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Responsible Belief and Our Social Institutions

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 January 2009

René van Woudenberg
René van Woudenberg
Affiliation:
VU University, Amsterdam
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Abstract

The idea that we can properly be held responsible for what we believe underlies large stretches of our social and institutional life; without that idea in place, social and institutional life would be unthinkable, and more importantly, it would stumble and fall. At the same time, philosophers have argued that this idea is strange, puzzling, beyond belief, false, meaningless or at any rate defective. The first section develops the alleged problem. The burden of this paper, however, is not to discuss the merits of this idea but rather to measure the damage in case the idea turns out to be defective indeed. This is done by substantiating the claim that this idea indeed underlies large and important stretches of our social and institutional life. Section 2 substantiates that claim by presenting the results of a web search on the use of what I call “deontological epistemic expressions”, i.e. expressions in which deontological and epistemological notions (both broadly construed) are combined; examples are “obligation to believe”, “not permitted to forget”, “right to know”. The ubiquitous use of these expressions, I argue, is linguistic evidence for the claim that the contested idea indeed pervades our social life. Linguistic evidence, however, can be frail and misleading. From the fact that we say that the shade is moving we cannot conclude that shades really exist; likewise it may not be permitted to conclude from the ubiquitous use of deontological epistemic expressions that there really are doxastic obligations (and hence doxastic responsibilities). The third section, therefore, moves beyond the linguistic evidence and discusses two social institutions, viz. education and law as we find them in modern Western societies, and argues that they cannot be made sense of unless the contested idea is in place. Educational and legal systems of course vary greatly throughout the Western world. Such differences as exist, however, are irrelevant for the claim I will be making in this paper. The final section states the conclusion.

Type
Research Article
Information
Philosophy , Volume 84 , Issue 1 , January 2009 , pp. 47 - 73
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy 2009

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References

1 So there are three notions here: obligation (or duty), permission and prohibitions. These notions are interdefinable: if doing X is required, then not doing X is both prohibited and not permitted. And if doing X is prohibited, then not doing X is both required and not permitted. Finally, if doing X is permitted, then not doing X is neither required, nor prohibited.

2 I abstract here from God, gods and other beings that conceivably might have the sort of voluntary control that is denied to humans.

3 Alston, William P., Beyond ‘Justification’. Dimensions of Epistemic Evaluation (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2005): 60Google Scholar.

4 Alston, op. cit.: 62–7.

5 Williams, Bernard, “Deciding to Believe”, in: idem, Problems of the Self (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1972)Google Scholar.

6 Talk about ‘responsible’ can be confusing for the following reason: if you are responsible for X, then doing or bringing about X can be a responsible thing to do, but it can also be an irresponsible thing to do. You can be responsible for X, while, by doing or bringing about X, you behaved irresponsibly.

7 Related principles can be obtained by permutations of the negation, e.g. “If one Bs what one has a duty not to B, one can be properly held responsible, i.e. blamed, for B-ing”, etc.

8 Unless indicated otherwise, all sentences in this section that appear between double quotation marks, are quotations from the web.

9 This point is beautifully made by Foley, Richard, “What am I to believe?”, in Wagner, Steven J. & Warner, Richard (eds.), Naturalism: A Critical Appraisal (Notre Dame: UNDP, 1993): 147–162Google Scholar.

10 Wolterstorff, E.g. Nicholas, “Obligations of Belief—Two Concepts”, in Hahn, Lewis E. (ed.), The Philosophy of Roderick M. Chisholm (Chicago & La Salle: Open Court, 1997): 232–3Google Scholar.

11 http://www.nizkor.org/hweb/imt/tgmwc/tgmwc-09/tgmwc-09-88-01.shtml

12 This is only a first approximation of ignorance—for one not any lack of knowledge qualifies as ignorance. For instance: one may have the true belief that p, but one's belief isn't justified or warranted; then one lacks knowledge, but one isn't ignorant with respect to p. See for this author, “Excusing Conditions for False Beliefs: Ignorance and Force”, forthcoming in American Philosophical Quarterly.

13 “I shall write that down, lest I forget it” is a common but peculiar saying. It allows the possibility that what one has forgotten in one sense (‘inability to remember’) gets not forgotten in another sense (‘thinking about something in time’). I have forgotten about the meeting, but a chance glance on my calender reminds me of it; I make it to the meeting in time and accordingly have not forgotten to go.

14 Levitt, Cf. Mairi, Chadwick, R. and Shickle, D. (eds.) 1997. The Right to Know and the Right not to Know, (Avebury: Aldershot)Google Scholar.

15 This paragraph is inspired by Wolterstorff, Nicholas, “Obligation, Entitlement, and Rationality”, in: Steup, Matthias & Sosa, Ernest (eds.), Contemporary Debates in Epistemology (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005)Google Scholar.

16 According to Williamson, Timothy (Knowledge and its Limits, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000: 249–55)Google Scholar knowledge is the rule of assertion. But at the very least in educational contexts that doesn't seem to be the case. In an examination situation it is not inappropriate to assert, in response to a question, what one merely believes to be true. Consider, for example, a multiple choice question. Checking one of the answers counts as an assertion on the part of the student. But when the student doesn't really know the answer, it isn't inappropriate for him just to make a guess; it would be inappropriate, though, to check (so: to assert) none of the answers.

17 I have been thinking mainly of institutions for intellectual learning where the performances mainly have to do with the acquisition of knowledge. There grades are implicit expressions of praise and blame for what students believe, etc. In institutions for practical learning grading too implicitly expresses praise and blame—not, however, for what students believe or know, but for whatever skills they have acquired.

18 Reid, Thomas, Essays on the Active Powers of the Human Mind (ed. Brody, Baruch, Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 1969): 94–200Google Scholar.

19 And let us suppose that the belief and the action are related in the appropriate way—whatever that may turn out to be.

20 In the present context we can think, with Goldman, Alvin, of ignorance as “The absence of true belief” (see his Knowledge in a Social World. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1999: 5)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Within this broad description of ignorance, however, falls a rather rich diversity of phenomena. See for this René van Woudenberg, “Excusing Conditions for False Beliefs: Ignorance and Force” (forthcoming in American Philosophical Quarterly).

21 This objection was posed by a referee for this journal.

22 Dretske, Fred, “Epistemic Operators”, Journal of Philosophy 67 (1970): 1003–1013CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

23 For comments and discussion thanks are due to Robert Audi, Martijn Blaauw, Terence Cuneo, Rik Peels, Alvin Plantinga, Jeroen de Ridder, Fritz Warfield, and Nicholas Wolterstorff. I thankfully acknowledge that work on this paper was supported by a Plantinga Fellowship at the University of Notre Dame.