—the immediate causal impact account—maintains that a believer exercises doxastic control when her judgments about how she ought to regulate her beliefs in a particular set of circumstances can cause the believer actually to regulate her beliefs in those circumstances as she (...) judges she ought to. I show here that the immediate causal impact account is ultimately untenable. Nevertheless, the immediate causal impact account gets something important about the nature of doxastic control right: exercising doxastic control involves being such that one’s conception of ideal belief regulation somehow shapes the way in which one actually regulates one’s beliefs. Thus, I develop here an alternative account according to which, insofar as she exercises doxastic control, a believer’s conception of ideal belief regulation shapes the way in which she actually believes by exerting causal power directly on her dispositions to regulate her beliefs in certain ways. I defend this alternative against other competitors by showing that it can be extended to supply a unified account of rational control that explains why evaluation with respect to the various different norms of rationality that govern the way in which we form, revise and sustain not only our beliefs, but also our intention, hopes, fears, etc. is often appropriately prescriptive. (shrink)

Many of the things we do in the course of a day we don't do intentionally: blushing, sneezing, breathing, blinking, smiling—to name but a few. But we also do act intentionally, and often when we do we act for reasons. Whether we always act for reasons when we act intentionally is controversial. But at least the converse is generally accepted: when we act for reasons we always act intentionally. Necessarily, it seems. In this paper, I argue that acting intentionally is (...) not in all cases acting for a reason. Instead, intentional agency involves a specific kind of control. Having this kind of control makes it possible to modify one's action in the light of reasons. Intentional agency opens the possibility of acting in the light of reasons. I also explain why when we act with an intention we act for reasons. In the second part of the paper, I draw on these results to show that the dominant view of reasons to intend and the rationality of intentions should be rejected. (shrink)

Buck-passing analyses of normative concepts in terms of normative reasons face the so-called ‘wrong kind of reason’ (WKR) problem. Most work on this topic has focused either (i) on the WKR problem for the buck-passing account of value or (ii) more generally as an issue for ‘reasons fundamentalists’ (those that hold that all normative concepts can be analysed into normative reasons). This paper concerns the buck-passing analysis of deontic concepts, in particular the concept of wrongness, understood as an analysis into (...) normative reasons for action. I first address the question of whether wrong kind reasons for action are possible in the first place, before examining and rejecting some accounts of the WKR/RKR for action. I end with a suggestion which points to a positive account of the distinction, and I explain one way in which appealing to this distinction can help to resolve the WKR problem. (shrink)