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The Illusion of Exclusivity
Author(s) -
McHugh Conor
Publication year - 2015
Publication title -
european journal of philosophy
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.42
H-Index - 36
eISSN - 1468-0378
pISSN - 0966-8373
DOI - 10.1111/ejop.12032
Subject(s) - doxastic logic , illusion , proposition , deliberation , epistemology , illusion of control , control (management) , philosophy , psychology , computer science , cognitive psychology , social psychology , artificial intelligence , political science , law , politics
It is widely held that when you are deliberating about whether to believe some proposition p , only considerations relevant to the truth of p can be taken into account as reasons bearing on whether to believe p and motivate you accordingly. This thesis of exclusivity has significance for debates about the nature of belief, about control of belief, and about certain forms of evidentialism. In this paper I distinguish a strong and a weak version of exclusivity. I provide reason to think that strong exclusivity is an illusion and that weak exclusivity may also be an illusion. I describe a number of cases in which exclusivity seems not to hold, and I show how an illusion of exclusivity may be generated by a rather different feature of doxastic deliberation, which I call demandingness .