Introduction to the special issue “Doxastic Agency and Epistemic Responsibility”

Abstract

In our everyday life we are holding each other responsible for what we believe and for how we form beliefs. Since there are many similarities between holding an agent responsible for her actions and holding an agent responsible for her beliefs, some epistemologists think that we can model epistemic responsibility, i.e., responsibility for a belief, along the lines ofmoral responsibility, i.e., responsibility for performing an action. Research onmoral responsibility suggests that a person can be held responsible for an action she has performed only if she had control over performing that action. Even though our practice of holding each other responsible for our beliefs is similar to our practice of holding each other responsible for our actions, our formation of a belief appears to be different to our performance of an action when it comes to our capacity to exercise control over it. Beliefs are mostly taken to be more or less passive responses to how the world appears to us, while in performing an action we shape the world, often as we intend it to be. This difference between actions and beliefs raises a problem when it comes to establishing a viable notion of epistemic responsibility along the lines of the notion of moral responsibility. Thus, we need to rethink our notion of epistemic responsibility, the kind of control necessary for responsibility, as well as the connection between epistemic responsibility and doxastic control. This special issue partially documents results of the two-day workshop “Doxastic Agency and Epistemic Responsibility” which took place at the Ruhr University Bochum in June 2014. It addresses questions such as: do we have the same kind of control over our doxastic attitudes as we have over our actions, what kind of control do we have over our doxastic attitudes and how is epistemic responsibility related to notions such as epistemic justification and practical responsibility?Most of the authors