The Will in Belief

In Tamar Szabó Gendler, John Hawthorne, Julianne Chung & Alex Worsnip, Oxford Studies in Epistemology, Vol. 8. Oxford University Press (2026)
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Abstract

It’s bad to hang on to a belief in the face of good evidence that it’s false. That makes you dogmatic. Enter the classic dogmatism puzzle. The standard response? Go for defeat: new evidence can destroy old knowledge. But there are variants on the classic dogmatism puzzle which defeat can’t help with. Worse still, these puzzles threaten to undermine the standard defeatist solution to the classic puzzle. Call these the revenge puzzles. Two are already noted in the literature. In this paper, I introduce a third, particularly severe revenge puzzle. I then present a unified solution to the revenge puzzles. The solution motivates a boldly revisionary conception of belief: one on which belief involves the will.

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Rachel Elizabeth Fraser
University of Oxford

Citations of this work

Inquiry beyond knowledge.Bob Beddor - 2023 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 109 (1):330-356.

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References found in this work

Change in View: Principles of Reasoning.Gilbert Harman - 1986 - Cambridge, MA, USA: MIT Press.
Inquiry and Belief.Jane Friedman - 2019 - Noûs 53 (2):296-315.
The Limitations of the Open Mind.Jeremy Fantl - 2018 - Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.
The Toxin Puzzle.Gregory S. Kavka - 1983 - Analysis 43 (1):33-36.

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