i. Preliminaries*
I now begin the detailed treatment of the items on my initial list of alleged epistemic desiderata. I will be concerned with clarification of the nature of each desideratum, how it should be construed. Where there are serious questions as to the viability of an item, those will be addressed. I discuss the deontological group first because it gives rise to crucial problems about viability, as a result of which I postponed consideration of it in Chapter 3 until and unless they can be resolved.
Here are the deontological candidates for epistemic desiderata of belief (B) that were listed in Chapter 3.
- B is held permissibly (one is not subject to blame for doing so).
- B is formed and held responsibly.
- The causal ancestry of B does not contain violations of intellectual obligations.
First a word about my terminology. âDeontologyâ and âdeontologicalâ come from the Greek deon â âwhat is bindingâ or âdutyâ. In ethics, deontology is the study of duty or obligation, and a deontological theory of ethics is one that takes duty or obligation to be the most basic ethical concept and treats it as an intrinsic ethical value of an act rather than in terms of the consequences of the act. My use is broader. I use it to range over any kind of requirement, not restricted to moral obligation, and not excluding requirements that are based on consequences of what is required. And I identify deontological considerations as having to do with the triad of statuses â required, forbidden, and permitted. Thus any way in which it would be epistemically desirable (desirable from the standpoint of an aim at true belief) for a belief to be required or permitted (i.e., not forbidden) would count as a deontological desideratum in my terminology.
Back to the above list, I think it will suffice to concentrate on 9 and 11. Each of these can be construed as focusing on somethingâs being permitted, not being in violation of any intellectual requirements. Desideratum 9 is matter of the having or the acquiring of the belief being permitted. Desideratum 11 is a matter of the permissibility or lack thereof of what one did that led to the acquisition of the belief. Although 10, the formation in terms of responsibility, is familiar in the literature, I think it is ambiguous between 9 and 11 and so does not require separate treatment. The basic difference between 9 and 11 is what is said to be permitted â either the believing itself or what led up to it. Thus, to foreshadow a major point in the ensuing discussion, 9 gives rise to problems about voluntary control of belief whereas 11 does not.
I have already pointed out [âŚ] that it is plausible to suppose that âjustifiedâ came into epistemology from its more unproblematic use with respect to voluntary action. I am justified in doing something, for example, appointing someone to a Teaching Assistantship on my own, provided my doing so is in accordance with the relevant rules and regulations, provided it is permitted by those rules and hence that I could not rightfully be blamed or held to account for it, and was acting responsibly in doing so.1 The rules could be institutional, as in the above example, or legal or moral. Thus I would be morally justified in failing to make a contribution to a certain organization provided my doing so doesnât violate any moral rule. Because of this provenance it is natural to think of believing, when taken to be subject to being justified or unjustified, as subject to requirement, prohibition, and permission. We say things like âYou shouldnât have supposed so readily that he would not returnâ, âYou have no right to assume thatâ, âYou shouldnât jump to conclusionsâ, and âI ought to have trusted him more than I didâ. Locutions like these seem to be interchangeable with speaking of a belief as being, or not being, justified. These considerations were introduced in this book prior to the abandonment of a justificationâbased epistemology of belief, and in the new dispensation they have no force. Since we are thinking of 9 and 11 simply as states of affairs that are, or may be thought to be, important goals of cognition, the fact that they have often been thought to constitute a beliefâs being justified, with all the associations that brings from talk of the justification of actions, has lost whatever metaâepistemological significance it had under the old dispensation. The idea of a beliefâs being required, permitted, or forbidden will have to swim or sink on its own, without support from the etymology of âjustifiedâ. I will now enter onto the elucidation of 9 and a critical discussion of its credentials as an epistemic desideratum. The criticism will mostly hinge on whether we have effective voluntary control of believings. I will argue that we do not.
It seems clear that the terms of the deontological triad, permitted, required, and forbidden, apply to something only if it is under effective voluntary control. By the timeâhonored principle âOught implies canâ, one can be obliged to do A only if one has an effective choice as to whether to do A. It is equally obvious that it makes no sense to speak of Sâs being permitted or forbidden to do A if S lacks an effective choice as to whether to do so. Therefore, the most fundamental issue raised by the claim of 9 to be an epistemic desideratum is whether believings are under effective voluntary control. If they are not and hence if deontological terms do not apply to them, alleged epistemic desiderata like 9 do not get so far as to be a candidate for an epistemic desideratum. It suffers shipwreck before leaving port. I will argue that believings are not subject to voluntary control. But before that, there are some preliminary points to be made.
First, if I considered the possibility of deontological ED for beliefs to...
