Speaker Series: Alex Worsnip, “Believing at Will as a Failure of Coherence”

Alex Worsnip (Yale University), will present a talk, “Believing at Will as a Failure of Coherence”, on Monday, February 2 from 1:00 – 3:00 p.m. in Caldwell 213. A reception will follow.

Abstract:

This paper is about a classic puzzle: why is it so hard to believe something at will – that is (for the purposes of this paper) directly and consciously on the basis of pragmatic considerations? I have three, highly interrelated, contentions. First, I argue that philosophers have tended to overstate both the strength and the generality of the claim that believing at will is difficult. Second, I cast doubt on the popular thought that the difficulty of believing at will can be explained by the substantive norms associated with belief – that belief is subject to a norm of truth, that it “aims” at truth, or even that only evidential reasons can be normative reasons for belief. Third, I suggest that we can do better by examining particular coherence requirements associated with belief. I argue that believing at will, in the paradigm cases, would require one to be incoherent in a way that is transparent to oneself – and that, more generally, transparent incoherence is hard for agents to sustain. In the conclusion, I highlight how the case study of believing at will illustrates the theoretical fruitfulness of distinguishing substantive normative reasons from coherence requirements, and how the latter are poised to play explanatory roles that the former are not.