EPISTEMIC AGENCY: SOME DOUBTS

Many philosophers hold that we exercise some form of epistemic agency: that we can be active, rather than passive, in relation to our beliefs. This conviction is expressed in various ways. Sometimes, it involves appeal to the Kantian idea of spontaneity. Unlike perception, which is a receptive faculty, the understanding is spontaneous and in a certain way free, though its freedom does not contrast with, but rather consists in, determination by reason.1 At other times, what is said to be active is inference. A representative discussion treats inferring a conclusion as "a person-level, conscious, voluntary mental action" (Boghossian forthcoming: §2). Still others focus on "judgements [as] actions, normally done for reasons" (Peacocke 1999: 19). "To make a judgement is the fundamental way to form a belief (or to endorse it when it is being reassessed). Judgement is a conscious rational activity, done for reasons, where these reasons are answerable to a fundamental goal of judgement, that it aims at truth" (Peacocke 1999: 238).2 Finally, some insist that "believing itself is an exercise of agency, one for which the subject bears a characteristically agential sort of responsibility" (Boyle 2011a: 121).3 This despite the fact that believing is not an event or process in our lives, but a state or condition we are sometimes in.