Online research in philosophy

How does a subject who is competent to detect the irrationality of a belief that p, form her belief against weighty or even conclusive evidence to the contrary? The phenomenon of self-deception threatens a widely shared view of beliefs according to which they do not regularly correspond to emotions and evaluative attitudes. Accordingly, the most popular answer to this question is that the belief formed in self-deception is caused by an intention to form that belief. On this view, the state of self-deception is taken to be a calculated outcome involving a person's intentional manipulation of her own thoughts. I argue that this answer is false and forms an impediment towards making sense of self-deception. I show that, contrary to philosophical prejudice, emotions and desires exert vast and systematic effects on the formation of beliefs. In this, and other, sections of the article, the results of experimental work are brought forward. Self-deception is portrayed here as resembling numerous instances of belief formation which are regularly affected by motivational factors. I argue that self-deceptive beliefs are direct expressions of the subject's wishes, fears and hopes. Qua beliefs which mostly correspond to such factors (rather than to evidence), self-deceptive states are a kind of fantasy.

What is the relation between a perceptual experience of an object X as being red, and one's belief, if any, as to the nature of that experience? A traditional Cartesian view would be that, if indeed object X does seem to be red to oneself, then one's resulting introspective belief about it could only be a _conforming _belief, i.e., a belief that X perceptually seems to be _red _to oneself--rather than, for instance, a belief that X perceptually seems to be green to oneself instead. On such a Cartesian view, our introspective certainly about our own thoughts extends also to our perceptual experiences as to how things seem to be to us, so that our resulting introspective beliefs about our phenomenal states also count as knowledge of them.

This paper examines the epistemic status of the reflective belief about the content of one’s own conscious mental state, with emphasis on perceptual experience. I propose that the process that gives a special epistemic status to a reflective belief is not observation, inference, or conceptual articulation, but semantic ascent similar to the transition from a sentence in the object language to a sentence in the meta-language that affirms the truth of the original sentence. This account of the process of reflection explains why a reflective belief is (subject to some qualification) infallible.

The view (held, e.g., by Davidson) that the having of beliefs and desires presupposes the having of reflective capacities is sometimes supported by appealing to the idea that the concept of belief is a concept of a mental state which involves a normative aspect: beliefs can be “successful” or “unsuccessful” from the perspective of their possessors, and sometimes discarded in light of their “failure.” This naturally invites the idea that believers must be capable of reflecting on their beliefs. Desires presuppose reflectivity if only in virtue of their essential linkage with beliefs. This paper suggests a sense in which mental states—including those of non-reflective creatures—can have such a normative aspect. On this suggestion, the intelligible relations that obtain between cognitive states and conative states open the door for the possibility of normativity without reflectivity. Due to these relations, a creature's beliefs can be successful or unsuccessful from its own perspective even without its conceiving of them.

I distinguish two ways of explaining our capacity for ‘transparent’ knowledge of our own present beliefs, perceptions, and intentions: an inferential and a reflective approach. Alex Byrne (2011) has defended an inferential approach, but I argue that this approach faces a basic difficulty, and that a reflective approach avoids the difficulty. I conclude with a brief sketch and defence of a reflective approach to our transparent self-knowledge, and I show how this approach is connected with the thesis that we must distinguish between a kind of self-knowledge that is of oneself as agent and another kind that is of oneself as patient.

1. The first such problem concerns the clarity of the notion of lying to oneself. Is it possible to lie to oneself? ___ who is being deceived? Who is doing the deceiving? ___ how is one communicating to oneself in the act of self-deception? (internal dialogue?) ___ Is lying something one can do without knowing it?

Evidentialism is a prominent and long-standing view about the relation between beliefs and epistemic reasons. It holds (I) that if one has a belief in a proposition, one must think there is sufficient evidence for the proposition believed; and (II) (conversely), that when one thinks there is sufficient evidence for a given proposition, one must believe it. In this paper, I will be concerned mainly with the first of these claims. My goal is to defend evidentialism against the objection that some reflectively-held beliefs need not be supported by evidence. I defend the view by qualifying the claim significantly. Since the qualification is a departure from established versions of evidentialism, I attempt to justify it in what follows. In the target claims (I) and (II), there is a serious ambiguity in the word “must”, subject to two very different readings. Some evidentialists hold that “must” here means “ought” and expresses an epistemically normative or ethical claim. To the extent that one governs oneself according to the relevant norms or ethical values, one will adjust oneself so that one’s beliefs are all evidentially supported. By contrast, other evidentialists hold that “must” means a kind of necessity, such that one literally cannot intelligibly regard something as a belief unless one regards it as supported by evidence. Following Adler, I will call the first view “extrinsic” and the second view “intrinsic,” for the reason that the first view leaves it open that the agent might believe without regard for evidence, hence evidential reasons lie outside the agent’s motivation, whereas the second view makes it the case that evidential reasons must necessarily always be 1 available upon reflection if we are to speak of belief.1 Both versions of evidentialism appear to imply that we must regard ourselves as having evidence for our beliefs (duly noting the ambiguity in “must” here). However, there are some kinds of belief for which I appear normally not to have any evidence, such as the belief that I see (or seem to see) a hand in front of me, or that I have a hand..

Humans have two kinds of beliefs, intuitive beliefs and reflective beliefs. Intuitive beliefs are a most fundamental category of cognition, defined in the architecture of the mind. They are formulated in an intuitive mental lexicon. Humans are also capable of entertaining an indefinite variety of higher-order or "reflective" propositional attitudes, many of which are of a credal sort. Reasons to hold "reflective beliefs" are provided by other beliefs that describe the source of the reflective belief as reliable, or that provide explicit arguments in favour of the reflective belief. The mental lexicon of reflective beliefs includes not only intuitive, but also reflective concepts.

I take as my starting point the evident fact that people are capable of modifying their beliefs in response to reasons in the course of deliberation. This fact is sufficient to make notions such as responsibility, blameworthiness, and praiseworthiness applicable to people with regard to their beliefs. If a state is such, and one is such, that one is capable of determining it through one’s best evaluations of reasons in the course of deliberation, then even if it isn’t under one’s voluntary control, it is attributable to one as something for which one is appropriately held accountable. There is thus conceptual space for the possibility of one’s conducting oneself poorly or well with regard to it, and accordingly for the application of praise or criticism. And there is room for an evaluation of whether one has conducted oneself responsibly or irresponsibly – that is, whether one has proceeded in a way that takes proper account of the considerations which one reasonably could have been expected to take account of, or not.

”Self-beliefs” are beliefs of the sort one ordinarily has about oneself, and expresses with the first person. These contrast with the beliefs one has in ”Casta˜neda cases,” in which one has a belief about oneself without knowing it. This paper advances an account of the nature of self-belief. According to this account, self-belief is a special case of interacting with things via notions that serve as repositories for information about objects with certain important relations to the knower, and as motivators for actions the success of which is dependent on the object in that relation to the agent. Identity is such a relation, and ”self-notions” play this special role: they are the repositories for information gained in normally self-informative ways, and the motivators of types of action whose success normally depends on facts about the agent. Self-beliefs involve such self-notions, while the beliefs that one has about oneself in Casta˜neda cases do not.