Sebastián Sánchez-Martínez
TU Dresden
In this presentation, I defend a dual account about voluntary control for simplification in reasoning. Human reasoners simplify by disregarding complex rules or omitting information in both theoretical and practical reasoning. For instance, when forming beliefs, people disregard skeptical scenarios as well as ordinary doubts. Equally, when making decisions, people omit considering numerous complications. Given that in a world of overabundance of information our reasoning could become intractably complex, the phenomenon of simplification is highly consequential in epistemology. Together with an appeal to clear cases where simplification is done voluntarily, authors in the literature about simplified reasoning have defended that involuntary doxastic states, like belief, cannot be in charge of simplification. Call this view voluntarism about simplification, because it says that only voluntary doxastic states can fulfill the simplification role. However, my contention is that the possibility of voluntary simplification is paradoxically insufficient for real simplification. In particular, if the phenomenon is conceptualized as a fundamentally voluntary phenomenon, then the voluntary doxastic state needs to also be deliberately controlled to prevent it from getting more complex than necessary, and a vicious regress ensues. I provide a decision model of this regress, together with an appeal to both deliberate and automatic regress-stopping policies. Given that there are clear cases of voluntary simplification, I conclude that a dual-control view about simplification must be true: we should allow for both voluntary and involuntary doxastic states to play a simplification role. My dual account is amicable to non-ideal methodologies in epistemology that call for psychologically realistic theorizing, but it also provides an explicit model of how simplification happens.
Chair: Clement Mayambala
Time: 14:00-14:30
Location: SR 1.003
SOPhiA 2026 