In this paper, I discuss whether different interpretations of the ‘aim’ of belief—both the teleological and normative interpretations—have the resources to explain certain descriptive and normative features of suspended belief (suspension). I argue that, despite the recent efforts of theorists to extend these theories to account for suspension, they ultimately fail. The implication is that we must either develop alternative theories of belief that can account for suspension, or we must abandon the assumption that these theories ought (...) to be able to account for suspension. To close, I briefly consider some of the reasons we have in favour of pursing each of these options, and I suggest that it is worth exploring the possibility that suspension is best understood as its own attitude, independently of theories of belief’s ‘aim’. (shrink)

In Frege’s Puzzle (1986), Salmon analyzed ‘a withholds believing p’ in terms of a ternary relation BEL of x believing a proposition p under a guise g. The proposed analysis is the following: There is a proposition guise g such that a grasps p by means of g but a does not stand in BEL to p and g. Sean Crawford has made a proposal for Millians to evade propositional guises through second-order belief. Specifically, in effect, Crawford’s proposes to (...) analyze the crucial notion of withheld belief instead as believing that one does not believe: a believes that a does not believe p. Crawford’s clever proposal thus avoids explicit quantification over guises. However, it is shown that the proposal is inadequate to avoid guises. The resulting notion is too weak to capture the relevant notion of withheld belief. (shrink)

According to the view that there is moral encroachment in epistemology, whether a person has knowledge of p sometimes depends on moral considerations, including moral considerations that do not bear on the truth or likelihood of p. Defenders of moral encroachment face a central challenge: they must explain why the moral considerations they cite, unlike moral bribes for belief, are reasons of the right kind for belief (or withheld belief). This paper distinguishes between a moderate and (...) a radical version of moral encroachment. It shows that, while defenders of moderate moral encroachment are well-placed to meet the central challenge, defenders of radical moral encroachment are not. The problem for radical moral encroachment is that it cannot, without taking on unacceptable costs, forge the right sort of connection between the moral badness of a belief and that belief’s chance of being false. (shrink)

Moral judgment depends critically on theory of mind, reasoning about mental states such as beliefs and intentions. People assign blame for failed attempts to harm and offer forgiveness in the case of accidents. Here we use fMRI to investigate the role of ToM in moral judgment of harmful vs. helpful actions. Is ToM deployed differently for judgments of blame vs. praise? Participants evaluated agents who produced a harmful, helpful, or neutral outcome, based on a harmful, helpful, or neutral intention; participants (...) made blame and praise judgments. In the right temporo-parietal junction, and, to a lesser extent, the left TPJ and medial prefrontal cortex, the neural response reflected an interaction between belief and outcome factors, for both blame and praise judgments: The response in these regions was highest when participants delivered a negative moral judgment, i.e., assigned blame or withheld praise, based solely on the agent's intent. These results show enhanced attention to mental states for negative moral verdicts based exclusively on mental state information. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Kennedy Institute of Ethics Journal 11.2 (2001) 165-168 [Access article in PDF] UPMC Presbyterian Policy and Procedure Manual Guidelines for Disclosure and Discussion of Conditions and Events with Patients, Families and Guardians* I. Introduction and Background In the course of hospital care, an extensive amount of clinical information is generated. It includes diagnostic findings, treatment options, responses to interventions, and professional opinions. The information can be positive or negative. (...) Clinical events may or may not be caused by clinicians and consequently may be iatrogenic (caused by medical treatment), nosocomial (occurring in the hospital) or natural events.In accordance with the informed consent policy (#4011), Patients' Bill of Rights (# 0154, Section II H), and the Guidelines on Forgoing Life Sustaining Treatment (#4007), patients have the right to information regarding their condition and care. Physicians and other caregivers are obligated to provide accurate information as expeditiously as possible. While it is usually easy to provide positive information, negative information is more difficult to disclose, especially when the cause is iatrogenic."Therapeutic privilege" has been invoked to explain why certain negative information might be withheld. By invoking therapeutic privilege, the physician refrains from full disclosure to protect the patient from the effects of receiving the information itself. The use of therapeutic privilege is increasingly being called into question because it decreases patient autonomy and reduces trust.The following recommendations are provided to clinicians to help guide delivery of sensitive information, positive and negative. Specific recommendations [End Page 165] are provided for situations where the information is about an unfavorable or adverse event, or where the information might best be characterized as "bad news." II. Definitions Unfavorable event or unfavorable condition. For the purposes of these guidelines, an unfavorable condition is an occurrence or diagnosis that results in or is likely to result in a significant negative outcome, and/or a significant alteration in the care plan.An unfavorable event in this context is not the same as a sentinel event, which in policy #4025 is defined as, "a serious, unexpected, adverse patient event which has resulted in, or if repeated would have a significant probability of resulting in, loss of life or serious physical or psychological injury, that is judged to be a warning of an underlying problem involving hospital facilities, policies, procedures, systems or personnel."Adverse Event. An unfavorable event for the purposes of these guidelines is also distinguished from the FDA definition of the term "adverse event", which is a reportable negative effect of a drug or device potentially resulting in death, hospitalization, or medical or surgical intervention. (See policy #4022 Safe Medical Device Act.)Examples of unfavorable events or conditions for the purpose of these guidelines include a new diagnosis of cancer, a perioperative myocardial infarction, or unintended delivery of an incorrect medication that results in clinical change.Examples of events not covered by these guidelines are intravenous saline infiltration and medication dosing errors that have no clinical impact on care.Iatrogenic. Event caused by the treatment of a healthcare provider. III. Guidelines and Principles It is appropriate that UPMC Presbyterian support basic principles for patient and family notification regarding all clinical events and conditions, including unfavorable ones. Physicians must be honest because that is a cornerstone of the patient-physician relationship, and because it fosters patient autonomy.UPMC Presbyterian supports the following AMA position regarding patient information: [End Page 166] It is a fundamental ethical requirement that a physician should at all times deal honestly and openly with patients. Patients have a right to know their past and present medical status and to be free of any mistaken beliefs concerning their conditions. Situations occasionally occur in which a patient suffers significant medical complications that may have resulted from the physician's mistake or judgement. In these situations, the physician is ethically required to inform the patient of all the facts necessary to ensure understanding of what has occurred. Only through full disclosure is a patient able to make informed decisions regarding future medical care. Ethical responsibility includes informing patients of changes in their diagnoses... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:66. ' HUME ON SPACE AND GEOMETRY * : A REJOINDER TO FLEW ' S 'ONE RESERVATION '.? Flew' s reservation about my assertion that the Enquiry contains no significant revision of the Treatise conception of geometry as a body of necessary and synthetic knowledge, appears to involve two charges. Firstly, he alleges that I dismiss but offer no substantial argument against his own view that the Enquiry restores (...) pure geometry "to its place alongside the other two elements of the trinity ". Secondly, he thinks that I have committed a serious sin of omission in failing to take into consideration a certain passage in the Enquiry (page 31, section 27) which, in his opinion, constitutes "a quite decisive reason" for supposing that Hume abandoned the Treatise position, in that it contains an account of applied mathematics, a subject on which the Treatise is silent. To the charge of omission I plead guilty, and I shall presently seek to remedy this defect and to state why I do not share Flew' s view of the significance of the said passage. To the former charge I am not so ready to plead guilty, and I shall counter-charge that Flew has failed not only to do justice to my proposed reading of Enquiry page 25, section 20, but also to provide clear and convincing support for his own. One difficulty encountered in answering Flew lies in understanding whether or not his claim about the status of geometry as a pure science in the Enquiry is put forward independently of his interpretation of E31. As originally presented in Hume's Philosophy of Belief this appears to be the case, and if so, on what evidence does it rest? 2 In his book, Flew' s statement about Hume replacing pure geometry alongside arithmetic and algebra follows directly upon a paragraph in which he comments that Hume's references to geometrical propositions at E25 signify "an important advance from the position of the Treatise". For whereas the status of perfect precision and certainty was 67. there withheld from geometry (T71), Hume now speaks of the certainty and evidence of the propositions of Euclidean geometry, and declares such propositions to be discoverable by the mere operation of thought, without dependence on what is anywhere existent in the universe. (E25) Now, I argued at some length in my paper (pp. 21-24) that Hume is prepared to grant scientific status to geometry in the Enquiry because he has come to regard its certainty as that proper to a mathematics of space. He has abandoned the Treatise contrast between an ideal or theoretical standard of equality, viewed therein as necessary to geometry considered as a science proper, and the merely sensible standard of equality upon which geometry as practised depends. It should not be forgotten that Hume recognises two kinds of certainty where "Relations of Ideas" are concerned, intuitive and demonstrative. Since he fails to provide any detail of the place of each of these in mathematics, the door is left open for speculation along the lines followed in pp. 28-29 of my paper. For there is nothing in?25 which implies that the certainty of all geometrical propositions is of the same kind, or that the process of geometrical demonstration is of the same logical nature as demonstrative reasoning in arithmetic and algebra. In his comment on my position Flew makes no reference to my proposed reason why Hume classes geometry as a science in the Enquiry.· Yet, even if this reclassification does mark an advance of a kind, the fact remains that E25 does not furnish incontrovertible evidence for that advance which Flew thinks he finds there. Nor, therefore, is it conclusive against my assertion that Hume in both works regards the propositions of geometry as necessary and synthetic truths. Given that Flew does not wish to deny the inclusion of a synthetic element even in the Enquiry account of mathematics (see H. P. B. pp. 64-66), I find it difficult to see why he supposes that the logical status of the propositions of geometry is different in the Enquiry from that in the Treatise, since in the latter too they are held 68. to be truths which depend... (shrink)

Advances in molecular technologies have the potential to help remedy health inequities through earlier detection and prevention; if, however, their delivery and uptake are not more carefully considered, there is a very real risk that existing inequities in access and use will be further exacerbated. We argue this risk relates to the way that information and knowledge about the technology is both acquired and shared, or not, between health practitioners and their patients.A healthcare system can be viewed as a complex (...) social network comprising individuals with different worldviews, hierarchies, professional cultures and subcultures and personal beliefs, both for those giving and receiving care. When healthcare practitioners are not perceived as knowledge equals, they would experience informational prejudices, and the result is that knowledge dissemination across and between them would be impeded. The uptake and delivery of a new technology may be inequitable as a result. Patients would also experience informational prejudice when they are viewed as not being able to understand the information that is presented to them, and information may be withheld.Informational prejudices driven by social relations and structures have thus far been underexplored in considering equitable implementation and uptake of new molecular technologies. Every healthcare interaction represents an opportunity for experiencing informational prejudice, and with it the risk of being inappropriately informed for undertaking such screening or testing. Making knowledge acquisition and information dissemination, and experiences of informational prejudice, explicit through sociologically framed investigations would extend our understandings of equity, and offer ways to affect network relationships and structures that support equity in delivery and uptake. (shrink)

Our hospital routine requires that all new admissions must be asked about their code status. It is not uncommon for an otherwise healthy patient to request that a do-not-resuscitate order be placed in their chart. Presumably, these patients who wish to have a DNR order are acting on the belief that should an unforeseen, irreversible condition occur that leads to a cardiac arrest, they would not want to undergo resuscitation. Tragically, we have witnessed several instances in which potentially life-saving (...) interventions were withheld in viable patients in non-arrest settings for reversible conditions because the patients had a DNR order in the chart. Unfortunately, this happens when the treating physicians are not aware of the limited scope of a DNR order and instead use the order as a blanket prohibition against all components of resuscitation. This communication failure is due to misconceptions that patients and their physicians have with regard to such orders. The medical community is well overdue to improve the end-of-life decisions offered to patients beyond relying on the outdated term DNR.LIMITATIONS OF DNR ORDERSDespite the major advances in critical care medicine in the past few decades, doctors have not substantially improved their ability to address end-of-life decisions any better than by using the all-encompassing term DNR. Currently, the term is generally accepted as an order to prohibit the use of interventions to reverse a cardiac or pulmonary arrest.1 2 What is frequently forgotten with the DNR order is that …. (shrink)

Beliefs can be resistant to evidence. Nonetheless, the orthodox view in epistemology analyzes beliefs as evidence-responsive attitudes. I address this tension by deploying analytical tools on capacities and masking to show that the cognitive science of evidence-resistance supports rather than undermines the orthodox view. In doing so, I argue for the claim that belief requires the capacity for evidence-responsiveness. More precisely, if a subject believes that p, then they have the capacity to rationally respond to evidence bearing on p. (...) Because capacities for evidence-responsiveness are fallible and may be masked, beliefs can be held in the face of counter-evidence. Indeed, I will argue that our best science of belief supports the claim that evidence-resistant beliefs result from masks on evidence-responsiveness capacities. This account of belief not only allows for resistance to evidence, but provides us with a framework for describing and explaining actual cases of evidence-resistance. (shrink)

Are extreme beliefs constitutive of echo chambers, or only typically caused by them? Or are many echo chambers unproblematic, amplifying relatively benign beliefs? This paper details the conceptual relations between echo chambers and extreme beliefs, showing how different conceptual choice-points in how we understand both echo chambers and extreme beliefs affects how we should evaluate, study, and engage with echo chambering groups. We also explore how our theories of extreme beliefs and echo chambers shape social scientific research and contribute in (...) a practical way when treating these phenomena, focusing on examples of climate change scepticism. (shrink)

Aaron Zimmerman presents a new pragmatist account of belief, in terms of information poised to guide our more attentive, controlled actions. And he explores the consequences of this account for our understanding of the relation between psychology and philosophy, the mind and brain, the nature of delusion, faith, pretence, racism, and more.

According to the cognitive model of psychopathology, maladaptive beliefs about oneself, others, and the world are the main factors contributing to the development and persistence of various forms of mental suffering. Therefore, the key therapeutic process of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT)—a therapeutic approach rooted in the cognitive model—is cognitive restructuring, i.e., a process of revision of such maladaptive beliefs. In this paper, I examine the philosophical assumptions underlying CBT and offer theoretical reasons to think that the effectiveness of belief (...) revision in psychotherapy is very limited. This is the case, I argue, because the cognitive model wrongly assumes that our body of beliefs is unified, while it is in fact fragmented. (shrink)

The fundamental question of the ethics of belief is "What ought one to believe?" According to the traditional view of evidentialism, the strength of one's beliefs should be proportionate to the evidence. Conventional ways of defending and challenging evidentialism rely on the idea that what one ought to believe is a matter of what it is rational, prudent, ethical, or personally fulfilling to believe. Common to all these approaches is that they look outside of belief itself to determine (...) what one ought to believe. In this book Jonathan Adler offers a strengthened version of evidentialism, arguing that the ethics of belief should be rooted in the concept of belief—that evidentialism is belief's own ethics. A key observation is that it is not merely that one ought not, but that one cannot, believe, for example, that the number of stars is even. The "cannot" represents a conceptual barrier, not just an inability. Therefore belief in defiance of one's evidence (or evidentialism) is impossible. Adler addresses such questions as irrational beliefs, reasonableness, control over beliefs, and whether justifying beliefs requires a foundation. Although he treats the ethics of belief as a central topic in epistemology, his ideas also bear on rationality, argument and pragmatics, philosophy of religion, ethics, and social cognitive psychology. (shrink)

A commonly-discussed feature of perceptual experience is that it has ‘assertoric’ or ‘phenomenal’ force. We will start by discussing various descriptions of the assertoricity of perceptual experience. We will then adopt a minimal characterization of assertoricity: a perceptual experience has assertoric force just in case it inclines the perceiver to believe its content. Adducing cases that show that visual experience is not always assertoric, we will argue that what renders these visual experiences non-assertoric is that they are penetrated by (...) class='Hi'>belief-like imaginings. Lastly, we will explain why it is that when belief-like imaginings—as opposed to beliefs (and other cognitive states)—penetrate visual experience, they render visual experiences non-assertoric. (shrink)

“Probably Peirce’s best-known works are the first two articles in a series of six that originally were collectively entitled Illustrations of the Logic of Science and published in Popular Science Monthly from November 1877 through August 1878. The first is entitled ‘The Fixation of Belief’ and the second is entitled ‘How to Make Our Ideas Clear.’ In the first of these papers Peirce defended, in a manner consistent with not accepting naive realism, the superiority of the scientific method over (...) other methods of overcoming doubt and ‘fixing belief.’” — Robert Burch, “Charles Sanders Peirce,” entry in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (2021 revision) -/- “Pragmatist epistemologies often explore how we can carry out inquiries in a self-controlled and fruitful way. (Where much analytic epistemology centres around the concept of knowledge, considered as an idealised end-point of human thought, pragmatist epistemology centres around the concept of inquiry, considered as the process of knowledge-seeking and how we can improve it.) So pragmatists often provide rich accounts of the capacities or virtues that we must possess in order to inquire well, and the rules or guiding principles that we should adopt. A canonical account is Peirce’s classic early paper ‘The Fixation of Belief‘. Here Peirce states that inquiry is a struggle to replace doubt with “settled belief“, and that the only method of inquiry that can make sense of the fact that at least some of us are disturbed by inconsistent beliefs, and will subsequently reflect upon which methods of fixing belief are correct is the Method of Science, which draws on the Pragmatic Maxim described above. This contrasts with three other methods of fixing belief: i) refusing to consider evidence contrary to one’s favored beliefs (the Method of Tenacity), ii) accepting an institution’s dictates (the Method of Authority), iii) developing the most rationally coherent or elegant-seeming belief-set (the A Priori Method).“ — Catherine Legg, “Pragmatism,” entry in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (2021 revision). (shrink)

The “looks” of things are frequently invoked (a) to account for the epistemic status of perceptual beliefs and (b) to distinguish perceptual from inferential beliefs. ‘Looks’ for these purposes is normally understood in terms of a perceptual experience and its phenomenal character. Here I argue that there is also a nonexperiential sense of ‘looks’—one that relates to cognitive architecture, rather than phenomenology—and that this nonexperiential sense can do the work of (a) and (b).

According to many philosophers, belief is a settling state. On this view, someone who believes p is disposed to take p for granted in practical and theoretical reasoning. This paper presents a simple objection to this settling conception of belief: it conflicts with our ordinary patterns of belief ascription. I show that ascriptions of unsettled beliefs are commonplace, and that they pose problems for all of the most promising ways of developing the settling conception. I proceed to (...) explore the implications of my argument for the relation between belief and credence, and for the relative importance of belief in psychological explanation. (shrink)

Abstract In slogan form, the thesis of this paper is that beliefs are self-verifying fictions: We make them up, but in so doing, they come to exist, and so the fiction of belief is in fact true. This picture of belief emerges from a combination of three independently motivated views: (1) a phenomenal intentionalist picture of intentionality, on which phenomenal consciousness is the basis of intentionality; (2) what I will call a “self-ascriptivist” picture of derived representation, on which (...) non-fundamental representational features are a matter of our ascribing contents to ourselves or our mental states or contents; and (3) a representationalist picture of the attitudes, on which the attitude components of mental states (e.g., the “belief” bit of a belief that P) are represented contents. This paper outlines and motivates the view of beliefs as self-verifying fictions, compares the view to alternative views of belief, and contrasts beliefs on the resulting picture to other belief-like mental states. (shrink)

First published in 1986, Knowledge, Belief, and Witchcraft remains the only analysis of indigenous discourse about an African belief system undertaken from within the framework of Anglo-American analytical philosophy. Taking as its point of departure W. V. O. Quine's thesis about the indeterminacy of translation, the book investigates questions of Yoruba epistemology and of how knowledge is conceived in an oral culture.

We often find that beliefs we hold are in conflict with the beliefs of epistemic peers, individuals who are just as intelligent, just as well-informed, and just as scrupulous in forming their beliefs as we are. Is it permissible to maintain our beliefs in the face of such disagreement? It is argued here that continued belief in these circumstances is not epistemically permissible, and that this has striking consequences for the practice of philosophy: we cannot reasonably hold on to (...) our philosophical views. (shrink)

In everyday life we either express our beliefs in all-or-nothing terms or we resort to numerical probabilities: I believe it's going to rain or my chance of winning is one in a million. The Stability of Belief develops a theory of rational belief that allows us to reason with all-or-nothing belief and numerical belief simultaneously.

Delusions are a common symptom of schizophrenia and dementia. Though most English dictionaries define a delusion as a false opinion or belief, there is currently a lively debate about whether delusions are really beliefs and indeed, whether they are even irrational. The book is an interdisciplinary exploration of the nature of delusions. It brings together the psychological literature on the aetiology and the behavioural manifestations of delusions, and the philosophical literature on belief ascription and rationality. The thesis of (...) the book is that delusions are continuous with ordinary beliefs, a thesis that could have important theoretical and practical implications for psychiatric classification and the clinical treatment of subjects with delusions. By bringing together recent work in philosophy of mind, cognitive psychology and psychiatry, the book offers a comprehensive review of the philosophical issues raised by the psychology of normal and abnormal cognition, defends the doxastic conception of delusions, and develops a theory about the role of judgements of rationality and of attributions of self-knowledge in belief ascription. Presenting a highly original analysis of the debate on the nature of delusions, this book will interest philosophers of mind, epistemologists, philosophers of science, cognitive scientists, psychiatrists, and mental health professionals. (shrink)

In this book Jonathan Adler offers a strengthened version of evidentialism, arguing that the ethics of belief should be rooted in the concept of belief--that...

Belief storage is often modeled as having the structure of a single, unified web. This model of belief storage is attractive and widely assumed because it appears to provide an explanation of the flexibility of cognition and the complicated dynamics of belief revision. However, when one scrutinizes human cognition, one finds strong evidence against a unified web of belief and for a fragmented model of belief storage. Using the best available evidence from cognitive science, we (...) develop this fragmented model into a nascent theory of the cognitive architecture of belief storage. (shrink)

Presenting the first step-by-step commentary on Husserl’s Ideas I, Marcus Brainard’s Belief and Its Neutralization provides an introduction not only to this central work, but also to the whole of transcendental phenomenology. Brainard offers a clear and lively account of each key element in Ideas I, along with a novel reading of Husserl, one which may well cause scholars to reconsider many long-standing views on his thought, especially on the role of belief, the effect and scope of the (...) epoché, and the significance of the universal neutrality modification. (shrink)

Recent decades have seen a fertile period of theorizing within mainstream epistemology which has had a dramatic impact on how epistemology is done. Investigations into contextualist and pragmatic dimensions of knowledge suggest radically new ways of meeting skeptical challenges and of understanding the relation between the epistemological and practical environment. New insights from social epistemology and formal epistemology about defeat, testimony, a priority, probability, and the nature of evidence all have a potentially revolutionary effect on how we understand our epistemological (...) place in the world. Religion is the place where such rethinking can potentially have its deepest impact and importance. Yet there has been surprisingly little infiltration of these new ideas into philosophy of religion and the epistemology of religious belief. -/- Knowledge, Belief, and God incorporates these myriad new developments in mainstream epistemology, and extends these developments to questions and arguments in religious epistemology. The investigations proposed in this volume offer substantial new life, breadth, and sophistication to issues in the philosophy of religion and analytic theology. They pose original questions and shed new light on long-standing issues in religious epistemology; and these developments will in turn generate contributions to epistemology itself, since religious belief provides a vital testing ground for recent epistemological ideas. (shrink)

Daniel Weiskopf has recently raised an apparently powerful objection against the so-called “extended mind thesis” with regard to beliefs. His argument is that since alleged cases of “extended beliefs” lack a characteristic feature of beliefs properly so called (newly acquired beliefs are usually integrated with already existing beliefs rapidly, automatically and unconsciously), they do not count as genuine beliefs properly so called. We defend the extended mind thesis by arguing that Weiskopf is wrong. First, we suggest an alternative account of (...) informational integration that is compatible with externally stored beliefs’ being beliefs properly so called, emphasizes the crucial role action plays for cognition, and stresses the embodied and situationally embedded nature of human cognizers. Second, we argue that even if informational integration were usually rapid, automatic, and unconscious, this would not be an essential feature of beliefs. Third, we argue that even if rapid, automatic, and unconscious informational integration were characteristic of our commonsense conception of beliefs, externally stored “beliefs” would still be sufficiently similar to beliefs properly so called for them to be grouped together for all practical and scientific purposes. (shrink)

What propositions are rational for one to believe? With what confidence is it rational for one to believe these propositions? Answering the first of these questions requires an epistemology of beliefs, answering the second an epistemology of degrees of belief.

What is the relationship between lying, belief, and knowledge? Prominent accounts of lying define it in terms of belief, namely telling someone something one believes to be false, often with the intent to deceive. This paper develops a novel account of lying by deriving evaluative dimensions of responsibility from the knowledge norm of assertion. Lies are best understood as special cases of vicious assertion; lying is the anti-paradigm of proper assertion. This enables an account of lying in terms (...) of knowledge: roughly, lying is telling someone something you know ain't so. (shrink)

How does it come about that a person akratically believes that P, while at the same time believing that the available evidence speaks against that P? Among the current accounts, Scanlon offers an intuitive suggestion that one’s seeming experience that P may play an important role in the aetiology of their akratic belief that P. However, it turns out to be quite challenging to articulate what the role of seeming experience is. This paper will offer a novel development of (...) Scanlon’s intuitive suggestion, with a focus on clear-eyed epistemic akrasia. I will argue that the primary role of seeming experience is unlikely to act as the subject’s reason or to provide the subject with prima facie justification; instead, based on the recent work in dogmatism and Cartesian clarity, I will propose a causal account, according to which, when it seems clear to the subject that P, the seeming experience may exert a brute causal force to persistently compel the subject to believe that P. This causal account also has the advantage of helping some existing accounts to explain clear-eyed epistemic akrasia. (shrink)

This chapter is a survey of the ethics of belief. It begins with the debate as it first emerges in the foundational dispute between W. K. Clifford and William James. Then it surveys how the disagreements between Clifford and James have shaped the work of contemporary theorists, touching on topics such as pragmatism, whether we should believe against the evidence, pragmatic and moral encroachment, doxastic partiality, and doxastic wronging.