Flickers of Freedom

Rationality and Alienation

Thanks to everyone for the extremely helpful comments on what I’ve posted so far.  Now that I’ve laid out the groundwork, I’m going to try in this post to defend some of my claims in more detail.

My proposal is that in situations where a thinker faces a conflict between what the evidence seemed previously to support and what it now seems to support, she is not psychologically, conceptually, or rationally required to go with her present perspective.  In other words, the deliberative question “should I continue to believe that P?” is not as a matter of necessity transparent to the evidence as one now sees it.  To exercise doxastic self-control, on my view, is to consciously continue believing that P when you have received no significant new evidence since forming that belief, even if the same evidence now seems to you not to sufficiently support P – even if P no longer seems to you to be true.  I think this is possible if the thinker conceives of both the past and present perspective on the evidence as equally hers, and elects to treat the past perspective rather than the present as authoritative in determining what she believes.

Let me take a second to address a couple of responses that might be tempting people.  In some cases where a thinker’s judgment has been compromised, there will be higher-order evidence available to her that this has occurred.  She will know that she took a judgment-corrupting drug, or is severely sleep- or oxygen-deprived, and will therefore have good evidence that she should not trust her current judgment.  It is plausible that cases like this have a purely evidential solution, and so are no threat to belief transparency.  But I’m imagining cases that are not like this; in the cases I’m interested in, nothing highly out of the ordinary has happened, and the thinker doesn’t take herself to have conclusive evidence as to whether her past or her present judgment is mistaken.  She's just navigating the world with its normal emotional, social, environmental, and professional pressures.

A second tempting response is to suppose that one’s past judgment can simply be incorporated into the present perspective by treating it as testimonial evidence, as if from any other person.  But I think this won’t do.  If the thinker treats this conflicting testimony as decisive, even though she does not take her past self to be a greater expert or in possession of better evidence, this would be an odd and perhaps impossible instance of epistemic akrasia – it would be a matter of believing that P against her own best judgment, just because someone else with the same evidence believes it.  On the other hand, if she merely treats the testimony as some evidence to be weighed into fresh deliberation, there is no guarantee that it will suffice to counteract the distortions of the epistemic temptation she is experiencing. 

So, I think purely evidential solutions won’t do.  This is why I characterize doxastic self-control as a partly volitional matter.  Think about cases that are underdetermined by normative practical reasons, either because the values at stake seem to be incomparable, or because they are equally good (i.e. Buridan cases).  I don’t want to argue over the word ‘volition’, but I want to suggest that the latitude we have to choose what to do in cases that seem to be underdetermined by their practical reasons also exists in the epistemic cases I’ve described.  When the evidence doesn’t tell us whether to go with the past or the present perspective, we can exercise something worth calling a choice.  It’s not a choice we can make for pragmatic reasons, but we don’t make it for any particular epistemic reason either. 

Does this mean that in exercising doxastic self-control, the thinker ends up believing that P for no reason?  I don’t think that follows.  Rather, in identifying with her past perspective rather than her current one, she ends up believing that P on the basis of the reasons that she took to be sufficient when she formed the belief.  

Still, in the moment, P doesn’t seem true or sufficiently supported by evidence.  How can it be rational to continue believing it rather than simply withholding judgment?  I want to defend only the modest claim that it is rationally permissible to maintain belief rather than withholding judgment; I think the latter is generally also permissible, and in some cases it might even be permissible to switch to believing not-P.  I’m still trying to figure out exactly how to argue for this, but the basic thought is that a rational requirement to withhold judgment whenever one is experiencing doubt about a belief – even serious doubt – would be too costly from the perspective of acquiring important true beliefs.  Whenever the doubt is a result of epistemic temptation, it would require the thinker to lose a true belief that she has (with potentially serious consequences, if an important action is riding on that belief).  It might be that for a thinker who values the avoidance of error extremely highly, even at the cost of having true beliefs, withholding judgment is always the right option.  But I think most of us are not like this, and we don’t have to be in order to count as believers. 

Finally, it’s worth noting that the advocate of transparency as a rational ideal can potentially agree that doxastic self-control is possible – it just exhibits a problematic form of alienation.  If I have to treat my past judgment as having any bearing on what I believe now, and cannot avow my belief by reflecting only on my reasons, then I am estranged from my belief; it is as if I have programmed myself.  My question to you guys is:  how much should this bother us?  Perhaps there is a sense in which it would be better if we were thinkers who had no need of capacities like doxastic self-control, but we are such creatures.  And I think there is a sense in which we are most autonomous both in our doxastic lives and in our practical lives precisely when we have the latitude to choose which of our own perspectives to identify with over time.  If I’m right, it can be the key to weathering episodes that might otherwise lead one to quit a long-term project, e.g. because one no longer believes one’s efforts will be rewarded.  So if it is alienating – is that so bad?

                                                 

Related articles

Passing the Torch!

Doxastic Self-Control

The Transparency of Belief

In my last post, I tried to draw attention to the way in which a thinker’s ability to assess what her evidence supports can fluctuate over time.  This is in some ways similar to the effect temptation can have on an agent’s evaluative judgment, causing temporary distortions in what she perceives as desirable or worth doing.  We can identify these episodes as bouts of temptation by reference to their typical causes – strong emotion, certain environmental stimuli – and by their temporal profile, which tends to be relatively brief and followed by regret.  

The question I raised concerned whether it is possible to weather epistemic temptation without manipulating oneself.  If I formed the belief that P in the past, having taken my epistemic reasons sufficiently to support that conclusion, can I continue to believe it even if those same reasons now strike me as inadequate and P no longer seems to me to be true?  Specifically, is it up to me whether to continue to believe that P in a way that doesn't involve inducing belief by performing some intermediary action like refusing to think about it, going to sleep, and so forth?

In the comments, John Fischer rightly pointed out that we should distinguish between actually continuing to believe that P in such cases and merely “maintaining” that P, which would involve asserting that P and even thinking to oneself that P, but which would fall short of genuinely believing.  This certainly does seem like something we can do to get through bouts of insecurity, and should perhaps be treated as the null hypothesis here.  So my question is, can we do more than merely maintain that P – is it up to us genuinely to continue to believe, without some mediating action?  Can we exercise doxastic self-control with respect to our beliefs over time?

I’ll argue that we can in a roundabout way, by attempting to diagnose why many philosophers have thought that it’s impossible, and explaining why I think we should reject this line of thought.  I will call the line of thought the “Transparency View,” and although I don’t claim that any one philosopher has explicitly advocated for the view quite as I’ll present it, I think it has wide appeal.  

It starts with the deep and important insight that belief is an attitude that embodies a thinker’s take on what is true.  The Transparency View holds that this fact about belief is centrally manifested by a conceptual constraint on doxastic deliberation:  that the deliberative question of whether to believe that P is transparent to the question whether P, in that the former question can only be settled by considerations bearing on the factual question of whether P is true.  As Nishi Shah characterizes the thesis, “… as long as one is considering the deliberative question of what to believe, these two questions must be considered to be answered by, and answerable to, the same set of considerations.  The seamless shift from belief to truth is not a quirky feature of human psychology, but something that is demanded by the nature of first-personal doxastic deliberation.”

A second context in which transparency is often said to be manifested is in a thinker’s capacity to know what she believes.  The idea here, influentially advocated by Richard Moran, is that a rational thinker need not wrack her brain or theorize about herself in order to know whether she believes that P.  Rather, because a rational thinker’s beliefs are settled by what she takes to be true, she can come to know that she believes that P at any point in time simply by reflecting on her reasons for thinking P is true and avowing her conclusion as her belief. That is, the question ‘do I believe that P?’ is held to be transparent to the question ‘is P true?’

Perhaps surprisingly, it’s meant to be consistent with both of these appeals to transparency (if not exactly highlighted) that most of us are in fact woefully irrational thinkers.  We all believe many false things, and our beliefs frequently do not comport with our evidence.  Knowing this, how can I be justified in taking my beliefs to be settled by my evidence, let alone true?  The answer, I think, is that transparency only holds from the first-person perspective.  If I adopt a “theoretical,” third-personal point of view on myself, conceiving of myself as any other person who is subject to cognitive error and frequently mistaken, the possibility comes into view that my beliefs are false or unsupported by my evidence.  But when I adopt the first-personal perspective, my potentially fallible mind is rendered invisible to me; it does not allow me to entertain the possibility that my beliefs might deviate from what fact and evidence require.  As Bernard Williams famously argued, reflection about what to believe makes no essential use of the concept of the first person:  “When I think about the world, and try to decide the truth about it, I think about the world, and I make statements, or ask questions, which are about it and not about me.”

The problem with adopting a third-personal perspective on yourself is that it exhibits alienation or estrangement.  It is possible to do, and sometimes necessary; if my belief that P is recalcitrantly resistant to my take on whether P, I will have to theorize about myself or pay an analyst to do it for me in order to know about it.  And I can certainly reflect in general on my cognitive failings and devise strategies for improving my epistemic success.  But with respect to any particular belief, adopting the third-personal perspective is a symptom of a rational breakdown, in that my judgment has failed to determine what I believe in the way it ought to.  Transparency  is thus understood as a rational ideal for belief as well as a conceptual constraint on doxastic deliberation.

The latter constraint is what purports to rule out the possibility of believing at will.  To believe at will, the belief would need to be the conclusion of a process explicitly aimed at issuing in a belief, but that didn’t appeal only to evidence.  For if the thinker does appeal only to questions bearing on the truth of P, then she’s simply oriented toward her belief in the ordinary epistemic way; this would not count as believing at will.  But if she appeals to non-evidential considerations in her effort to form the belief, such as that it would be worthwhile to believe that P, then she has violated a conceptual requirement for being engaged in a process aimed at issuing in a belief.  By her own lights, the considerations she has mustered do not settle the question that must be positively answered if she is to believe that P – namely, whether P (as Pamela Hieronymi has emphasized).  Whatever issues from this process would explicitly fail to meet the correctness norm on belief, and thus would not count as that state.

Finally, advocates of transparency have held that treating a past judgment as settling for oneself what one should believe now exhibits a similarly problematic form of alienation, more akin to programming oneself than being a rational thinker.  As Matt Boyle writes, “I do not recall what I believe about whether P unless I recall what now looks to me to be the truth as to whether P.  What I call to mind must be not merely my past assessment of it, but my present assessment of it – the assessment that currently strikes me as correct.” At each point in time, the thinker is unalienated from her belief that P only if she now actively holds P to be true on the basis of some set of reasons deemed sufficient.  If she only believes P because of some earlier judgment, the objection is again that she must adopt a third-personal perspective on herself, seeing her judgment as a kind of intervention on herself to bring it about that she has a certain belief.

To summarize, if the Transparency View is correct, then it’s impossible to weather epistemic temptation in a way that’s not self-manipulative, epistemically irrational, or problematically alienated.  For one thing, it would require my taking a past judgment to settle for me now what to believe, and this would involve third-personal estrangement from myself.  Even worse, this isn’t something I could possibly choose to do.  That would require asking the deliberative question of whether to continue believing that P, and this question would have to be treated as transparent to the evidence as I now (in my corrupted state) see it.

Okay:  so what’s wrong with this view?  This post is getting long, so I’m again going to have to quickly say something provocative and leave a more thorough defense for the comment thread and for my next post.  I think the arguments we have (briefly) considered rest on a mistaken conception of what the first-personal perspective must be.  The mistake is to presuppose that the first-personal perspective is necessarily synchronic, encompassing only the present moment.  Although it is never made explicit, the ideal of transparency in fact demands this presupposition.  If it were allowed that multiple, conflicting answers to the question “Is P true?” are first-personally available, the relation between truth and belief could not be conceptually or metaphysically unmediated.  And yet, memory does give us access to appearances of the truth that can differ from what now appears to be true.  It may even be possible to have psychological access to a future take on what is the case.  If these past and future stances were not implicitly ruled out as part of a thinker’s first-personal perspective, transparency would fail; the capacity to avow the belief that P on the basis of reflection on evidence would require the mediation of a further answer to the question ‘When?’

I think we should reject the idea that we are rationally limited to occupying a synchronic, present-directed perspective – that the first person is essentially indexed to ‘now’.  It is open to me to conceive of myself as occupying a genuinely diachronic first-personal perspective that encompasses past, present, and even future assessments of the truth as potentially my own. I don’t think a diachronic self-conception is required in order to be a believer, or to possess the concept of belief, but I don’t think it is ruled out either.  Let us grant that possessing the concept of belief involves accepting a norm of correctness to the effect that a belief is correct only if it is true.  It does not follow from accepting this norm that I am compelled to believe whatever my evidence now seems to me to require.  As a reflective creature, I am in a position to recognize that my capacity to evaluate what is true vacillates over time.  I can therefore see that the best way of satisfying the norm of believing P only if it is true may not be always to let my present perspective determine what I believe.  A legitimately epistemic concern for the truth does not compel me to conceive of past and future judgments as akin to the testimony of another person, something that could never settle for me what to believe unless I now take the further step of deeming it to be sufficient first-order evidence.  Rather, I can consider all of them mine, and therefore candidates for constituting my considered stance on what is true.

If this is right, then when I face a conflict between what the evidence seemed to support in the past and what it seems to support now, I have a choice about which way to go.  I am not required to take my present perspective to speak for me, since I conceive of the past perspective as equally mine.  I can elect to continue to believe that P on the basis of my past perspective, even though it conflicts with how things seem to me right now, without going against my own best judgment.  Rather, I take my best judgment to consist in my earlier rather than my current perspective.  The deliberative question about whether to form the belief that P might necessarily be transparent to one's current take on the evidence for P, but for the diachronic thinker, the deliberative question about whether to continue to believe need not be transparent in this way.

Doxastic Self-Control

Hi everyone!  My thanks to everyone at Flickers of Freedom, and to Thomas in particular, for this wonderful opportunity.  I’m really excited to talk to all of you about what I’ve been working on lately, and I look forward to hearing your thoughts.

I’ve actually been thinking a lot about freedom recently, but in connection with our beliefs rather than with our actions.  Let’s assume that there is a sense in which we are agents who sometimes determine for ourselves what we will do.  Some of our intentions and actions are attributable to us, rather than to some external influence or some automatic, subpersonal mechanism within us.  And we have the capacity to be more or less self-governing over certain aspects of our practical lives, in that the extent to which our actions are the product of external forces is sometimes under our control.  Can anything similar be said about our relationship to our beliefs?

I think the dominant view about the answer to this question is ‘no’.  It is almost universally denied that we exercise anything like direct voluntary control over our beliefs.  Epistemologists commonly depict us as being “passive in response to” or “at the mercy of” the evidence, in that we cannot help but believe whatever seems to us to be true in light of our evidence.  We cannot will ourselves into believing that P if we do not take P to be true, even for the best of practical reasons.  As William Alston puts it in his seminal paper “The Deontological Conception of Epistemic Justification,” “volitions, decisions, or choosings don’t hook up with anything in the way of propositional attitude [belief and withholding] inauguration, just as they don’t hook up with the secretion of gastric juices or cell metabolism.”  This is sometimes intended to be a claim about a conceptual constraint on belief, while others take it to be a merely contingent psychological fact, but most agree on its truth.   

To be sure, it is widely acknowledged that we can voluntarily shape what we believe in many indirect ways, and that non-evidential influences frequently affect what we believe.  We can curate the evidence we expose ourselves to, or even change our evidence; we can choose how thoroughly to deliberate; we can develop good or bad habits with respect to the possibilities we consider.  And if we are at the mercy of our evidence when we are explicitly considering what to believe, we are equally at the mercy of implicit bias, wishful thinking, fatigue, intoxication, and all sorts of other forces that influence how we see the evidence.  To deny that we exercise any kind of voluntaristic control or autonomy in forming or sustaining a belief is specifically to claim that we have no direct control, unmediated by some distinct action.

I think there is more latitude for volition in constructing our doxastic lives than this traditional picture admits, and that there is a dimension in which we can genuinely be said to be more or less self-governing with respect to our beliefs.  This is in the possibility of overcoming what I call “epistemic temptation.”  In today’s post, I’ll focus on explaining in more detail what epistemic temptation is, leaving my account of doxastic self-control for next time.  I’d love to hear everyone’s thoughts about whether they recognize the phenomenon, and how common they think it is (I think it’s pretty common, but it certainly varies from person to person, and some claim not to recognize it at all).

Let’s grant that at each moment in time, a thinker believes that P only if she takes P to be true.  It might still be the case that over time, her take on whether P is true fluctuates without a change in evidence, such that she takes P to be true at one time and false at another.  This can happen because her capacity to assess whether P is true vacillates, due to temporary corruptions in judgment caused by insecurity, wishful thinking, the influences of her peers, stereotype threat, or other environmental priming effects.  The very same evidence can strike one as supporting different conclusions depending on how it is presented, the company one is in, or the kinds of emotions one is currently experiencing.  When these factors vary over time, a thinker’s ability accurately to assess what her evidence supports varies with them, and can lead to a rise or fall in her confidence in a proposition without a change in the evidence she possesses. 

Specifically, the cases I’m interested in are those in which a thinker has previously formed the belief that P, but later loses confidence in her previous judgment without acquiring significant new evidence or having any specific reason to think her deliberation was flawed.  In such cases, we will generally be aware of a conflict between how things used to seem and how they seem now – “I used to think P is true, but now it doesn’t seem true to me” – but we often won’t take ourselves to have decisive evidence either way about which perspective might be the result of some malfunction.  I’m imagining that there was no obvious corrupting event of e.g. taking a hallucinogenic drug; it’s just a relatively ordinary change in one’s emotional state or circumstances that leads to a change in perspective. 

Here’s an example that I hope hits close to home – it certainly does to me!  Imagine that at some point in the past, I deliberated carefully about a philosophical question, considering all the major arguments for and against the possible views.  Eventually, I formed the belief that View X is the correct one, thereby coming to believe in the truth of X.  But when I arrive at the APA to present on X, my confidence in my previous deliberation plummets (though I gain no specific information concerning a flaw in that deliberation).  I've heard all the arguments against X before, but they now strike me as much more forceful than they previously did, and those in favor of X as much less forceful.  Although my time and psychic energy could be better used by concentrating on the next session, I instead spend it by re-opening the question and deliberating anew with the same evidence I previously had, with my insecurity-infused judgment now leading me to abandon my belief in X.  Finally, although I previously held that the prestige of a philosopher’s home institution is no evidence at all that his or her views are correct, I now perceive the arguments of those with prestigious positions as much more compelling and form the new belief that Y is the correct view.

At this point, since I’ve gone on long enough, I’ll just end with a two-part question.  Could I have held onto my belief in my view throughout the conference, even though it no longer seemed to me to be true?  And could it have been rational for me to do so?  Let me set aside a positive answer to the first question that would involve indirect control over my belief, using “self-manipulation.”  Of course I could have weathered my bout of epistemic temptation by going to sleep, drugging myself, or otherwise undermining my capacity to redeliberate.  But this isn’t especially philosophically interesting (or good conference etiquette!).  My question is whether it is psychologically and conceptually possible to maintain my belief directly, without resorting to strategic self-manipulation.  And if it is, would I necessarily be irrational for doing so, given that my evidence no longer seems to me to be sufficient?

As you might have guessed, my view is that it is both possible and rationally permissible to maintain one's previous belief in the face of epistemic temptation.  In my next post, I’ll elaborate on those claims and defend them against an influential way of thinking about the nature of belief and epistemic rationality that emphasizes “transparency” as a conceptual constraint on doxastic deliberation and as a rational ideal governing belief in general.

By the way, for anyone who’s interested in these kinds of questions about rationality over time (with respect to agency as well as belief), we’re hosting a read-ahead conference at UW-Madison over Labor Day weekend with the theme of “Belief, Action, and Rationality Over Time.”  The presenters and commentators are listed here.  If you’re interested in attending, please register for free here.

Passing the Torch!

It's time to once again pass the torch here at Flickers of Freedom from one Featured Author to the next. But first, I wanted to thank Helen Steward for generating such an illuminating discussion last month about the nature of determinism. Over the course of the month, 57 comments were posted in response to her initial post.  It was a very helpful and sustained discussion that ranged over metaphysics, the philosophy of language, and the history of philosophy.  I personally learned an awful lot from the discussion thread. So, thanks to all those who participated. It's no small wonder the free will debate is so protracted given that we can't even agree on what "determinism" means (or what determinism is)! Luckily, there's room for progress and discussions like the one ushered in by Helen last month help move us in the right direction.

That said, it is now time to welcome this month's Featured Author--Sarah Paul (PhD Stanford). Professor Paul is  normally Assistant Professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, but will be Visiting Assistant Professor at M.I.T. for Fall 2015.  She is interested in all things related to intention and action explanation. She is primarily a philosopher of action, but thinks that some of the most interesting results in philosophy come out of ecumenical, holistic approaches that cross subfield divisions, and so tries to make progress on understanding agency by thinking about related questions in the philosophy of mind, epistemology, ethics, and metaethics.  She wants to know how intentions relate to beliefs; how we know of our intentions, and of our resulting actions; what rational requirements apply to our intentions and beliefs, what reasons we have to obey them, and how we manage to do so from a psychological point of view; and what implications these answers have for moral responsibility and the criminal law.  A major theme of all of these projects is that we should be wary of idealization; our psychological limitations should directly inform our understanding of rationality, and an adequate account of what we ought to do should be directly sensitive to how we are to do it.

Recent articles include "Doxastic Self-Control" (American Philosophical Quarterly), "The Transparency of Intention" (Philosophical Studies), "Diachronic Incontinence is a Problem in Moral Philosophy" (Inquiry, special issue) and "Embarking on a Crime" (Law and the Philosophy of Action, Rodopi Press).  She is also just beginning to work on a textbook on the Philosophy of Action for the Routledge Contemporary Introduction to Philosophy series.

So, please join me in welcoming Sarah to the fray here at Flickers of Freedom.  I am excited to see what she comes up during the coming weeks.  Hopefully, I will hear from you in the discussion threads!

p.s.  Here is the scheduled line up in the months ahead. I have purposely left some time open so that regular contributors can post without feeling like they are infringing upon someone else's time.

 

September:   Heidi Maibom
October:         Natalia Washington 

2016:
June/July:    Patricia Greenspan