This book has argued that problems of religious luck, especially when operationalized into concerns about doxastic risk and responsibility, can be of shared interest to theologians, philosophers, and psychologists. We have pointed out counter-inductive thinking as a key feature of fideistic models of faith, and examined the implications of this point both for the social scientific study of fundamentalism, and for philosophers’ and theologians’ normative concerns with the reasonableness of a) exclusivist attitudes to religious multiplicity, and b) theologically-cast but bias-mirroring (...) trait-ascriptions to religious insiders and outsiders. It is important to keep the descriptive/explanatory and normative concerns properly separated, but philosophy of luck and risk are relevant to both. More specifically, inductive risky theological strategies,we have argued, are a relevant concern both descriptively and normatively. The descriptive/explanatory relevance of measures of high inductive risk connects it with cognitive and social psychology of religion, while its normative relevance connects with critical concerns with epistemology of testimony, the epistemology of disagreement, and the ethics of belief. A research program to examine fideistic orientation and its relation to epistemically risky doxastic strategies is one of potentially numerous research programs on which philosophers and psychologists might work collaboratively. So this concluding chapter of our study culminates with the outline of a proposed research program at the intersection of shared concerns. I term this research program CICI, because it examines what lies at the intersection of CSR’s standing interest in the appeal of counter-intuitive ideas, and our own study’s focus on the fideistic penchant for counter-inductive thinking. Religious Studies scholars typically focus on particular traditions and teachings, while CSR scholars tend to eschew such content-focused approaches in favor of a study of evolutionary and hence generic or trans-religious functions and processes. I argue that CICI has the added benefit of effectively mediating this generic-specific contrast between CSR and Religious Studies, allowing CSR research to be more closely connected with and relevant to comparative fundamentalism. (shrink)

To speak of being religious lucky certainly sounds odd. But then, so does “My faith holds value in God’s plan, while yours does not.” This book argues that these two concerns — with the concept of religious luck and with asymmetric or sharply differential ascriptions of religious value — are inextricably connected. It argues that religious luck attributions can profitably be studied from a number of directions, not just theological, but also social scientific and philosophical. There is a strong tendency (...) among adherents of different faith traditions to invoke asymmetric explanations of the religious value or salvific status of the home religion vis-à-vis all others. Attributions of good/bad religious luck and exclusivist dismissal of the significance of religious disagreement are the central phenomena that the book studies. Part I lays out a taxonomy of kinds of religious luck, a taxonomy that draws upon but extends work on moral and epistemic luck. It asks: What is going on when persons, theologies, or purported revelations ascribe various kinds of religiously-relevant traits to insiders and outsiders of a faith tradition in sharply asymmetric fashion? “I am saved but you are lost”; “My religion is holy but yours is idolatrous”; “My faith tradition is true, and valued by God, but yours is false and valueless.” Part II further develops the theory introduced in Part I, pushing forward both the descriptive/explanatory and normative sides of what the author terms his inductive risk account. Firstly, the concept of inductive risk is shown to contribute to the needed field of comparative fundamentalism by suggesting new psychological markers of fundamentalist orientation. The second side of what is termed an inductive risk account is concerned with the epistemology of religious belief, but more especially with an account of the limits of reasonable religious disagreement. Problems of inductively risky modes of belief-formation problematize claims to religion-specific knowledge. But the inductive risk account does not aim to set religion apart, or to challenge the reasonableness of religious belief tout court. Rather the burden of the argument is to challenge the reasonableness of attitudes of religious exclusivism, and to demotivate the “polemical apologetics” that exclusivists practice and hope to normalize. Lexington Books Pages: 290 978-1-4985-5017-8 • Hardback • December 2018 • $95.00 • (£65.00) 978-1-4985-5018-5 • eBook • December 2018 • $90.00 • (£60.00) ISBN 978-1-4985-5018-5 (pbk: alk. paper) (coming 2020) [Download the 30% personal use Discount Order Form I uploaded for hardcover or e-book, and please ask your library to purchase a copy for their collection.]. (shrink)

We defend the Simulation Theory of Mind against a challenge from the Theory Theory of Mind. The challenge is that while Simulation Theory can account for Theory of Mind errors, it cannot account for their systematic nature. There are Theory of Mind errors seen in social psychological research with adults where persons are either overly generous or overly cynical in how rational they expect others to be. There are also Theory of Mind errors observable in developmental data drawn from Maxi-type (...) false belief tests. We provide novel responses to several examples showing that Simulation Theory can answer these challenges. (shrink)

I assess Tamar Gendler's (2007) account of self-deception according to which its characteristic state is not belief, but imaginative pretense. After giving an overview of the literature and presenting the conceptual puzzles engendered by the notion of self-deception, I introduce Gendler's account, which emerges as a rival to practically all extant accounts of self-deception. I object to it by first arguing that her argument for abandoning belief as the characteristic state of self-deception conflates the state of belief and the process (...) of belief-formation when interpreting David Velleman's (2000) thesis that belief is an essentially truth-directed attitude. I then call attention to the fact that Velleman's argument for the identity of motivational role between belief and imagining, on which Gendler's argument for self-deception as pretense depends, conflates two senses of 'motivational role'-a stronger but implausible sense and a weaker but explanatorily irrelevant sense. Finally, I introduce Neil Van Leeuwen's (2009) argument to the effect that belief is the practical ground of all non-belief cognitive attitudes in circumstances wherein the latter prompt action. I apply this framework to Gendler's account to ultimately show that imaginative pretense fails to explain the existence of voluntary actions which result from self-deception. (shrink)

In this work, I argue for the possibility of epistemic akrasia. An individual S is epistemically akratic if the following conditions hold: S knowingly believes that P though she judges that it is epistemically wrong to do so and Having these mental states displays a failure of rationality that is analogous to classic akrasia. I propose two different types of epistemic akrasia involving different kinds of evidence on which the subject bases her evaluation of her akratic belief. I examine three (...) objections to their possibility. I suggest that the key to defending the possibility of epistemic akrasia is to explain condition. I finally argue that epistemic akrasia is possible, and that it represents a failure of mental agency. (shrink)

In this article, we show how the phenomenon of self-deception when adequately analyzed, can be incorporated into a predictive processing framework. We describe four strategies by which a subject may become self-deceived to account for typical cases of self-deception. We then argue that the four strategies can be modeled within this framework, under the assumption that a satisfying account of motivation is possible within predictive processing. Finally, we outline how we can ground this assumption by discussing how such a systematic (...) model of motivation may be developed using the distinction between a world-model and a self-model. (shrink)

The self-deception debate often appears polarized between those who think that self-deceivers intentionally deceive themselves (‘intentionalists’), and those who think that intentional actions are not significantly involved in the production of self-deceptive beliefs at all. In this paper I develop a middle position between these views, according to which self-deceivers do end up self-deceived as a result of their own intentional actions, but where the intention these actions are done with is not an intention to deceive oneself. This account thus (...) keeps agency at the heart of self-deception, while also avoiding the paradox associated with other agency-centered views. (shrink)

While some philosophical models reduce religious faith to either mere belief or affect, more recent accounts have begun to look at the volitional component of faith. In this spirit, John Bishop has defended the notion of faith as a ‘doxastic venture’. In this article, I consider Bishop's view in detail and attempt to show that his account proves on the one hand too permissive and on the other too restrictive. Thus, although the doxastic-venture model offers certain advantages over other prominent (...) views in the philosophy of religion, it still falls short of providing us with an ultimately satisfactory account of religious faith. (shrink)

Episodic memories can no longer be seen as the re-activation of stored experiences but are the product of an intense construction process based on a memory trace. Episodic recall is a result of a process of scenario construction. If one accepts this generative framework of episodic memory, there is still a be big gap in understanding the role of the narrative self in shaping scenario construction. Some philosophers are in principle sceptic by claiming that a narrative self cannot be more (...) than a causally inefficacious attributed entity anyway. Thus, we first characterize a narrative self in detail and second we clarify its influential causal role in shaping our episodic memories by influencing the process of scenario construction. This happens at three stages, namely at the level of the input, the output and the process of scenario construction. (shrink)

Episodic memories can no longer be seen as the re-activation of stored experiences but are the product of an intense construction process based on a memory trace. Episodic recall is a result of a process of scenario construction. If one accepts this generative framework of episodic memory, there is still a be big gap in understanding the role of the narrative self in shaping scenario construction. Some philosophers are in principle sceptic by claiming that a narrative self cannot be more (...) than a causally inefficacious attributed entity anyway. Thus, we first characterize a narrative self in detail and second we clarify its influential causal role in shaping our episodic memories by influencing the process of scenario construction. This happens at three stages, namely at the level of the input, the output and the process of scenario construction. (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)

This article for the PHILOKLES Journal for Popular Philosophy surveys a few common theoretical approaches to the phenomenon of self-deception before putting forward a thus far relatively unexplored intentionalist option, namely what the author calls the "project model of self-deception". On this model, self-deception is understood as a dynamic, diachronic activity, aimed at the preservation of a certain self-image, to which an agent is implicitly committed. The author shows how this model can make subjects responsible for their self-deceptions without running (...) straightforwardly into the so-called "paradoxes" of self-deception. (shrink)