Belief and Cognitive Agency: Making Room for Epistemic Normativity

Some events in our lives are things that we do, what philosophers call exercises of agency. Other events are things that simply happen to us. Distinct forms of normative assessment are appropriate to each of these categories; if something good happens to me I am fortunate, for instance, while if I do something good I may as a result be worthy of praise. Into which of these categories does the mental attitude of belief fall? Much of our everyday practice of epistemic evaluation, as well as the philosophical literature, treat beliefs implicitly or explicitly as exercises of agency. On the other hand, beliefs seemingly fail to meet widely accepted criteria for identifying exercises of agency developed with cases of ordinary physical action in mind. For instance, a belief is not (it seems) under the believer’s direct voluntary control; one cannot simply adopt a belief at will. The result is a mismatch between theory and application, one that threatens both our understanding of the nature of agency and the propriety of our epistemic assessments. In this dissertation I aim to resolve this apparent conflict by offering a unified account of the nature of belief, of agency, and of some of the normative standards governing belief. On this account, beliefs are subject to just the same sort of voluntary control as more typical examples of exercises of agency. Such control, I argue, is a matter of the belief’s being adopted as an agent’s means to some end. The limits to agents’ discretion over belief result from the fact that only attitudes directed at certain particular ends constitute beliefs; but this, I claim, is a limit on agents’ discretion over even paradigmatic exercises of agency. I further argue that this view of beliefs as essentially means to agents’ ends allows us to make sense of much of the normativity of belief as a special case of the instrumental normativity familiar from the practical sphere; we can for instance understand the rationality of belief as a matter of the skill with which an agent adopts means in pursuit of her epistemic ends.Doctor of Philosoph