DOXASTIC RESPONSIBILITY, GUIDANCE CONTROL, AND OWNERSHIP OF BELIEF

ABSTRACTThe contemporary debate over responsibility for belief is divided over the issue of whether such responsibility requires doxastic control, and whether this control must be voluntary in nature. It has recently become popular to hold that responsibility for belief does not require voluntary doxastic control, or perhaps even any form of doxastic ‘control’ at all. However, Miriam McCormick has recently argued that doxastic responsibility does in fact require quasi-voluntary doxastic control: “guidance control,” a complex, compatibilist form of control. In this paper, I pursue a negative and a positive task. First, I argue that grounding doxastic responsibility in guidance control requires too much for agents to be the proper targets for attributions of doxastic responsibility. I will focus my criticisms on three cases in which McCormick's account gives the intuitively wrong verdict. Second, I develop a modified conception of McCormick's notion of “ownership of belief,” which I call Weak Doxastic Ownership. I employ this conception to argue that responsibility for belief is possible even in the absence of guidance control. In doing so, I argue that the notion of doxastic ownership can do important normative work in grounding responsibility for belief without being subsumed under or analyzed in terms of the notion of doxastic control.

Epistemic Responsibility in Social Context

This chapter addresses a host of worries that one might have about this book’s account of epistemic propriety and epistemic responsibility. Chief among these are worries about the threat of social relativism in epistemic assessment, the threat of an overly context-sensitive account of epistemic propriety and epistemic responsibility, the challenge to vindicate that one can be epistemically responsible even while alone on a desert island (and so when systematically isolated from others), and the lack of engagement in the book’s account of epistemic responsibility with any discussion of doxastic voluntarism or doxastic control. The author concludes that none of the worries should lead us to reject the proposal on offer.

Kant on Doxastic Voluntarism and its Implications for Epistemic Responsibility

This paper shows that Kant’s account of cognition can be used to defend epistemic responsibility against the double threat of either being committed to implausible versions of doxastic voluntarism, or failing to account for a sufficiently robust connection between the will and belief. Whilst we have no direct control over our beliefs, we have two forms of indirect doxastic control that are sufficient to ground epistemic responsibility. It is because we have direct control over our capacity to judge as well as the epistemic principles that govern belief-acquisition that we have indirect control over the beliefs we thereby acquire.