Humans have direct voluntary control over their beliefs.
the verdict
REFUTED
the evidence says no
refutedsupported
the weight of evidence
2 sources for · 3 against
While direct doxastic voluntarism exists as a philosophical concept describing potential control over beliefs, scholarly consensus largely treats the thesis that humans possess direct voluntary control over beliefs as false or constrained by evidence.
philosophical view that people elect their own beliefs; that is, that subjects have a certain amount of control over what they believe, such that a subject
Doxastic voluntarism is a philosophical view that people elect their own beliefs; that is, that subjects have a certain amount of control over what they believe, such that a subject may choose whether or not to believe a certain thing. This philosophical view is derived from a branch of logic known as doxastic logic; however, as opposed to other philosophical views on belief, doxastic voluntarism
Doxastic voluntarism is a philosophical view that people elect their own beliefs; that is, that subjects have a certain amount of control over what they believe, such that a subject may choose whether or not to believe a certain thing. This philosophical view is derived from a branch of logic known as doxastic logic; however, as opposed to other philosophical views on belief, doxastic voluntarism claims each human agent as the author of their own beliefs. Doxastic voluntarism falls under the branch of philosophy known as ethics of belief.
Philosophers distinguish two types of doxastic voluntarism: direct doxastic voluntarism and indirect doxastic voluntarism. Direct doxastic voluntarism being that the person has control over some of their beliefs (e.g. an individual changes his belief from theism to atheism) and indirect doxastic voluntarism is that the person has unintended control, through voluntary intermediate actions, over some of their beliefs (e.g. researching and unintentionally evaluating the evidence).
Abstract Direct Doxastic Voluntarism — the notion that we have direct (un-mediated) voluntary control over our beliefs — has widely been held to be false. There are, however, two ways to interpret the impossibility of our having doxastic control: as either a conceptual/ logical/metaphysical impossibility or as a psychological impossibility. In this paper I analyse the arguments for (Williams 1973; Scott-Kakures 1993; Adler 2002) and against (Bennett 1990; Radcliffe 1997) both types of claim and, in particular, evaluate the bearing that putative cases of self-deception have on the arguments in defence of voluntarism about belief. For it would seem that if it is the case that self-induced cases of self-deception are indeed possible, then voluntarism about belief could be true after all. Bennett claims that Williams’ argument for the impossibility case proves too much in that if it is successful in ruling out direct doxastic voluntarism, it is also successful in ruling out cases of indirect doxastic voluntarism. If cases of self-deception can also be cases of indirect doxastic voluntarism, then such cases support the argument against the impossibility case. I argue that Bennett is right in claiming that Williams’ argument proves too much, that cases of self-deception are indeed also sometimes cases of indirect self-deception and so that they cause genuine trouble for the conceptual impossibility case. However, I also argue that this is the only genuine worry for Williams’ argument. I end, while considering whether cases of self-deception can tell us anything about the psychological possibility of direct doxastic control, by suggesting a way of establishing the conceptual impossibility of direct doxastic control that circumvents Bennett’s counter-argument.
epistemic matters. The thesis that we have direct voluntary control over our beliefs is called doxastic … to see how they are both required to give up their beliefs — false beliefs can sometimes be reasonable … based on good reasoning. If both parties base their beliefs on good evidence, couldn’t they both have reasonable
Doxastic involuntarism—the thesis that we lack direct voluntary control (in response to non‐evidential reasons) over our belief states—is often touted as philosophical orthodoxy. I here offer a novel defense of doxastic voluntarism, centered around three key moves. First, I point out that belief has two central functional roles, but that discussions of voluntarism have largely ignored questions of control over belief's guidance function. Second, I propose that we can learn much about doxastic control by looking to cognitive scientific research on control over other relevantly similar mental states. I draw on a mechanistic account of control of the guidance function for “emotion‐type states,” and argue that these same cognitive control mechanisms can used to block doxastic guidance. This gives us an account of “back‐end” doxastic control which can be deployed for reasons which are not the right kinds of reasons to support “front‐end” belief formation—i.e., non‐evidential reasons. Third, I argue that comprehensive, self‐directed exercises of this kind of control can amount to an underappreciated kind of voluntarism. This form of voluntarism is available to any account of belief that takes guidance‐instantiation to be at least partly constitutive of believing. Finally, I discuss objections to, and upshots of, the view.
People attribute considerable control to others over what those individuals believe. However, no work to date has investigated how people judge their own belief control, nor whether such judgments diverge from their judgments of others. We addressed this gap in seven studies and found that people judge others to be more able to voluntarily change what they believe than they themselves are. This occurs when people judge others who disagree with them (Study 1) as well as others agree with them (Studies 2-5, 7), and it occurs when people judge strangers (Studies 1-2, 4-5) as well as close others (Studies 3, 7). It appears not to be explained by impression management or self-enhancement motives (Study 3). Rather, there is a discrepancy between the evidentiary constraints on belief change that people access via introspection, and their default assumptions about the ease of voluntary belief revision. That is, people spontaneously tend to think about the evidence that supports their beliefs, which leads them to judge their beliefs as outside their control. But they apparently fail to generalize this feeling of constraint to others, and similarly fail to incorporate it into their generic model of beliefs (Studies 4-7). We discuss the implications of our findings for theories of ideology-based conflict, actor-observer biases, naïve realism, and on-going debates regarding people’s actual capacity to voluntarily change what they believe.
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