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Believing intentionally

Synthese 194 (8):2673-2694 (2017)

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  1. Doxastic Voluntarism.Mark Boespflug & Elizabeth Jackson - 2024 - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
    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 (...)
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  • Reasonable standards and exculpating moral ignorance.Nathan Biebel - 2024 - Philosophical Studies 181 (1):1-21.
    It is widely agreed that ignorance of fact exculpates, but does moral ignorance exculpate? If so, does it exculpate in the same way as non-moral ignorance? In this paper I will argue that on one family of views explaining exculpating non-moral ignorance also explains exculpating moral ignorance. The view can be loosely stated in the following way: ignorance counts as an excuse only if it is not the result of a failure to meet some applicable reasonable epistemic standard—call this the (...)
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  • How to judge intentionally.Antonia Peacocke - 2023 - Philosophical Perspectives 37 (1):330-339.
    Contrary to popular philosophical belief, judgment can indeed be an intentional action. That's because an intentional judgment, even one with content p, need not be intentional as a judgment that p. It can instead be intentional just as a judgment wh- for some specific wh- question—e.g. a judgment of which x is F or a judgment whether p. This paper explains how this is possible by laying out a means by which you can perform such an intentional action. This model (...)
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  • (1 other version)Are We Pre-Theoretically Committed to Doxastic Voluntarism?Nikolaj Nottelmann, Anthony Booth & Rune Lomholt - 2023 - Review of Philosophy and Psychology 14 (3):1077-1098.
    Much of the force behind doxastic involuntarism comes from our pre-theoretical judgement that any effort to form a belief simply by intending to form it must remain unsuccessful. However, despite this, ordinary language use of locutions like “chose to believe” are common. In this article, we present new experimental data that shows that the prevalence of ordinary language talk of “chosen beliefs” is no obstacle to doxastic involuntarism in a standard sense (pace Turri et al. 2018). While we employ the (...)
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  • Why Every Belief is a Choice: Descartes’ Doxastic Voluntarism Reconsidered.Mark Boespflug - 2023 - International Journal of Philosophical Studies 31 (2):158-178.
    Descartes appears to hold that everything we believe is the product of a voluntary choice. Scholars have been reluctant to take this particularly radical version of doxastic voluntarism as Descartes’ considered position. I argue that once Descartes’ compatibilist conception of free will as well as his position on the ‘freedom of indifference’ are taken into account, the primary motivations for the rejection of the aforementioned radical version of doxastic voluntarism lose their force. Consequently, we may take Descartes at his word (...)
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  • Reasons for Belief and Aretaic Obligations.Emmanuel Smith - 2023 - Episteme (N/A):1-12.
    I argue that, if doxastic involuntarism is true, then we should reconceive what are traditionally called reasons for belief. The truth of doxastic involuntarism would rule out a certain understanding of reasons for belief according to which they are reasons to form, alter, or relinquish beliefs. Thus, reconceiving reasons for belief would require reconceiving doxastic obligations. I argue that, in fact, a reconception of reasons for belief warrants abandoning the notion of doxastic obligations, understood as obligations to perform acts of (...)
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  • Acting and believing on the basis of reasons.Christopher Blake-Turner - 2021 - Philosophy Compass 17 (1):e12797.
    This paper provides an opinionated guide to discussions of acting and believing on the basis of reasons. I aim to bring closer together largely separate literatures in practical rea- son and in epistemology. I focus on three questions. First, is basing causing? Causal theories of basing remain popular despite the notorious Problem of Deviant Causal Chains. Causal theorists in both the epistemic and practical domains have begun to appeal to dispositions to try and solve the problem. Second, how unified are (...)
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  • A Permissivist Defense of Pascal’s Wager.Elizabeth Grace Jackson - 2023 - Erkenntnis 88 (6):2315-2340.
    Epistemic permissivism is the thesis that the evidence can rationally permit more than one attitude toward a proposition. Pascal’s wager is the idea that one ought to believe in God for practical reasons, because of what one can gain if theism is true and what one has to lose if theism is false. In this paper, I argue that if epistemic permissivism is true, then the defender of Pascal’s wager has powerful responses to two prominent objections. First, I argue that (...)
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  • In Search of Doxastic Involuntarism.Matthew Vermaire - 2022 - Philosophical Studies 179 (2):615-631.
    Doxastic involuntarists, as I categorize them, say that it’s impossible to form a belief as an intentional action. But what exactly is it to form a belief, as opposed to simply getting yourself to have one? This question has been insufficiently addressed, and the lacuna threatens the involuntarists’ position: if the question isn’t answered, their view will lack any clear content; but, after considering some straightforward ways of answering it, I argue that they would make involuntarism either false or insignificant. (...)
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  • Being neutral: Agnosticism, inquiry and the suspension of judgment.Matthew McGrath - 2021 - Noûs 55 (2):463-484.
    Epistemologists often claim that in addition to belief and disbelief there is a third, neutral, doxastic attitude. Various terms are used: ‘suspending judgment’, ‘withholding’, ‘agnosticism’. It is also common to claim that the factors relevant to the justification of these attitudes are epistemic in the narrow sense of being factors that bear on the strength or weakness of one’s epistemic position with respect to the target proposition. This paper addresses two challenges to such traditionalism about doxastic attitudes. The first concerns (...)
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  • Mental action.Antonia Peacocke - 2021 - Philosophy Compass 16 (6):e12741.
    Just as bodily actions are things you do with your body, mental actions are things you do with your mind. Both are different from things that merely happen to you. Where does the idea of mental action come from? What are mental actions? And why do they matter in philosophy? These are the three main questions answered in this paper. Section 1 introduces mental action through a brief history of the topic in philosophy. Section 2 explains what it is to (...)
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  • Как верить преданно и твердо? (How to Believe Faithfully and Firmly?).Pavel Butakov - 2020 - Philosophy. Journal of the Higher School of Economics 4 (4):167-184.
    Religious people are expected to believe in their religious creeds faithfully and firmly. How can one acquire such belief? In order to answer that question, I propose a model for all belief-like propositional attitudes. The model differentiates, firstly, between voluntary and involuntary, and, secondly, between categorical and quantitative belief-like attitudes. The whole variety of belief-like attitudes is then reduced into two main groups. The first group combines all voluntary and categorical attitudes, and the second group combines all involuntary and quantitative (...)
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  • How Should We Build Epistemic Community?Hanna Kiri Gunn - 2020 - Journal of Speculative Philosophy 34 (4):561-581.
    ABSTRACT One of the promises of the internet was its power to unite individual knowers with one another, democratizing knowledge and spurring our collective efforts toward truth. In what sense is our current epistemic life a collective effort? This article examines the idea of the epistemic community. I contrast epistemic community with a collection of individual epistemic agents aiming for truth. I propose that this latter conception of epistemic life permits neglecting our epistemic and moral duties. I argue that healthy (...)
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  • Responsible Belief, Influence, and Control: Response to Stephen White.Rik Peels - 2019 - Journal of Philosophical Research 44:53-62.
    I reply to Stephen White’s criticisms of my Influence View. First, I reply to his worry that my Appraisal Account of responsibility cannot make sense of doxastic responsibility. Then, I discuss in detail his stolen painting case and argue that the Influence View can make sense of it. Next, I discuss various other cases that are meant to show that acting in accordance with one’s beliefs does not render one blameless. I argue that in these cases, even though the subjects (...)
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  • Weighing Aims in Doxastic Deliberation.C. J. Atkinson - 2019 - Synthese (5):4635-4650.
    In this paper, I defend teleological theories of belief against the exclusivity objection. I argue that despite the exclusive influence of truth in doxastic deliberation, multiple epistemic aims interact when we consider what to believe. This is apparent when we focus on the processes involved in specific instances (or concrete cases) of doxastic deliberation, such that the propositions under consideration are specified. First, I out- line a general schema for weighing aims. Second, I discuss recent attempts to defend the teleological (...)
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  • Почему эвиденциалисты должны верить обещаниям (Why Evidentialists Must Believe in Promises).Pavel Butakov - 2019 - Phiosophy. Journal of the Higher School of Economics 3 (3):172-200.
    I argue that evidentialist ethics of belief requires believing in every promise, because any promise always has sufficient evidence. In order to combine evidentialism with ethics of belief, I distinguish two belief-like propositional attitudes. The first is categorical belief, which I call “opinion,” the second is quantitative belief, which I call “credence.” I accept doxastic voluntarism about opinions, and doxastic involuntarism about credences. Opinion has two values—affirmative and negative—and the subject has control over which one to choose. Credence can have (...)
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  • Permissivism, Underdetermination, and Evidence.Elizabeth Jackson & Margaret Greta Turnbull - 2024 - In Maria Lasonen-Aarnio & Clayton Littlejohn (eds.), The Routledge Handbook of the Philosophy of Evidence. New York, NY: Routledge. pp. 358–370.
    Permissivism is the thesis that, for some body of evidence and a proposition p, there is more than one rational doxastic attitude any agent with that evidence can take toward p. Proponents of uniqueness deny permissivism, maintaining that every body of evidence always determines a single rational doxastic attitude. In this paper, we explore the debate between permissivism and uniqueness about evidence, outlining some of the major arguments on each side. We then consider how permissivism can be understood as an (...)
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  • Evidence, Judgment, and Belief at Will.Blake Roeber - 2019 - Mind 128 (511):837-859.
    Doxastic involuntarists have paid insufficient attention to two debates in contemporary epistemology: the permissivism debate and the debate over norms of assertion and belief. In combination, these debates highlight a conception of belief on which, if you find yourself in what I will call an ‘equipollent case’ with respect to some proposition p, there will be no reason why you can’t believe p at will. While doxastic involuntarism is virtually epistemological orthodoxy, nothing in the entire stock of objections to belief (...)
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  • Control over Our Beliefs? A Response to Peels.Annemarie Kalis & Katrien Schaubroeck - 2018 - International Journal of Philosophical Studies 26 (4):618-624.
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  • Doxastic Voluntarism and Up-To-Me-Ness.Matthias Steup - 2018 - International Journal of Philosophical Studies 26 (4):611-618.
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  • Robert Holcot on Doxastic Voluntarism and the Ethics of Belief.Mark Boespflug - 2018 - Res Philosophica 95 (4):617-636.
    In the Middle Ages, the view that agents are able to exercise direct voluntary control over their beliefs—doxastic voluntarism—was pervasive. It was held by Augustine, Aquinas, Scotus, Ockham, and Buridan, among many others. Herein, I show that the somewhat neglected Oxford Dominican, Robert Holcot (†1349), rejected doxastic voluntarism with a coherence and plausibility that reflects and anticipates much contemporary thought on the issue. I, further, suggest that Holcot’s rejection of the idea that agents can voluntarily control their beliefs is intimately (...)
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  • Strong internalism, doxastic involuntarism, and the costs of compatibilism.Timothy Perrine - 2020 - Synthese 197 (7):3171-3191.
    Epistemic deontology maintains that our beliefs and degrees of belief are open to deontic evaluations—evaluations of what we ought to believe or may not believe. Some philosophers endorse strong internalist versions of epistemic deontology on which agents can always access what determines the deontic status of their beliefs and degrees of belief. This paper articulates a new challenge for strong internalist versions of epistemic deontology. Any version of epistemic deontology must face William Alston’s argument. Alston combined a broadly voluntarist conception (...)
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  • Knowledge requires commitment (instead of belief).Nicholas Tebben - 2019 - Philosophical Studies 176 (2):321-338.
    I argue that S knows that p implies that S is properly committed to the truth of p, not that S believes that p. Belief is not required for knowledge because it is possible that one could know that there are no beliefs. Being ‘properly committed’ to the truth of a proposition is a matter of having a certain normative status, not occupying a particular psychological state. After arguing that knowledge requires commitment instead of belief, I go on to demonstrate (...)
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  • Belief isn’t voluntary, but commitment is.Nicholas Tebben - 2018 - Synthese 195 (3):1163-1179.
    To be committed to the truth of a proposition is to constrain one’s options in a certain way: one may not reason as if it is false, and one is obligated to reason as if it is true. Though one is often committed to the truth of the propositions that one believes, the states of belief and commitment are distinct. For historical reasons, however, they are rarely distinguished. Distinguishing between the two states allows for a defense of epistemic deontology against (...)
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  • Epistemology.Matthias Steup - 2008 - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
    Defined narrowly, epistemology is the study of knowledge and justified belief. As the study of knowledge, epistemology is concerned with the following questions: What are the necessary and sufficient conditions of knowledge? What are its sources? What is its structure, and what are its limits? As the study of justified belief, epistemology aims to answer questions such as: How we are to understand the concept of justification? What makes justified beliefs justified? Is justification internal or external to one's own mind? (...)
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  • (1 other version)Are We Pre-Theoretically Committed to Doxastic Voluntarism?Nikolaj Nottelmann, Anthony Booth & Rune Lomholt - 2022 - Review of Philosophy and Psychology 14 (3):1-22.
    Much of the force behind doxastic involuntarism comes from our pre-theoretical judgement that any effort to form a belief simply by intending to form it must remain unsuccessful. However, despite this, ordinary language use of locutions like “chose to believe” are common. In this article, we present new experimental data that shows that the prevalence of ordinary language talk of “chosen beliefs” is no obstacle to doxastic involuntarism in a standard sense. While we employ the methods of experimental philosophy, our (...)
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  • Permissive Situations and Direct Doxastic Control.Blake Roeber - 2020 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 101 (2):415-431.
    According to what I will call ‘the disanalogy thesis,’ beliefs differ from actions in at least the following important way: while cognitively healthy people often exhibit direct control over their actions, there is no possible scenario where a cognitively healthy person exhibits direct control over her beliefs. Recent arguments against the disanalogy thesis maintain that, if you find yourself in what I will call a ‘permissive situation’ with respect to p, then you can have direct control over whether you believe (...)
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  • Epistemic justification and the ignorance excuse.Nathan Biebel - 2018 - Philosophical Studies 175 (12):3005-3028.
    One of the most common excuses is ignorance. Ignorance does not always excuse, however, for sometimes ignorance is culpable. One of the most natural ways to think of the difference between exculpating and culpable ignorance is in terms of justification; that is, one’s ignorance is exculpating only if it is justified and one’s ignorance is culpable only if it not justified. Rosen :591–610, 2008) explores this idea by first offering a brief account of justification, and then two cases that he (...)
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  • Formación de docentes en universidades latinoamericanas.Luis Alejandro Murillo, Melba Libia Cárdenas, Carmen Rosa Cáceda, Mariana Valderrama Leongómez, Alejandro Farieta, Lina Melissa Vela, José Vicente Abad, Jefferson Zapata García, Diego Fernanado Villamizar Gómez, Jorge Armando Rodríguez Cendales, Amanda K. Wilson, Martha Lengeling, Isarema Mora-Pablo, Isaac Frausto-Hernández & Irineo Omar Serna-Gutierrez (eds.) - 2019 - Bogotá: Editorial Uniagustiniana.
    Esta obra se concentra en cuatro temas cruciales de la formación de docentes, tanto antes como durante el servicio y en la enseñanza en diferentes áreas y niveles educativos. En primer lugar, se aborda el asunto de las creencias que los docentes tienen sobre el proceso educativo, las cuales parecen influir en la práctica profesional que estos desarrollan y, por lo tanto, deberían recibir la atención explícita de los procesos de formación de docentes que deseen promover prácticas específicas. El segundo (...)
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  • Doxastic Deontology and Cognitive Competence.Gábor Forrai - 2019 - Erkenntnis 86 (3):687-714.
    The paper challenges William Alston’s argument against doxastic deontology, the view that we have epistemic duties concerning our beliefs. The core of the argument is that doxastic deontology requires voluntary control over our beliefs, which we do not have. The idea that doxastic deontology requires voluntary control is supposed to follow from the principle that ought implies can. The paper argues that this is wrong: in the OIC principle which regulates our doxastic duties the “can” does not stand for the (...)
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  • Debunking, Vindication, and Moral Luck.Daniel Statman - 2019 - Midwest Studies in Philosophy 43 (1):203-223.
    Midwest Studies In Philosophy, EarlyView.
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  • Belief is Contingently Involuntary.Anthony Robert Booth - 2017 - Ratio 30 (2):107-121.
    The debate between “Normativists” and “Teleologists” about the normativity of belief has been taken to hinge on the question of which of the two views best explains why it is that we cannot believe at will. Of course, this presupposes that there is an explanation to be had. Here, I argue that this supposition is unwarranted, that Doxastic Involuntarism is merely contingently true. I argue that this is made apparent when we consider that suspended judgement must be involuntary if belief (...)
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  • Response to Critics: The Influence Account of Responsible Belief Defended.Rik Peels - 2018 - International Journal of Philosophical Studies 26 (4):633-643.
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  • Introduction to the special issue “Doxastic Agency and Epistemic Responsibility”.Andrea Kruse & Heinrich Wansing - 2017 - Synthese 194 (8):2667-2671.
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