Research
My research interests are in social epistemology, ethics, and issues of normativity and responsibility generally. My dissertation research is on doxastic responsibility, that is, responsibility for belief. A summary of my dissertation can be found below, as can individual abstracts for each dissertation chapter.
Dissertation Abstract
Imagine someone who was raised to hold a number of irrational and objectionable beliefs. There seems to be an important sense in which they lack control over these beliefs, and so we might think they are not responsible for them. But many of our beliefs are like this: they are the product of forces beyond our control. And yet we generally think that we are responsible for most of our beliefs. What, then, is the nature of the responsibility we bear for our beliefs?
I argue that such responsibility has a crucial social component: part of being responsible for our beliefs is being responsible to others. The ways in which humans socially depend on one another means that our responsibility for our beliefs is bound up with our relations to others. I further contend that responsibility for belief should be understood first and foremost as a form of answerability: we are responsible for our beliefs in the sense that we can be “called to answer” for them. Understanding responsibility for belief in terms of answerability, I argue, allows us to capture the importantly social features of such responsibility that often go overlooked.
The novel part of the view I develop is that answerability in fact has two dimensions that should be understood differently: an individual and an interpersonal dimension. I argue that the individual dimension should be understood differently than most other views. Namely, while most views hold that this dimension is grounded in some form of control that we can exercise over our beliefs, I argue that we are answerable for our beliefs as long as they reflect our evaluative commitments and dispositions, or are products of our reasoning, where this does not amount to a form of control. By contrast, we are not answerable for our sneezes or muscle spasms, since they do not reflect our commitments or reasoning. What matters for the individual dimension of answerability, then, is not whether we can control our beliefs, but whether they reflect our ‘take’ on the world and on what is valuable.
I next argue that responsibility for belief has a second, largely neglected dimension: the interpersonal dimension of answerability, which is bound up with the nature of human sociality. I develop an account of the social features of the interpersonal dimension, which I suggest must be captured by any complete account of responsibility for belief. I argue that the interpersonal dimension of answerability—that being responsible for our beliefs involves being responsible to others—is grounded in what I call our relations of doxastic dependence. As social creatures, we depend (and indeed, typically must depend) on one another in our capacity as believers. We depend on one another as believers not only in epistemic ways—such as for reliable testimony—but also in practical ways, because our beliefs inform and motivate our actions, and allow us to participate in shared practical goals. We depend on one other not only for information about how to get to the train station, or whether it will rain later, but also as teammates engaged in a common project, or as students who depend on their teachers. Depending on one another in these ways is an unavoidable part of the collective project of pursuing epistemic and practical success, and it makes us vulnerable to both epistemic and moral harm. It is because of this, I argue, that answerability has interpersonal normative force upon us: we are subject to legitimate expectations associated with participating in relations and practices of dependence, where this sometimes involves owing reasons to others.
While the individual and interpersonal dimensions of answerability are importantly distinct in various ways, they form a unified whole. Responsibility for belief, as answerability, is a single phenomenon with two facets. As a result, any complete account of responsibility for belief must capture both dimensions. This means, then, that giving a complete account here involves adopting a thoroughly social perspective on our epistemic and doxastic lives. By revealing the often overlooked interpersonal dimension of responsibility for belief, my account allows us both to avoid various complications surrounding the issue of control and to do justice to the social nature of responsibility.
Chapter Abstracts
Chapter 1: “A Social Solution to the Puzzle of Doxastic Responsibility”
Abstract: I argue that doxastic responsibility has a crucial social component: part of being responsible for our beliefs is being responsible to others. I suggest that this responsibility in fact has two dimensions that should be understood differently: an individual and an interpersonal dimension. I argue that the individual dimension should be understood differently than most other views: while most views hold that this dimension is grounded in some form of control that we can exercise over our beliefs, I argue that we are answerable for our beliefs as long as they reflect our evaluative commitments and dispositions, or are products of our reasoning, where this does not amount to a form of control. I next argue that responsibility for belief has a second, largely neglected dimension: the interpersonal dimension, which is bound up with the nature of human sociality. I argue that the interpersonal dimension is grounded in what I call our relations of doxastic dependence. As social creatures, we depend (and indeed, typically must depend) on one another in our capacity as believers. We depend on one another as believers not only in epistemic ways—such as for reliable testimony—but also in practical ways, because our beliefs inform and motivate our actions, and allow us to participate in shared practical goals. Depending on one another in these ways is an unavoidable part of cooperating in the shared project of pursuing epistemic and practical success, and it makes us vulnerable to both epistemic and moral harm. It is because of this, I argue, that answerability has interpersonal normative force upon us: we are subject to legitimate expectations associated with participating in relations and practices of dependence, where this sometimes involves owing reasons to others.
Chapter 2: “Doxastic Responsibility, Guidance Control, and Ownership of Belief”
Abstract: The contemporary debate over responsibility for belief is divided over the issue of whether such responsibility requires doxastic control, and whether this control must be voluntary in nature. It has recently become popular to hold that responsibility for belief does not require voluntary doxastic control, or perhaps even any form of doxastic ‘control’ at all. However, Miriam McCormick has recently argued that doxastic responsibility does in fact require quasi-voluntary doxastic control: “guidance control,” a complex, compatibilist form of control. In this paper, I pursue a negative and a positive task. First, I argue that grounding doxastic responsibility in guidance control requires too much for agents to be the proper targets for attributions of doxastic responsibility. I will focus my criticisms on three cases in which McCormick’s account gives the intuitively wrong verdict. Second, I develop a modified conception of McCormick’s notion of “ownership of belief,” which I call Weak Doxastic Ownership. I employ this conception to argue that responsibility for belief is possible even in the absence of guidance control. In doing so, I argue that the notion of doxastic ownership can do important normative work in grounding responsibility for belief without being subsumed under or analyzed in terms of the notion of doxastic control.
Chapter 3: “Doxastic Responsibility, Answerability, and Blame”
Abstract: This chapter argues that various recent accounts of doxastic responsibility are too conservative: that is, they require too much for agents to be responsible for their beliefs, which in turn makes it too easy to be excused from such responsibility. I consider a central case about which I argue these views give implausible verdicts. I then survey four different conceptions or models of responsibility, arguing that at least one of them can survive and be fruitfully applied to the central case, even in the face of skepticism about the others. Finally, I offer a diagnosis of the aforementioned views: namely, they might plausibly be understood as articulating conditions on doxastic blame, not doxastic responsibility. In doing so, I argue for a principle of normative independence: that is, doxastic blame and doxastic responsibility are independent and questions about them can be treated separately. This means that we can be more liberal about the conditions on responsibility for belief, even if we want to maintain a normatively ‘high bar’ for proper ascriptions of doxastic blame.
Chapter 4: “What is Doxastic Control (and is it Required for Doxastic Responsibility?)
Abstract: It has become popular to hold that, while we lack voluntary or intentional control over belief, we nevertheless have the capacity for some non-voluntary, non-intentional, or non-volitional form of doxastic or attitudinal control, which is that in virtue of which we are responsible for our beliefs. However, this general answer to the “in virtue of” question is complicated by the fact that there is great diversity and plurality in the conceptions of non-voluntary doxastic--or, more broadly, attitudinal--control that have been offered in the literature, and it is not especially clear whether these various conceptions of control all refer to the same phenomenon. This paper has three aims. The first is to canvas a number of conceptions of non-voluntary doxastic control in the literature and offer a kind of schematic account of what seems to unify them: the ability to form, maintain, and, most importantly, revise one’s beliefs in response to (typically epistemic) reasons—what I call revisional control. The second aim of the paper is to consider whether such control is required for doxastic responsibility. I argue that, for at least one important form of responsibility, such control is not required, and that the form of responsibility for which it may plausibly be required is overly narrow. Finally, I argue that revisional control is better understood as a condition on a belief being (ir)responsible, rather than being a necessary condition on responsibility for belief. I suggest that this has the interesting implication that one can be responsible for a belief without the belief being either responsibly or irresponsibly held.
Chapter 5: “Epistemic Responsibility with a Human Face: Answerability and Non-Ideal Social Epistemology”
The notion of answerability, understood as a model of responsibility, has made its way into discussions of epistemic or doxastic, not only moral, responsibility. Some have suggested that responsibility for belief can be understood in terms of answerability. But the notion of answerability is also nicely situated to do work within applied or non-ideal social epistemology. In particular, answerability is a helpful tool for analyzing and understanding real-world social practices of giving and exchanging reasons, and norms of social accountability. In this paper, I argue that practices of answerability are tied to practices of epistemic policing within communities, both of which are in turn connected to a community’s epistemic health. Practices of answerability aid in epistemic policing efforts, I suggest, which aim to improve or maintain the health of communities. As a result, understanding how the norms of answerability are socially implemented, and how they can be flouted or misused, can help us understand and diagnose various kind of social-epistemic ills. I also suggest that one such social-epistemic ill is a form of epistemic injustice, and so the notion of answerability is also relevant to the large literature on this kind of injustice.