85:3 July 2002
Controlling Belief

Advisory Editor: Ward E. Jones, Rhodes University, South Africa

To what extent, if any, do we have direct control over what we believe? Answers to this question have been surprisingly various. On one end of the spectrum are the voluntarists (perhaps Aquinas and Descartes), who argue that believing is, in fact, subject to the will. Opposing the voluntarists are those who find it obvious that there is no interesting sense in which we have control over our beliefs, and who have been more vexed by the problem of explaining why this is so (Bernard Williams and Jonathan Bennett are recent examples). The present issue of the Monist is designed to further this discussion, by addressing one or more of the following questions: (1) If there is any sense in which beliefs are under the believer’s immediate or direct control, then how precisely should we describe such control? (2) What is the right explanation of our doxastic control, or lack thereof? Will the right explanation make reference to the nature of belief, or is our doxastic control a property not of beliefs per se but of certain types of believers? (3) Williams famously contrasts our inability to believe at will with our inability to blush at will, claiming that the former cannot be a merely contingent property of human beings. Is this right? More generally, how do we determine the modal status of mental relations like that between believing and the will? (4) How does the extent of our doxastic control affect the epistemic assessment of belief? From whence does the notion of ‘epistemic responsibility’ arise, and what is its relation to our degree of doxastic control? Broader issues to be discussed in relation to the topic of doxastic control may include: voluntariness and free will, irrationality and self-deception, the dichotomy between pragmatic and epistemic rationality, as well as persuasion and brainwashing.

Table of Contents:

John Cottingham 

Descartes and the Voluntariness of Belief

Jennifer Church 

Taking It to Heart: What Choice Do We Have?

David Owens 

Epistemic Akrasia

Stephen Hetherington 

Epistemic Responsibility: A Dilemma

Gordon Barnes 

Resolving the Responsibilism Dilemma: A Reply to Hetherington

Mark Leon 

Responsible Believers

Nishi Shah 

Clearing Space for Doxastic Voluntarism

Grace Yee 

Desiring to Believe

Jonathan Adler 

Conundrums of Belief Self-Control

Brian Ribeiro 

Epistemological Scepticism(s) and Rational Self-Control