A Social Approach to Doxastic Responsibility

Osborne, Robert Carry

doi:https://doi.org/10.21985/n2-dhq7-fx03

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A Social Approach to Doxastic Responsibility

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Imagine someone who was raised to hold a number of irrational and objectionable beliefs. There seems to be an important sense in which they lack control over these beliefs, and so we might think they are not responsible for them. But many of our beliefs are like this: they are the product of forces beyond our control. And yet we generally think that we are responsible for most of our beliefs. What, then, is the nature of the responsibility we bear for our beliefs? I argue that such responsibility has a crucial social component: part of being responsible for our beliefs is being responsible to others. The ways in which humans socially depend on one another means that our responsibility for our beliefs is bound up with our relations to others. I further contend that responsibility for belief should be understood first and foremost as a form of answerability: we are responsible for our beliefs in the sense that we can be “called to answer” for them. Understanding responsibility for belief in terms of answerability, I argue, allows us to capture the importantly social features of such responsibility that often go overlooked. The novel part of the view I develop is that answerability in fact has two dimensions that should be understood differently: an individual and an interpersonal dimension. I argue that the individual dimension should be understood differently than most other views. Namely, while most views hold that this dimension is grounded in some form of control that we can exercise over our beliefs, I argue that we are answerable for our beliefs as long as they reflect our evaluative commitments and dispositions, or are products of our reasoning, where this does not amount to a form of control. What matters for the individual dimension of answerability, then, is not whether we can control our beliefs, but whether they reflect our ‘take’ on the world and on what is valuable. I next argue that responsibility for belief has a second, largely neglected dimension: the interpersonal dimension of answerability, which is bound up with the nature of human sociality. I develop an account of the social features of the interpersonal dimension, which I suggest must be captured by any complete account of responsibility for belief. I argue that the interpersonal dimension of answerability—that being responsible for our beliefs involves being responsible to others—is grounded in what I call our relations of doxastic dependence. As social creatures, we depend (and indeed, typically must depend) on one another in our capacity as believers. We depend on one another as believers not only in epistemic ways—such as for reliable testimony—but also in practical ways, because our beliefs inform and motivate our actions, and allow us to participate in shared practical goals. We depend on one other not only for information about how to get to the train station, or whether it will rain later, but also as teammates engaged in a common project, or as students who depend on their teachers. Depending on one another in these ways is an unavoidable part of the collective project of pursuing epistemic and practical success, and it makes us vulnerable to both epistemic and moral harm. It is because of this, I argue, that answerability has interpersonal normative force upon us: we are subject to legitimate expectations associated with participating in relations and practices of dependence, where this sometimes involves owing reasons to others. While the individual and interpersonal dimensions of answerability are importantly distinct in various ways, they form a unified whole. Responsibility for belief, understood as answerability, is a single phenomenon with two facets. As a result, any complete account of responsibility for belief must capture both dimensions. This means, then, that giving a complete account involves adopting a thoroughly social perspective on our epistemic and doxastic lives. By revealing the often overlooked interpersonal dimension of responsibility for belief, my account allows us both to avoid various complications surrounding the issue of control and to do justice to the social nature of responsibility.

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