Ivan Catanzaro
University of Cologne / University of Salento
Following Christensen (2021), I call BRV the Belief-Relative Value account: it is rational for an agent to believe p iff believing p, rather than suspending or disbelieving p, would have the best expected consequences, given the agent’s beliefs. Susanna Rinard (2022) defends BRV as especially attractive for those who hold that rationality concerns what makes sense “from the inside”, from the agent’s own perspective.
I argue that this attraction is unstable. “From the agent’s own perspective” admits two readings. On a thin reading, a response makes sense from the inside when it is instrumentally intelligible relative to the agent’s beliefs and ends. On a thicker reading, it makes sense only if the operative standpoint is one the agent owns or inhabits as a source of normative authority. BRV can secure at most the thin notion. Yet its intuitive appeal often relies on the thicker one.
The gap emerges clearly in cases of alienated belief, where a belief is operative and guides action yet feels intrusive, estranged, or insufficiently one’s own. An obsessive belief, for instance, may render a response instrumentally intelligible from the agent’s beliefs while the standpoint generating it remains alien. Parallel structures arise in non-pathological cases, such as beliefs internalised through domination or forms of divided agency, where agents reject their operative ends and beliefs as products of oppression rather than endorse them as authoritative.
This objection does not refute BRV or vindicate antipragmatism. Its upshot is narrower: mere belief-relativity fails to capture the richer first-personal intelligibility that motivates BRV in the first place. Defenders thus face a dilemma: retain the view’s austerity, in which case it delivers only thin instrumental intelligibility; or enrich the notion of “perspective,” in which case it loses the simplicity that made it attractive.
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SOPhiA 2026 