There are different ways in which, or reasons for which, you might be inclined to believe X. Essay by Michael Huemer

3. Inclinations to Believe 3.1. Types of Inclination There are different ways in which, or reasons for which, you might be inclined to believe X. You might be inclined to believe X because X just seems to be true. Or you might be inclined to believe X because X is emotionally comforting. Or because you think good people believe X. Or because your social group believes X. Notice how the last three are quite different from believing something because it seems correct. So here’s a theory: Unjustified beliefs result when non-appearance-based inclinations influence our credences or outright beliefs. Only appearances are (epistemically) justification-conferring. 3.2. Can We Control our Beliefs? Some philosophers would question whether we can control our beliefs and whether we can believe something on the basis of ordinary (non-epistemic) desires, such as the desire for emotional comfort, or to fit in, or to be a good person. Examples: If I offered you a million dollars to sincerely believe that you are a giraffe, I bet you still couldn’t do it. But maybe this only shows that you can’t believe for practical reasons when you have conclusive evidence that the proposition is false. So consider … If I offered you a million dollars to believe that the number of atoms in the universe is even, I bet you couldn’t do it. In #2, the evidence is evenly balanced; thus, if non-epistemic desires can ever influence belief, they should be able to do so in that example, right? It looks like they can’t, so desires can’t influence beliefs. 3.3. Doxastic Semi-voluntarism Consider two extreme positions: Doxastic Involuntarism: Desires can never have any influence on any beliefs. (Strong) Doxastic Voluntarism: Desires can influence beliefs just as easily as they influence ordinary actions. Neither of these is the case. What is correct is Doxastic Semi-voluntarism: Desires can influence beliefs sometimes, but their influence is limited. One cannot believe a thing that is too obviously false, or too obviously unjustified. There is a limit to how epistemically irrational a person can be, even if they want to (this limit varies across people). Thus, you can’t believe you are a giraffe, no matter the reward, because that’s obviously false. Nor can you believe the number of atoms is even, because that is obviously unjustified. But suppose that your child is accused of a heinous crime (say, deadnaming Caitlin Jenner). If the evidence is complex and hard to evaluate, so that it is not too obvious what the right judgment is, then it becomes much easier for your love for your child and desire to believe that she is good to influence your judgment, causing you to believe the child innocent even when the evidence does not justify this. There will be some degree of evidence that would induce you to admit that your child had committed the heinous act, but the evidentiary threshold will just be much higher than it would be for an impartial observer. Everyone knows that things like this can happen; that is why defendants’ family members are not allowed to sit on juries. If you try talking to a political ideologue some time and giving them evidence against their beliefs, you’ll probably become convinced that the same thing is happening to them. So the first thing that enables people to adopt unjustified beliefs is evidential ambiguity. There should be mixed evidence, evidence pointing in different directions, and it should be unclear how to weigh the evidence, perhaps because the evidence for and against X is of different kinds. 3.4. Confusing Feelings with Appearances In some cases, people may confuse their emotions with appearances. When you hear a claim that you don’t like, you may have an aversive reaction, which includes a sense of the clash between that claim and others of your current attitudes. E.g., you hear a negative claim about someone you like, or a positive one about someone you dislike. You might confuse that feeling with an appearance that the claim is factually wrong. Likewise, it is possible to confuse a positive feeling, a feeling of fit with your other current attitudes, with an appearance that a claim is correct. This, in turn, partially disguises the fact that your desired belief is unjustified; it makes this sufficiently unobvious that it becomes possible to adopt the belief. 4. Corruption of Belief-Forming Practices You’re obligated, before forming a belief on a controversial issue, to conduct a responsible inquiry. This typically requires things like: listening to both sides (or multiple sides), looking for counter-evidence, and trying to find objections to arguments that you are initially attracted to. Most people are terrible at this. They only listen to news sources who they already know agree with their political orientation; they accept evidence supporting their favored view at face value, while carefully scrutinizing only the evidence that undermines their favored view (if they happen to accidentally run into some); they don’t think about objections to their views but focus their attention on reasons for their views. This violation of epistemic norms stops many beliefs from being justified (the 3rd kind of irrationality mentioned in sec. 2). Why do people do these things? Again, doxastic semi-voluntarism is important. If involuntarism were true (so that only epistemic reasons could influence beliefs and not desires), then these measures would be impotent. E.g., you could still deliberately select news sources that already agree with you, but then your credences would automatically update on the fact that you did that, and that there were many other news sources that would very likely have given you evidence against your favored view, and that would prevent you from adopting a high credence in your favored view. On the other hand, if strong voluntarism were true (so that we could form beliefs based on our desires just as easily as we take actions based on our desires), then there would be no need for these measures. You would just directly believe X based on your desire to believe it, with no need to select evidence sources, direct your attention away from objections, etc. We do these things because our desires have some power to affect our beliefs, but only when it’s not too clear what epistemic rationality demands. 5. Conclusion Actually, it’s not hard to be irrational. Everybody has non-epistemic belief preferences—desires to believe something for reasons unrelated to truth or evidential justification. These have a limited, direct influence on our beliefs, which is most important when the evidence is ambiguous and when our feelings about a proposition can be confused with appearances. Desires can also directly influence how we conduct inquiry, enabling us to take advantage of our predictable cognitive shortcomings, such as the tendency to under-adjust for biases in our evidence sources. The beliefs that we form after such an inquiry are unjustified due to failure to satisfy obligations of responsible inquiry. This is bad because unjustified beliefs are more likely to be false, and false beliefs can wreak havoc. E.g., false political beliefs prevent us from solving social problems, and often make the problems worse. The mechanisms for generating unjustified beliefs will operate more or less automatically unless you make specific, positive efforts to stop them—which you should do to be a good person. That is why the points developed above are important to know. [After the above essay I might mention here that Michael Huemer is with the school of thought of the intuitionists which is different from the Kant Fries school and also different from Hegel. As for me I see value in all three schools and see each as relating to a different stratum of level of reality phenomenal world, the rational world and the world beyond reason the dinge an sich. All this along the lines of Plotinus the philosopher who was mainly with Plato but used modifications from Aristotle]