It has been argued that humans can face an ethical/epistemic dilemma over the automatic stereotyping involved in implicit bias: ethical demands require that we consistently treat people equally, as equally likely to possess certain traits, but if our aim is knowledge or understanding our responses should reflect social inequalities meaning that members of certain social groups are statistically more likely than others to possess particular features. I use psychological research to argue that often the best choice from the epistemic perspective (...) is the same as the best choice from the ethical perspective: to avoid automatic stereotyping even when this involves failing to reflect social realities in our judgements. This argument has an important implication: it shows that it is not possible to successfully defend an act of automatic stereotyping simply on the basis that the stereotype reflects an aspect of social reality. An act of automatic stereotyping can be poor from an epistemic perspective even if the stereotype that is activated reflects reality. (shrink)

Many philosophers recognize that, as a matter of psychological fact, one can believe something valuable without valuing it. I argue that it is also possible to value something without believing it valuable. Agents can genuinely value things that they neither believe disvaluable nor believe valuable along a scale of impersonal value.

Most agree that believing a proposition normally or ideally results in believing that one believes it, at least if one considers the question of whether one believes it. I defend a much stronger thesis. It is impossible to believe without knowledge of one's belief. I argue, roughly, as follows. Believing that p entails that one is able to honestly assert that p. But anyone who is able to honestly assert that p is also able to just say – i.e., authoritatively, (...) yet not on the basis of evidence – that she believes that p. And anyone who is able to just say that she believes that p is able to act in light of the fact that she holds that belief. This ability to act, in turn, constitutes knowledge of the psychological fact. However, without a broader theory of belief to help us make sense of this result, this conclusion will be hard to accept. Why should being in a particular mental state by itself necessitate an awareness of being in that state? I sketch a theory that helps to answer this question: believing is a matter of viewing a proposition as what one ought to believe. I show how this theory explains the thesis that to believe is to know that you believe. (shrink)

To believe is to possess a wide variety of dispositions pertinent to the proposition believed. Among those dispositions are self-ascriptive dispositions. Consequently, being disposed to self-ascribe belief that P is partly constitutive of believing that P. Such self-ascriptive dispositions can be underwritten by any of a variety of mechanisms, acting co-operatively or competitively. But since self-ascriptive dispositions are only partly constitutive of belief, there can be cases in which the self-ascriptive dispositions splinter away from the remaining dispositions. It is then (...) an empirical question how often our self-ascriptive dispositions diverge from the remaining dispositions constitutive of belief. The dispositions will tend to align reliably when possession of the belief in question is normatively neutral, straightforwardly connected to behavior, and most centrally manifested in explicit assertions or judgments. When these three conditions are not met, self-ascription, self-conscious avowal, sincere utterance, and explicit judgment will often diverge from the various other dispositions constitutive of belief. Even self-knowledge of explicit judgment can be problematic when we are attracted to half-empty forms of words or when we are not entirely persuaded of what we are saying. (shrink)

Implicit intergroup biases have been shown to impact social behavior in many unsettling ways, from disparities in decisions to “shoot” black and white men in a computer simulation to unequal gender-based evaluations of résumés and CVs. It is a difficult question whether, and in what way, agents are responsible for behaviors affected by implicit biases. I argue that in paradigmatic cases agents are responsible for these behaviors in the sense that the behavior is “attributable” to them. That is, behaviors affected (...) by implicit biases reflect upon who one is as a moral agent. (shrink)

I offer a new argument for the elimination of ‘beliefs’ from cognitive science based on Wimsatt’s concept of robustness and a related concept of fragility. Theoretical entities are robust if multiple independent means of measurement produce invariant results in detecting them. Theoretical entities are fragile when multiple independent means of detecting them produce highly variant results. I argue that sufficiently fragile theoretical entities do not exist. Recent studies in psychology show radical variance between what self-report and non-verbal behaviour indicate about (...) participants’ beliefs. This is evidence that ‘belief’ is fragile, and is thus a strong candidate for elimination. 1 Introduction2 Robustness and Fragility2.1 A historical example of robustness2.2 Fragility and elimination3 The Received View4 Evidence for the Fragility of Belief4.1 Contamination and fragility4.2 Implicit association tests and fragility5 Attempts to Preserve the Belief Category for Cognitive Science5.1 Beliefs and aliefs5.2 Contradictory beliefs5.3 In-between beliefs and the unity assumption5.4 Belief sub-classes5.5 Self-deception6 Alternative Mental States7 Conclusion. (shrink)

Stoics and Sceptics distinguish belief (doxa) from a representationally and functionally similar but sub-doxastic state: passive yielding to appearance. Belief requires active assent to appearances, that is, affirmation of the appearances as true. I trace the roots of this view to Plato's accounts of doxa in the Republic and Theaetetus. In the Republic, eikasia and pistis (imaging and conviction) are distinguished by their objects, appearances versus ordinary objects; in the Theaetetus, perception and doxa are distinguished by their objects, proper perceptibles (...) versus ‘commons’, including being. But underlying these ontological distinctions is a psychological one: the lower mental states are confined to their lower objects because they are passive; the higher mental states have access to higher objects because they result from questioning appearances and making active affirmations about how things are. This doctrine of doxa anticipates both the Hellenistic one and modern accounts of belief as ‘aiming at truth’; it also shows Plato's views of doxa to have more in their favour philosophically and to cohere better with one another than generally thought. (shrink)

The article proposes a novel approach to mental agency that is inspired by Victoria McGeer’s work on self-regulation. The basic idea is that certain mental acts leave further work to be done for an agent to be considered an authoritative self-ascriber of corresponding dispositional mental states. First, we discuss Richard Moran’s account of avowals, which grounds first-person authority in deliberative, self-directed agency. Although this view is promising, we argue that it ultimately fails to confront the empirical gap between occurrent judgments (...) and dispositional beliefs. Second, we show how Victoria McGeer's account of self-regulation allows us to bridge this gap by emphasizing that avowals are only reliable and authoritative insofar as we take certain steps to live up to the commitments inherent in our self-ascriptions. Third, we address the question whether and to what extent self-regulation can be seen as a form of mental agency. Unlike the ‘pure’ deliberative form of mental agency advocated by Moran, which is direct, conscious and intra-personal, we follow McGeer and argue for a notion of mental agency as an indirect, unconscious and inter-personal process of self-regulation. (shrink)

This article critiques the much-discussed notion of alief recently introduced by Tamar Gendler. The narrow goal is to show that the notion is explanatorily unnecessary; the broader goal is to demonstrate the importance of making explicit one's explanatory framework when offering a philosophical account of the mind. After introducing the concept of alief and the examples Gendler characterizes in terms of it, the article examines the explanatory framework within which appeal to such a concept can seem necessary. This framework, it (...) argues, is a generalization of the belief-desire account of action. Although Gendler introduces the notion of alief in an attempt to move beyond the belief-desire account, it argues that she nevertheless works within a generalized version of its explanatory structure. Once the framework is made explicit, we find no explanatory need that requires introducing the notion of alief into our account of the mind. (shrink)

Self-deception poses serious difficulties for belief attribution because the behavior of the self-deceived is deeply conflicted: some of it supports the attribution of a certain belief, while some of it supports the contrary attribution. Theorists have resorted either to attributing both beliefs to the self-deceived, or to postulating an unconscious belief coupled with another kind of cognitive attitude. On the other hand, deflationary accounts of self- deception have attempted a more parsimonious solution: attributing only one, false belief to the subject. (...) My aim in this paper is to critically examine this strategy and, subsequently, to suggest that its failure gives support to the neglected view that the self-deceived are not accurately describable as believing either of the relevant propositions. (shrink)

In this paper I develop the idea that, by answering the question whether p, you can answer the question whether you believe that p. In particular, I argue that judging that p is a fallible yet basic guide to whether one believes that p. I go on to defend my view from an important skeptical challenge, according to which my view would make it too easy to reject skeptical hypotheses about our access to our minds. I close by responding to (...) the opposing view on which our beliefs themselves constitute our only source of first-person access to our beliefs. (shrink)

In Delusions and Other Irrational Beliefs , Lisa Bortolotti argues that the irrationality of delusions is no barrier to their being classified as beliefs. This comment asks how Bortolotti’s position may be affected if we accept that there are two distinct types of belief, belonging to different levels of mentality and subject to different ascriptive constraints. It addresses some worries Bortolotti has expressed about the proposed two-level framework and outlines some questions that arise for her if the framework is adopted. (...) It also suggests that, rather than being beliefs that fail to meet the relevant standards of rationality, delusions may be non-doxastic acceptances that were never meant to meet them. (shrink)

How do we know what our intentions are? It is argued that work on self-knowledge has tended to neglect the attitude of intention, and that an epistemological account is needed that is attuned to the specific features of that state. Richard Moran’s Authorship view, on which we can acquire self-knowledge by making up our minds, offers a promising insight for such an account: we do not normally discover what we intend through introspection. However, his formulation of the Authorship view, developed (...) primarily with the attitude of belief in mind, is found wanting when applied to intention. An alternative account is proposed for knowledge of one’s own intentions that gives a central role to the mental act of deciding what to do. It is argued that we can come to know what we intend by making a decision about what to do and self-ascribing the content of that decision as our intended action. (shrink)

What attitude does someone manifesting implicit bias really have? According to the default representationalist picture, implicit bias involves having conflicting attitudes (explicit versus implicit) with respect to the topic at hand. In opposition to this orthodoxy, dispositionalists argue that attitudes should be understood as higher-level dispositional features of the person as a whole. Following this metaphysical view, the discordance characteristic of implicit bias shows that someone’s attitude regarding the topic at hand is not-fully-manifested or ‘in-between’. However, so far few representationalists (...) have been convinced by dispositionalist arguments, largely because dispositionalism cannot provide explanations in terms of underlying processes. We argue that if dispositionalism wants to be a genuine contender, it should make clear what it has to offer in terms of understanding of implicit bias. As a concrete proposal, we combine dispositionalist metaphysics with the idea that our normative practices of attitude ascription partly determine what it means to have an attitude. We show that such regulative dispositionalism can account for two prominent normative features of implicit bias. We conclude by suggesting that in order to engage in a meaningful debate with representationalism, dispositionalists might have to put the question ‘what counts as a good explanation?’ back on the table. (shrink)

This paper articulates a general distinction between two important communicative ideals—expressive sincerity and discursive integrity—and then uses it to analyze problems with political debate in contemporary democracies. In the context of philosophical discussions of different forms of trustworthiness and debates about deliberative democracy, self-knowledge, and moral testimony, the paper develops three arguments for the conclusion that, although expressive sincerity is valuable, we should not ignore discursive integrity in thinking about how to address problems with contemporary political debate. The paper concludes (...) with a brief discussion of a strategy for improving discursive integrity within public political debate by reflecting on which principles of responsible public debate would promote better democratic decision making. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to propose a new conceptualization of the distinction between realism and anti-realism about beliefs that is based on the division between natural and non-natural properties, as defined by Lewis. It will be argued that although the traditional form of anti-realism about beliefs, namely eliminative materialism, has failed, there is a possibility to reformulate the division in question. The background assumption of the proposal is the framework of deflationism about truth and existence: it will be (...) assumed that beliefs can be said to exist and their attributions can said to be true. The aim is to show that even when we buy into such assumptions we can meaningfully distinguish between the realist and anti-realist approach to belief. According to the proposal, the paradigmatic anti-realist view on beliefs should be seen as a conjunction of three claims: that belief attributions do not track objective similarities, that beliefs are not causally active, and that there is no viable way of naturalizing content. It will be shown that seeing the debate in the proposed way has important advantages as it allows the issue of belief realism to be made non-trivial and tractable, and it introduces theoretical unity into contemporary metaphysics of beliefs. (shrink)

This article discusses a puzzle arising from the phenomenon of insight in obsessive–compulsive disorder. “Insight” refers to an awareness or understanding of obsessive thoughts as false or irrational. I argue that a natural and plausible way of characterizing insight in OCD conflicts with several different possible explanations of the epistemic attitude underlying insight‐directed obsessive thought. After laying out the puzzle for five proposed explanations of obsessive thought and then discussing several possible ways that the puzzle might be avoided, I close (...) the article by arguing that we can avoid the puzzle by adopting a new positive view of insight‐directed obsessive thought. (shrink)

Psychological experiments allegedly show that people have a tendency to confabulate explanations of their behavior, because their conscious selves do not know why they do what they do, and therefore create the explanations that make most sense. This article explains why confabulation is neither a threat to interpretivist social science nor a threat to the presumption of first-person authority in Davidson’s interpretation theory. The reason is that the interpretative endeavor, which is necessary in order to identify and provide evidence for (...) confabulation is governed by a presumption of first-person authority. Explanations of confabulation thus depend on prior interpretations. (shrink)

It has become commonplace to distinguish enumerative theories of welfare, which tell us which things are good for us, from explanatory theories, which tell us why the things that are good for us have that status. It has also been claimed that while hedonism and objective list theories are enumerative but not explanatory, desire satisfactionism is explanatory but not enumerative. In this paper, I argue that this is mistaken. When properly understood, every major theory of welfare is both enumerative and (...) explanatory. (shrink)

We consider a range of cases—both hypothetical and actual—in which agents apparently know how to \ but fail to believe that the way in which they in fact \ is a way for them to \. These “no-belief” cases present a prima facie problem for Intellectualism about knowledge-how. The problem is this: if knowledge-that entails belief, and if knowing how to \ just is knowing that some w is a way for one to \, then an agent cannot both know (...) how to \ and fail to believe that w, the way that she \s, is a way for her to \. We discuss a variety of ways in which Intellectualists might respond to this challenge and argue that, ultimately, this debate converges with another, seemingly distinct debate in contemporary epistemology: how to attribute belief in cases of conflict between an agent’s avowals and her behavior. No-belief cases, we argue, reveal how Intellectualism depends on the plausibility of positing something like “implicit beliefs”—which conflict with an agent’s avowed beliefs—in many cases of apparent knowledge-how. While there may be good reason to posit implicit beliefs elsewhere, we suggest that there are at least some grounds for thinking that these reasons fail to carry over to no-belief cases, thus applying new pressure to Intellectualism. (shrink)

This paper focuses on the puzzling situation of having beliefs that are resistant to one’s own critical reasoning. This phenomenon happens, for example, when an individual does not succeed in eliminating a belief by evaluating it as false. I argue that this situation involves a specific type of irrationality—not yet properly identified in the literature—which I call ‘critical doxastic resistance’. The aim of this paper is to characterize this type of irrationality. Understanding such a phenomenon sheds light on the type (...) of agency that we exercise when we reason critically. Moreover, it illustrates one relevant relationship between agential rational control of our beliefs and the rational functioning of beliefs as being responsive to reasons. I argue that critical doxastic resistance is characterized by a failure to meet the following rational norm: in critical reasoning, the results of evaluative reasoning should automatically transfer into, and be implemented by, the reasoning or beliefs under evaluation. (shrink)

In a dissonance case, a person sincerely and with conviction asserts that P, while her overall automatic behaviour suggests that she believes that not-P. In contrast with several mainstream views, this paper defends the contradictory-belief view of some relevant dissonance cases and explores its consequences regarding Moorean propositions. The paper argues that in relevant cases, the dissonant person is justified in asserting a Moorean proposition on the grounds of her explicit view on the subject matter and the recognition of her (...) opposing beliefs. The person is irrational in being dissonant, but not in asserting a Moorean proposition. (shrink)

What enables everyday collective attitudes such as the intention of two persons to go for a walk together? Most current approaches are concerned with full-fledged col- lective attitudes and focus on the content, the mode or the subject of such attitudes. It will be argued that these approaches miss out an important explanatory enabling feature of collective attitudes: an experiential state, called a “sense of us”, in which a we-perspective is grounded. As will be shown, the sense of us pre-structures (...) collective intentional states and is thus relevant to an adequate understanding of collective atti- tudes. The argument receives indirect support by insights into distortions of interaction due to implicit stereotypes. (shrink)

What explains the context sensitivity of some (apparent) beliefs? Why, for example, do religious beliefs appear to control behaviour in some contexts but not others? Cases like this are heterogeneous, and we may require a matching heterogeneity of explanations, ranging over their contents, the attitudes of agents and features of the environment. In this paper, I put forward a hypothesis of the last kind. I argue that some beliefs (religious and non-religious) are coupled to cues, which either trigger an internal (...) representation or even partially constitute the beliefs. I show that such coupling will give rise to the context-sensitivity, without entailing that religious believers take a different attitude to belief content. (shrink)

According to Hutto and Satne, 521–536, 2015), an “essential tension” plagues contemporary neo-Pragmatist accounts of mental contents: their explanation of the emergence and constitution of intentional mental contents is circular. After identifying the problem, they also propose a solution: what neo-Pragmatists need to do, to overcome circularity, is to appeal to a primitive content-free variety of intentionality, different from the full-blown intentionality of propositional attitudes. In this paper, I will argue that, in addition to the problem of circularity, there is (...) another important problem that both neo-Pragmatist accounts, and Hutto and Satnes’s refinement of them, should also deal with: their difficulty to accommodate a host of recent empirical evidence and theoretical developments on the interdisciplinary field of animal cognition. I will call this difficulty the objection from animal minds, and I will present several arguments designed to show that, even though the notion of primitive intentionality, introduced by Hutto and Satne, may be useful to account for some of the most basic ways of dealing with the environment of nonhuman animals, it falls short of providing an adequate explanation of the full-range of cognitive capacities and behavioral dispositions that many animal species display. Thus, their proposal ends up being insufficient to help neo-Pragmatist approaches to overcome the problem of animal minds. Finally, I will suggest that overcoming this objection requires attributing to non-human animals some basic, yet content involving, kinds of intentional mental states. (shrink)

Influential views on self-knowledge presuppose that we cannot come to know a resistant belief in a first-personal way. Two theses support this supposition: if a belief self-ascription is grounded in the evidence of the person holding the belief, it is third-personal and we cannot have first-personal knowledge of beliefs we do not control. I object to both of these theses and argue that we can introspect on beliefs of which we lack control even though we cannot assent to their content.

This paper argues that it is possible to knowingly believe something while judging that one ought not to believe it and (so) viewing the belief as manifesting a sort of failure. I offer examples showing that such ‘alienated belief’ has several potential sources. I contrast alienated belief with self-deception, incontinent (or akratic) belief and half-belief. I argue that the possibility of alienated belief is compatible with the so-called ‘transparency’ of first-person reflection on belief, and that the descriptive and expressive difficulties (...) it involves stem from well-understood sources. I conclude by speculating that endorsed belief is in important respects like intentional action. Reflection on the possibility of alienated belief may thus help us to see one respect in which an agent can be responsible for her attitudes. (shrink)

The aim of the present article is to accomplish two things. The first is to show that given some further plausible assumptions, existing challenges to the indispensability of knowledge in causal explanation of action fail. The second is to elaborate an overlooked and distinct argument in favor of the causal efficacy of knowledge. In short, even if knowledge were dispensable in causal explanation of action, it is still indispensable in causal explanation of other mental attitudes and, in particular, some reactive (...) attitudes and factive emotions. Taking into account this sort of causal efficacy in determining which mental states are genuine mental states opens up new perspectives for defending the view that knowledge is the most general factive and genuine mental state. (shrink)

Radical embodied cognitive science (REC) tries to understand as much cognition as it can without positing contentful mental entities. Thus, in one prominent formulation, REC claims that content is involved neither in visual perception nor in any more elementary form of cognition. Arguments for REC tend to rely heavily on considerations of ontological parsimony, with authors frequently pointing to the difficulty of explaining content in naturalistically acceptable terms. However, many classic concerns about the difficulty of naturalizing content likewise threaten the (...) credentials of intentionality, which even advocates of REC take to be a fundamental feature of cognition. In particular, concerns about the explanatory role of content and about indeterminacy can be run on accounts of intentionality as well. Issues about explanation can be avoided, intriguingly if uncomfortably, by dramatically reconceptualizing or even renouncing the idea that intentionality can explain. As for indeterminacy, Daniel Hutto and Erik Myin point the way toward a response, appropriating an idea from Ruth Millikan. I take it a step further, arguing that attention to the ways that beliefs’ effects on behavior are modulated by background beliefs can help illuminate the facts that underlie their intentionality and content. (shrink)

Considering two of the main types of emotions, namely, perceptual emotions and cognitive emotions, in this paper we will examine which of them has a greater explanatory power for solving the frame problem. Additionally, we will analyze which of the main characteristics of perceptual and cognitive emotions type are appropriate when explaining how human beings determine relevance efficiently. We argue, assuming an intermediate position, that both types of emotions offer the necessary tools to explain how human beings solve the frame (...) problem. This is due, on the one hand, to the experiential/corporal character of the perceptual emotions and, on the other hand, to the relationship that cognitive emotions establish with the achievement of goals when facing a determined situation. (shrink)

There is an increasing push by journals to ensure that data and products related to published papers are shared as part of a cultural move to promote transparency, reproducibility, and trust in the scientific literature. Yet few journals commit to evaluating their effectiveness in implementing reporting standards aimed at meeting those goals (1, 2). Similarly, though the vast majority of journals endorse peer review as an approach to ensure trust in the literature, few make their peer review data available to (...) evaluate effectiveness toward achieving concrete measures of quality, including consistency and completeness in meeting reporting standards. Remedying these apparent disconnects is critical for closing the gap between guidance recommendations and actual reporting behavior. We see this as a collective action problem requiring leadership and investment by publishers, who can be incentivized through mechanisms that allow them to manage reputational risk and through continued innovation in journal assessment. (shrink)

In this paper, I set out some desiderata for a model of implicit cognition. I present test cases and suggest that, when considered in light of them, some recent models of implicit cognition fail to satisfy these desiderata. The test cases also bring to light an important class of cases that have been almost completely ignored in philosophical discussions of implicit cognition and implicit bias. These cases have important work to do in helping us understand both the role of implicit (...) cognition in action and our attempts to combat implicit biases. (shrink)

While the causal contributions of so‐called ‘automatic’ processes to behavior are now widely acknowledged, less attention has been given to their normative role in the guidance of action. We develop an account of the normativity of automaticity that responds to and builds upon Tamar Szabó Gendler's account of ‘alief’, an associative and arational mental state more primitive than belief. Alief represents a promising tool for integrating psychological research on automaticity with philosophical work on mind and action, but Gendler errs in (...) overstating the degree to which aliefs are norm‐insensitive. (shrink)

This paper examines the puzzling phenomenon of self-directed implicit bias in the form of gender “stereotype threat” (ST). Bringing to light the empirical undecidability of which account of this phenomenon is best, whether a rational or an associationist explanation, the paper aims to strengthen the associationist approach by appeal to a new account of seeing-as experiences. I critically examine “alief” accounts of reason-recalcitrant ST by bringing to bear arguments from the philosophy of emotion. The new account builds on the insights (...) and overcomes the weaknesses of “aliefs” by (a) employing associations that are imaginative and unreliable; and (b) proposing non-conceptual seeing-as experiences. (shrink)

We can understand implicit bias as a person’s disposition to evaluate members of a social group in a less favorable light than members of another social group, without intending to do so. If we understand it this way, we should not presuppose a one-size-fits-all answer to the question of how implicit cognitive states lead to skewed evaluations of other people. The focus of this paper is on implicit bias in considered decisions. It is argued that we have good reasons to (...) assume that imagination plays a vital role in decision making. If this assumption is correct, it offers an explanation for implicit bias in many considered decisions: Human beings who have been frequently exposed to stereotypes have stereotype-congruent expectations as part of their background knowledge. They feed into their imagination, sometimes without their awareness. This model would allow us to explain the key characteristics of implicit bias without recurring to any unconscious attitudes over and above such background knowledge. (shrink)

According to what I call the ‘Vagueness Thesis’ about belief, ‘believes’ is a vague predicate. On this view, our concept of belief admits of borderline cases: one can ‘half-believe’ something or be ‘in-between believing’ it. In this article, I argue that VT is false and present an alternative picture of belief. I begin by considering a case—held up as a central example of vague belief—in which someone sincerely claims something to be true and yet behaves in a variety of other (...) ways as if she believes that it is not. I argue that, even from the third-person perspective prioritised by proponents of VT, the case does not motivate VT. I present an alternative understanding of the case according to which the person in question believes as they say they do yet also has a belief-discordant implicit attitude otherwise. Moreover, I argue that, independently of the interpretation of any particular case, VT fails to accommodate the first-person perspective on belief. Belief is not only an item of one’s psychology that helps explain one’s behaviour; it is what one takes to be true. This fact about belief manifests itself in the nature of deliberation concerning whether to believe something and that of introspection regarding whether one believes something. Attending to these phenomena reveals that VT is not merely unmotivated, but untenable. (shrink)

According to the Doctrine of the Guise of the Good, actions are taken to be good by their agents. Kieran Setiya, however, has formulated a new objection to the DGG based on the distinction between the notions of normative reasons and motivating reasons. Only the latter, Setiya claims, is required for intentional agency. However, I will argue that Setiya’s objection fails because it rests on the implausible assumption that motivating reasons are determined solely in terms of the content of the (...) belief involved in answering the ‘why’ question. But the basis, or origin, of a belief is crucially important in determining whether the content of a belief can constitute a motivating reason for action. However, I will argue that the failure of Setiya’s argument reveals an important but neglected facts about the DGG, namely, that it presupposes the view that beliefs (or our dispositions to judge) about normative reasons play a role in one’s knowledge of what one is doing when one acts for a reason. Moreover, my discussion will make it clear that the DGG has a better chance of being true if it is formulated in terms of disposition to judge, rather than belief. (shrink)

According to the method of transparency, genuine self-knowledge is the outcome of an inference from world to mind. A. Byrne has developed a theory in which the method of transparency consists in following an epistemic rule in order to form self-verifying second-order beliefs. In this paper, I argue that Byrne’s theory does not establish sufficient conditions for having self-knowledge of first-order beliefs. Examining a case of self-deception, I strive to show that following such a rule might not result in self-knowledge (...) when one is involved in rational deliberation. In the case under consideration, one precisely comes to believe that one believes that p without coming to believe that p. The justification for one’s not forming the belief that p with its distinctive causal pattern in mental life and behaviour, is that one already had the unconscious belief that not-p, a belief that is not sensitive to the principles governing theoretical and practical reasoning. (shrink)

In this article I examine the role of anxiety in our motivation to reassess our epistemic states, by taking as a starting point a proposal put forward by Levy, according to which anxiety is responsible for the ruminations and worries about threatening possibilities that we sometimes get caught up into in our everyday life. Levy’s claim is that these irrational persistent thoughts about possible states of affairs are best explained by anxiety, rather than by beliefs, degrees of belief, or other (...) mental states. I will take Levy’s article as a starting point into my study of the role of anxiety in our inclinations to question the epistemic quality of our cognitive states. While I believe that Levy is right in directing our attention to the role of anxiety in these cases, his claim calls for further explanation into the nature of anxiety, and into the mechanisms through which anxiety generates these doubts. Although the relation between anxiety and doubt has already been highlighted, there has been little effort to elaborate on the mechanisms through which an affective state like anxiety generates a motivation to reassess our beliefs. This paper is an attempt at providing such an elaboration. Clarifying the role of anxiety in these phenomena will lead me to revise a common assumption about the interactions between anxiety and higher-level cognitive processes, such as the ones involved in representing hypothetical threatening scenarios through mental imagery. (shrink)

The discussion of the nature of consciousness seems to have stalled, with the “hard problem of consciousness” in its center, well-defined camps of realists and eliminativists at two opposing poles, and little to none room for agreement between. Recent attempts to move this debate forward by shifting them to a meta-level have heavily relied on the notion of “intuition”, understood in a rather liberal way. Against this backdrop, the goal of this paper is twofold. First, we want to highlight how (...) the ontological and epistemological status of intuitions restricts the arguments in the debate on consciousness that rely on them. Second, we want to demonstrate how the deadlock in those debates could be resolved through a study of a particular, “positive” kind of intuitions. We call this approach “The Canberrish Plan for Consciousness” as it adopts elements of the methodological “Canberra Plan”. (shrink)

People can be risk seeking and risk averse, but people can also be uncertainty averse: in other words, if risk is at least the possibility of an unwanted affect, then it is not only the unwanted effect that they want to avoid, it can also be the uncertainty inherent in the possibility that they wish to avoid. This uncertainty aversion can even lead to a state where someone prefers a certain outcome at all costs, even when it is the worst (...) case. This gives rise to the following paradox: the worst case seems to be more acceptable than the state where there is still a chance that it will not materialize. We can call this the Unbearable Uncertainty Paradox. This essay provides a first conceptual sketch of this phenomenon that seems to be widespread but nevertheless does not appear to have been identified before, either by philosophers or by psychologists. (shrink)

In philosophical inquiry into the mind, the metaphor of ‘transparency’ has been attractive to many who are otherwise in deep disagreement. It has thereby come to have a variety of different and mutually incompatible connotations. The mind is said to be transparent to itself, our perceptual experiences are said to be transparent to the world, and our beliefs are said to be transparent to – a great many different things. The first goal of this essay is to sort out the (...) different uses of the notion of transparency in the context of the philosophy of mind. The remainder of the essay will then be devoted to examining so-called Transparency theories of self-knowledge, or how we know our own minds. This type of theory has attracted a great deal of interest in recent years, but its prospects hinge on answers to unresolved questions concerning the epistemological details of the account and the scope of its ambitions. (shrink)

Because of the privileged place of beliefs in explaining behaviour, mismatch cases—in which agents sincerely claim to believe that p, but act in a way that is inconsistent with that belief—have attracted a great deal of attention. In this paper, I argue that some of these cases, at least, are at least partially explained by agents believing that they believe that p, while failing to believe that p. Agents in these cases do not believe that ~p; rather, they have an (...) indistinct first‐order, beliefy, representation that p. The indistinctness of this first‐order representation provides the leeway for the inconsistency seen in their behaviour. (shrink)