WIP: Kate Nolfi

What Does it Take for our Belief to be Responsive To Reasons?

The kinds of mental processing that gives rise to and sustain our beliefs, much like the kinds mental processing that give rise to and sustain our perceptual experiences, are causal processes that constitute apt targets for empirical investigation in cognitive science and psychology.  But philosophers take our beliefs, unlike our perceptual experiences, to be response to reasons and, as such, not merely the causal products of certain kinds of mental processing.  In virtue of what does the way in which we regulate our beliefs count as responsive to reasons?  I this paper I develop a familiar idea about what responsiveness to reasons requires in a new direction to identify features of the cognitive processing that gives rise to and sustains our beliefs in virtue of which our it makes sense to think of our beliefs as being responsive to reasons.  Thus, I offer here a psychologically plausible account of what our beliefs’ responsiveness to reasons involves.