Maria Fuelberth
Affiliation: Universität Konstanz
Category: Philosophy
Keywords: doxastic voluntarism, doxastic control, doxastic responsibility, philosophy of mind, moral psychology, evaluativism, motivation, epistemic values for belief formation, mental action
Date: Friday 5th of September
Time: 15:00
Location: Room 232 (232)
View the full session: Deliberation
Contemporary debates on doxastic responsibility and control often treat beliefs in a way that disconnects the concept from the believer and their agency. I think this is a mistake. I want to put the subject back into action by proposing the idea that belief formation is a (mostly habitual) mental action, governed by mental habits and skills. Control in this framework is an ability of the believer, not a characteristic of beliefs. The aim of this paper is to show how Peter Carruthers’ account of valence as representation of value (evaluativism) and motivational pluralism (Human Motives, 2024) provide essential support my Hybrid Intentional Control (HIC) account of belief formation. I claim, the believer is motivated to execute control by experiencing negative valence which is a representation of the key value for responsible belief formation: epistemic conscientiousness, binding it to the evidence guaranteeing mind-to-world direction of fit. Rooted in dual processing theory of cognition, the HIC-account proposes a formation process with a feedback-loop alternating between indirect and direct intentional control by switching between type 1 and type 2 thinking processes, which has an evaluative release mechanism through prospection, allowing direct intentional control of the deliberation process while leaving the evaluative step to be intentionally but only indirectly controlled. Three necessary and jointly sufficient conditions trigger the decision to execute control: C1: The specific situation is judged to be a high stakes situation. A situation is a high stakes situation because it is important to the individual. C2: The prospection experience of the adopted belief turning out to be false, is negative. It has negative valence. C3: The risk of forming a false belief involved in this belief formation process is above the personal risk tolerance threshold. Belief formation begins when type 1 thinking encounters an inquiry trigger to form a belief, uses perceptual and other readily available information in a habitual assessment for belief inquiries, and then engages in prospection (the evaluative release mechanism) of the belief in question turning out to be false. If prospection reveals C1 – C3 are met, the feedback-loop is triggered through a negative valence experience. The negative valence experience pushes into consciousness initiating the switch to type 2 thinking enabling the direct process control ability. Type 2 thinking uses deliberation skills to reassess the evidence. Direct control switches to indirect through type 1 thinking, where the evaluative release mechanism engages prospection again. (a) If prospection reveals C1 – C3 are still met, the feedback loop repeats; (b) if prospection reveals C1 – C3 are no longer (all) met, the evaluative release mechanism opens the feedback-loop, stopping control; the currently best supported doxastic position is adopted as belief. The importance of valence connects the account the Charruthers’ evaluativism account and his motivational pluralism: When an agent gets confronted with a stimulus (input), it gets appraised against their stored values. The output of this process is valence, that gets attached to the stimulus. The stimulus is now represented as non-conceptionally good or bad based on the agent’s stored values. A positive valence leads to a motivation to acquire the stimulus, while a negative valence leads to a motivation to avoid the stimulus. Valence then features together with considerations of likelihood and cost in the decision-making. If we align both processes with each other, the confrontation with the question whether to believe p and the initial analysis of the evidence situation happens before Carruthers account connects. From there, I claim, we can identify the stimulus with the prospection of believing that p and that belief turning out to be false. This stimulus then gets appraised against the believers stored values, which here are epistemic values, specifically epistemic conscientiousness. Finally, the output from that appraisal is an anticipatory valence experience, which represents the stimulus as non-conceptually good or bad based on the stored values it was appraised against. The valence experience, together with likelihood and costs carries the motivational force, that determines the further behaviour of the believer. In case of a positive valence experience and tolerable risks and costs, the belief formation process will run through uninterrupted without control execution and the belief is adopted. Often this process is not fully or at all conscious. When the prospection and appraisal process return a negative valence experience, one of the three conditions is met (C2). If there is also a high likelihood (C3) and high enough costs (C1) all conditions for control execution are met. This pushes the question into conscious type 2 processing, where the negative valence carries a motivation to avoid the expected negative outcome of adopting a false belief. If he agent now decides to execute control, they start the feedback-loop by reopening the evidence evaluation and engaging in conscious, intentional deliberation. I claim, that while the value system active in the belief formation process plausibly contains a multitude of epistemic values, epistemic conscientiousness plays the key role for the motivation to execute control. This is because the entire process around the execution of control is primarily about the believer’s justification for believing that p. Believing that p and that belief turning out to be false is only a problem for the believer (would yield a negative anticipatory valence), if they falsely believe that p because they were careless or did not do their due diligence to put themselves in the best possible position attainable in a given context to acquire a true belief. This binds the motivating impulse for the agent to execute control to the evidential state of the belief in question and thereby guarantees mind-to-world direction of fit. I argue that with this framework in place, it is possible to differentiate between believers who were deceived or manipulated or just made a mistake while doing everything to appropriately observe epistemic consciousness and who are thus not responsible for holding a false belief and those believers who do so because of careless inattentiveness, ignorance, or intentional abuse of their own psychological processes and should therefore be held fully responsible for their epistemic shortcomings.