Active Belief

Abstract

The man who changes his mind, in response to evidence of the truth of a proposition, does not act upon himself; nor does he bring about an effect.- Hampshire (1965, 100)A point of persistent controversy in recent philosophical discussions of belief concerns whether we can exercise some sort of agential control over what we believe. On the one hand, the idea that we have some kind of discretion over what we believe has appealed to philosophers working in several areas. This idea has been invoked, for instance, to characterize the basic difference between rational and non-rational cognition, to account for our epistemic responsibility for what we believe, and to explain how we are able, normally, to say what we presently believe without relying on self-observation or inference. On the other hand, most contemporary philosophers agree that, in one significant sense, what we believe is not up to us: we cannot simply believe “at will,” and, although what we wish were so can influence what we believe to be so, this influence hardly amounts to a form of control or agency.