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No Epistemic Norm or Aim Needed

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 September 2020

Marianna Bergamaschi Ganapini Open the ORCID record for Marianna Bergamaschi Ganapini [Opens in a new window]
Marianna Bergamaschi Ganapini*
Affiliation:
Union College and Montreal AI Ethics Institute, Montreal, Canada
*
Email: bergamam@union.edu
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Abstract

Many agree that one cannot consciously form a belief just because one wants to. And many also agree this is a puzzling component of our conscious belief-forming processes. I will look at three views on how to make sense of this puzzle and show that they all fail in some way. I then offer a simpler explanation that avoids all the pitfalls of those views, which is based instead on an analysis of our conscious reasoning combined with a commonly accepted account of the concept of belief. I conclude that no epistemic norm or aim is actually needed to explain why we cannot deliberatively believe whatever we want.

Keywords

Beliefaimnormreasoning
Type
Article
Information
Episteme , Volume 19 , Issue 3 , September 2022 , pp. 337 - 352
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Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2020. Published by Cambridge University Press

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