Abstract
Assent is an act of the mind, congenial to its nature; and it, as other acts, may be made both when it ought to be made and when it ought not. It is a free act, a personal act for which the doer is responsible.1
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Notes
John Henry Newman, A Grammar of Assent, Longmans, Green and Co., New York, 1947.
Leonard W. Levy, Freedom of Speech and Press in Early American History: Legacy of Suppression, Harper & Row Publ., New York, 1963, p. 315.
Ibid., p. 313.
Ibid., p. 317.
Stuart Hampshire, ‘Spinoza and the Idea of Freedom’, in Freedom of Mind and Other Essays, Princeton University Press, Princeton, 1971, p. 207.
See C. B. McPherson, The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism Hobbes to Locke, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1962.
There is some plausibility in suggesting that all these attitudes have in common (a) the entertainment, consideration or understanding at some time of a proposition or state-of-affairs and (b) a pro or con attitude (or the suspension of such an attitude) towards the truth of the proposition or the actuality of the state-of-affairs whether that attitude be occurrent or dispositional, conscious or nonconscious.
Some classic discussions of these matters can be found in Descartes, Meditations IV; Leibniz, New Essays Concerning Human Understanding, Book IV, Chapter I, Section 8; Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Book IV, Chapters XIII and XX; Hume, Treatise of Human Nature, Appendix; and C. I. Lewis, An Analysis of Knowledge and Evaluation, Chapter I, Section 2 and The Ground and Nature of the Right, pp. 14–16 and pp. 22–27. Some recent discussions can be found in H. H. Price, ‘Belief and Will’, SPAS 28 (1954) and Belief, George Allan & Unwin Ltd., London, 1969, Chapter 10; Stuart Hampshire, Thought and Action, The Viking Press, New York, 1960, esp. pp. 155–8 and Freedom of Mind and Other Essays, Princeton University Press, Princeton, 1971, esp. ‘Freedom of Mind’ and ‘Spinoza and the Idea of Freedom’; Bernard Mayo, ‘Belief and Constraint’, PAS 64 (1963–4); J. L. Evans, ‘Error and the Will’, Philosophy XXVIII, No. 144 (1963); Bernard Williams, Problems of the Self, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1973, ‘Deciding to Believe’; Anthony O’Hear, ‘Belief and the Will’, Philosophy XLVII, No. 180 (1972); T.Honderich (ed.), Essays on Freedom of Action, Routledge and Kegan Paul, London, 1973, esp. John Watling, ‘Hampshire on Freedom’; Richard Taylor, ‘Thought and Purpose’, Inquiry II No. 2 (1969); R. B. De Sousa, ‘How to Give a Piece of Your Mind’, Review of Metaphysics XXV, No. 1 (1971); and Samuel D. Fohr, ‘The Non-Rationality of Beliefs and Attitudes’, Personalist, Winter 1972.
Joel Feinberg, Reason and Responsibility, Dickenson Publ. Co., Belmont, 1965, p. 296.
A good collection of papers on this question, viz., ‘Free Will’ by G. E. Moore, ‘Freedom and Responsibility’ by P. H. Nowell-Smith, ‘Ifs and Cans’ by J. L. Austin, ‘Ifs Cans and Causes’ by K. Lehrer, ‘Mr Lehrer on the Constitution of Cans’ by B. Goldberg and H. Heidelberger, ‘Cans and Conditionals: A Rejoinder’ by K. Lehrer, and ‘J. L. Austin’s Philosophical Papers’ by R. M. Chisholm, can be found in Myles Brand, The Nature of Human Action Scott, Foresman and Co., Glenview, 1970.
See Price, op. cit. and for R. M. Chisholm’s view on this and related concepts see ‘Freedom and Action’, in Freedom and Determinism, ed. by K. Lehrer, Random House, New York, 1966; ‘He Could Have Done Otherwise’, in Brand op. cit., a revised version of a paper in Philosophy, LXIV, No. 13, (1967); and ‘On the Logic of Intentional Action’, in Agent, Action and Reason, ed. by R. Binkley et al., Basil Blackwell, Oxford, 1971.
Price, Belief, op. cit., p. 225.
Ibid., p. 26.
Ibid., p. 231.
Ibid., p. 225.
Ibid., p. 238.
Ibid., p. 238.
Ibid., Lectures 4, 5 and 6. See also R. M. Chisholm, Perceiving: A Philosophical Study, Cornell University Press, Ithaca, 1957, Chapter 3, and Theory of Knowledge, Prentice-Hall Inc., Englewood Cliffs, Chapters 2, 3 and 4.
Price, op. cit.
See Williams, op. cit. and R. B. De Sousa, op. cit.
See C. I. Lewis, op. cit.
See R. M. Chisholm, ‘What Is It to Act on a Proposition?’, Analysis XXII (1961).
For accounts of responsibility similar in some respects to the one offered here see Kurt Baier ‘Responsibility and Action’, in Brand, op. cit. and P. H. Nowell-Smith, Ethics, Penguin Books, London, 1954.
See H. Fingarette, On Responsibility, Basic Books, New York, 1967, Chapter 2.
See Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, Book III, Chapter I, and Fingarette, op. cit.
David Braybrooke, ‘Professor Stevenson, Voltaire, and the Case of Admiral Byng’, Journal of Philosophy LIII (1956).
Joel Feinberg, Doing and Deserving: Essays in the Theory of Responsibility, Princeton University Press, Princeton, 1970, ‘Justice and Personal Desert’.
See Chisholm, op. cit., esp. ‘He Could Have Done Otherwise’.
Elizabeth L. Beardsley, ‘Determinism and Moral Perspectives’, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research XXI (1960).
The literature is too vast to cite here, thus I offer, merely by way of an illustration, an influential theory which attempts to integrate behavioural, phenomenological and neurological evidence, viz., Eric Berne, Transactional Analysis in Psychotherapy: A Systematic Individual and Social Psychiatry, Ballantine Books, New York, 1973.
Norman W. Storer, The Social System of Science, Holt, Rinehart and Winston, New York, 1966, p. 82.
Ibid., p. 78.
Ibid., p. 79.
Ibid., p. 83.
Willmore Kendall, ‘The Open Society and Its Fallacies’, in Limits of Liberty: Studies in Mill’s ‘On Liberty’, Wadsworth Publ. Co. Inc., Belmont, 1966, ed. by Peter Radcliff.
For a critical account of the techniques and social implications of ‘thought reform’ see R. J. Lifton, Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism: A Study of Brainwashing’ in China, W. W. Norton & Company Inc., New York, 1969, and for a more sympathetic view see Han Suyin, China in the Year 2001, Penguin Books, Harmondsworth, 1970.
Quoted in Kendall, op. cit.
Elizabeth L. Beardsley, ‘Privacy: Autonomy and Selective Disclosure’, Nomos XIII Privacy, ed. by J. Roland Pennock and John W. Chapman, Atherton Press, New York, 1971. The rules in question are: ‘Rule I — ‘Do not restrict X’s ability to determine for himself whether or not he will perform an act A or undergo an experience E’ — and Rule II — ‘Do not seek or disseminate information about X which he does not wish to have known or disseminated’”, p. 57.
Henry D. Aitken, ‘Mill and the Justification of Social Freedom’, Nomos IV, Liberty, ed. by C. J. Friedrich, Atherton Press, New York, 1966, pp. 137 and 135.
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© 1975 D. Reidel Publishing Company, Dordrecht-Holland
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Stevenson, J.T. (1975). On Doxastic Responsibility. In: Lehrer, K. (eds) Analysis and Metaphysics. Philosophical Studies Series in Philosophy, vol 4. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-010-9098-8_13
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