Abstract
Many philosophers categorise judgment as a type of action. On the face of it, this claim is at odds with the seeming fact that judging a certain proposition is not something you can do voluntarily. I argue that we can resolve this tension by recognising a category of non-voluntary action. An action can be non-voluntary without being involuntary. The notion of non-voluntary action is developed by appeal to the claim that judging has truth as a constitutive goal. This claim, when combined with a conception of judging as a way of settling a question, explains both why judging is genuinely agential, and why it is nevertheless non-voluntary.
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Notes
More carefully: judgments are either events in conscious thought or events that have vehicles in conscious thought. For the distinction, see Soteriou (2007).
Eric Schwitzgebel has offered a very plausible account of belief along these lines, although he doesn’t claim that any of the dispositions associated with belief in p have a canonical status. See Schwitzgebel (2002).
See Soteriou (2007).
But perhaps not always. I leave it open that an event of accepting may fail to initiate a temporally extended conscious state of acceptance.
On the distinction between inquiry and judgment or belief-formation, see Owens (2000, pp. 18 ff.).
Including McDowell (1998), Peacocke (1999, 2008) and O'Brien (2007, e.g., p. 75). Descartes (1985a) also seems to be committed to this claim (see Sect. 3). Richard Moran (2001) appears to conceive of judgments as actions, or at least as exercises of rational agency in a full sense. Geach (1957) describes judgments as “acts”, as do Sellars (1967) and Soteriou (2005). The latter two withhold the label “action” in view of problems of the kind discussed in this paper, but nevertheless see judgments as episodic agentive performances. I will argue that they need not be so coy.
For the distinction between normative and motivating reasons, see Dancy (2002).
This does not obviously mean that the agent must conceptualise it as a reason for the action she performs.
That is, reasons for making particular judgments—for judging that p rather than not-p, say—are typically truth-conducive. Reasons for making a judgment as to whether p need not be truth-conducive. My reason for making a judgment as to whether p may simply be that it is important to me whether p.
This does not entail that thinkers have as a goal the following state of affairs: (For all p) (I judge p iff p). The goal of judging p iff p enters the picture once one has embarked on inquiring into whether p.
It could be denied that basic bodily actions, such as arm-raisings, are voluntary. I will leave this aside for two reasons. The first is dialectical. The objection I am dealing with in this paper is that judging cannot be an action because it is not voluntary. This objection has force only if many ordinary exemplars of action are voluntary. I want to show that this objection can be met, without denying that ordinary arm-raisings are voluntary. The second reason is substantive: it seems to me undeniable that ordinary, basic bodily actions are voluntary. This will become clear when I clarify the notion of voluntariness, below.
What I will deny is that voluntariness is essential to action. I have this in common with Pink (2003). Pink accepts that ordinary bodily actions are indeed voluntary, but claims that there are also non-voluntary actions (he focuses on deciding), and that the essence of action is not voluntariness, but goal-directedness. Although my focus is somewhat different from Pink's, and I do not offer a general account of agency and action, his approach can be seen as congenial to the view that I will defend regarding judgment.
See Owens (2000, Part 2) for a helpful discussion of different notions of voluntary action, and their application to the ‘doxastic voluntarism’ debate.
It would be compatible with this ‘will-based’ conception of voluntariness to claim that whenever an agent acts voluntarily, she does so for some motivating reason. One might claim this if one held that voluntariness is acting on one's desires, and that desiring to Φ itself gives an agent a motivating reason to Φ. On this view, there would be a necessary connection between voluntariness and reasons, but that connection would not be fundamentally constitutive of voluntariness, according to the will-based conception.
Note that it is far from obvious that desiring to Φ itself gives an agent a motivating reason to Φ, on the understanding of 'reason' that I am operating with.
See Descartes (1985b, Meditation Four, p. 18). One might be tempted to characterise this position in terms of the claim that you can decide to judge. However, as an anonymous referee pointed out to me, it is not clear that this is Descartes's view. Some read Descartes as maintaining that judging ('giving assent') is itself the performance of the will, and not something preceded by a distinct event of willing or deciding.
This understanding of voluntariness is explicit in Hieronymi (2009).
Guessing is discussed by Owens (2003), who argues that certain differences between guessing and believing suggest that the latter is not goal-directed in any interesting sense. I will deal in Sect. 7 with an analogue of Owens's argument, which relies on claims closely related to, but importantly distinct from, the claim being discussed at this point in the text.
I should also note that the claim being discussed here is distinct from the so-called 'transparency' claim, which is defended for the case of belief by Shah (2003). Applied to judgment, the claim would be that only (what the subject sees as) truth-conducive considerations can motivate judging. I will deny this claim in Sect. 7.
It might be claimed that there are no non-truth-regarding (non-evidential) reasons for judgment—that only evidence is relevant to whether one ought to judge. And it might be argued, then, that (Evidence 1 ) and (Evidence 2) are compatible with Voluntarism after all. The idea would be that you can judge for any reason that favours judging—it is just that only evidence ever favours judging. However, this objection misconstrues Voluntarism. Voluntarism claims that you can judge for any kind of reason that you take to favour judging (or for no reason at all). Even if no non-evidential reason ever favours judging, it is surely possible for thinkers to mistakenly take them to do so. Voluntarism would thus predict that thinkers could judge for those (purported) reasons.
I take what I say in this paper, about how judgments can be motivated, to be neutral on controversial questions about what normative reasons there can be for judgment.
Aristotle is discussing cases where agents perform actions that they do not know they are performing.
This, for example, is Owens's view (2000).
My summary of Hieronymi’s view omits some subtleties, but I hope it is not inaccurate.
See Hieronymi (2009, n. 4).
Hieronymi considers evaluative control to be a form of agency, but, like Sellars (1967) and Soteriou (2005), she reserves the term “action” for voluntary actions. Although this is partly a terminological matter—we all four agree that there are agentive performances that are not voluntary—there are substantive issues at stake too. Some might wish to argue that voluntariness is essential to action. It might be claimed that this is a truth about our concept action. This seems to me to be false (the thesis of this paper is not obviously incoherent); in any case it is hardly uncontroversial. I think that, if the overall account of judgment that I offer in this paper is correct, then my use of the word “action” is well justified. According to the account I offer, judgment shares a range of canonical agentive features with, for example, arm-raising. Its differences with arm-raising have their source in the constitutive role of a certain goal. While the constitutive role of this goal is incompatible with voluntariness, it is hard to see why it should ground a principled difference between action and non-action, unless one has a prior commitment to the thesis that all actions are voluntary. The role seems more apt to determine whether an action falls under a particular type or not.
The argument of this paragraph owes a great deal to Pink (2003). Something similar is briefly suggested by Hieronymi (2009).
Note that we don't decide to decide. Decisions are not themselves instances of agential self-determination in quite the same way that the voluntary actions decided upon are. The argument here does not suggest that all genuine actions must be preceded by actions of deciding—only that a certain familiar form of agency involves actions of deciding. Thus, this argument is compatible with the thesis that judging, which is not typically decided upon, is an action. Indeed, I will suggest that judging is importantly analogous to deciding itself. Pink (loc. cit.) holds that the essence of action is goal-directedness and that deciding counts as an action because it is goal-directed. I will be claiming that judging is goal-directed in the way characteristic of action.
Above, I used the role of decision in the determination of action to argue that deciding must itself be an action. One might worry that, since judgment has no such role in the determination of action, this conclusion cannot generalise to judgment. However, my claim was not that it is the role of deciding in the determination of action that makes it an action; rather, it was that this role constitutes evidence that it is an action.
One might hold, in any case, that judgment does have a role in self-determination, since it is by judging that you determine for yourself your beliefs. This would mesh with the view of Hieronymi (2008). She argues that, while voluntary actions reveal your moral personality, your beliefs, intentions and other ‘commitment-constituted attitudes’ constitute your moral personality. On the present suggestion, it is partly through non-voluntary actions such as judging and deciding that you determine your moral personality.
She suggests later in the paper that it is this “vulnerability” that, in the case of forming intentions, explains why it is not voluntary (p. 148).
See note 18 above.
Elsewhere, Hieronymi (2005) has distinguished between “constitutive” and “extrinsic” reasons for belief or other attitudes. She makes clear that only considerations relevant to whether p is true count as the right kind of reasons for belief. But she does not use the terms “goal” or “aim”.
Of course you can close your eyes, or do any number of other things, to avoid seeing X. But then you will not be looking in the right place. You do not have direct control over seeings—even though you have a great deal of indirect influence over them.
Perhaps visual experiences can be 'cognitively penetrated' by desires, so that what you desire affects what you see. This is not a form of agential control.
Note that any episode of consciously deciding is also goal-directed, although perhaps there is no particular goal that is constitutive of deciding. (A decision seems to aim at the goal that the action decided upon aims at.) Thus, this account is compatible with the view, canvassed above, that judging and deciding should be treated as analogous with respect to agency.
In fact, Evidence 1 is not obviously true of guessing either. This, I suggest, shows that guessing does not aim at truth in the same way that judging does. Rather, in guessing you aim for the state of affairs: if p then I guess that p. In any case, my aim here is to make clear that the claim that judging aims at the truth does not explain Evidence 2. The fact that I have glossed the aim of judging with a biconditional (you judge p iff p) does not help: on the face of it, having this biconditional state of affairs as an aim would be compatible with judging p when p is merely what you have most reason to think true. In what follows I will give an explanatory account of Evidence 2 that also provides further explanation, if it were needed, of Evidence 1.
Of course you might judge and then start doubting again. But this is not continuing doubt. Judging entails the absence of doubt, if only for a moment.
This also provides further illumination of how the goal of judging differs from that of guessing. See note 33 above.
See Moran (2001).
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Acknowledgements
For help in various forms, thanks to Fabian Dorsch, Anne Meylan, Matthew Nudds, Jesper Kallestrup and Till Vierkant. Thanks also to an anonymous reviewer from Philosophical Studies for very detailed and thoughtful comments. I received many helpful comments and questions when I presented versions of this paper in Edinburgh in March 2008, at the Epistemic Agency Conference in Geneva in April 2008, and at the Place of Epistemic Agents Conference in Madrid the following November, particularly from Matthew Chrisman, Jack Darach, Tom Crowther, Mikkel Gerken, Berislav Marusic, Joshue Orozco, Tony Booth and David Hunter. The preparation of this article was supported by the Agence Nationale de la Recherche, under the contract ANR-08.BLAN-0205-01.
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McHugh, C. Judging as a non-voluntary action. Philos Stud 152, 245–269 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-009-9478-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-009-9478-3