Eleanna Tzeraki
KU Leuven
A powerful argument against pragmatism about reasons for belief comes in the form of an impossibility claim: practical motivations are simply irrelevant to a process of belief formation through deliberative reasoning; the only way to be convinced of the truth of a proposition, e.g. that God exists, is by acknowledging enough evidence in favor of its being true, even in the face of infinite practical gain from belief. This phenomenon has been referred to as “transparency”, a psychological feature of belief that makes it so that the deliberative questions about “whether to believe that p” must give way to the question “whether p is true”. Nishi Shah (2006) undertakes an influential defense of evidentialism about reasons for belief by invoking the feature of transparency and positing a conceptual argument about the truth-aiming nature of belief as the best explanation for transparency.
First, I will show that the argument from impossibility ignores not only the crux of the pragmatist challenge, namely that certain epistemically unjustified beliefs may be justified in another normative context, but also the way in which our agency as authors of our actions may constitute our agency as authors of our beliefs. While believing is not intentional, it can be the intended result of intentional actions, which is a matter of great import in the ethics of belief.
Shah’s argument relies on the assumption that doxastic deliberation can only be resolved by the formation of belief. This contrasts with the standard account of deliberation about action, which is said to be resolved by an intention to act and not by the action itself. I will argue that this assumption, which I will call the doxastic exceptionalism thesis (DET), is unjustified, as it neglects the possibility of agnosticism as a deliberative outcome and it conflates the decision to believe that p, through deliberation that is responsive to practical interests, with the separate deliberative process about which means to adopt to produce the target belief.
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SOPhiA 2026 