Abstract

I argue that beliefs are a special sort of feeling about the truth-value of statements. Once that conclusion is drawn, beliefs can be seen to have little to do with what is really of import in epistemology — the formation of shared meanings. I then argue that doxastic involuntarism suggests that we must examine something else — attentional voluntarism — if we are to understand how agents change behaviors, and that once we examine attentional voluntarism, we are thrust into the social realm, and into social epistemology. Throughout, I will be discussing Alcoholics Anonymous, an organization whose use of symbolic language and social support has been demonstrated to create a social epistemology for its members which has an empirical effect upon their behavior. By so doing, I hope to suggest a sort of praxis by which we might ‘ground’ social epistemology, which I regard as a grand theory in the Mertonian sense.