Believing Against the Evidence Agency and the Ethics of Belief [Hardcover]

The question of whether it is ever permissible to believe on insufficient evidence has once again become a live question. Greater attention is now being paid to practical dimensions of belief, namely issues related to epistemic virtue, doxastic responsibility, and voluntarism.

In this book, McCormick argues that the standards used to evaluate beliefs are not isolated from other evaluative domains. The ultimate criteria for assessing beliefs are the same as those for assessing action because beliefs and actions are both products of agency. Two important implications of this thesis, both of which deviate from the dominant view in contemporary philosophy, are 1) it can be permissible (and possible) to believe for non-evidential reasons, and 2) we have a robust control over many of our beliefs, a control sufficient to ground attributions of responsibility for belief.

Introduction  Part I: Doxastic Norms  1. Conceptual Defenses of Evidentialism  2. Normative Defenses of Evidentialism  3. Unity of Norms: A Defense of Pragmatism  Part II: Doxastic Responsibility  4. The Puzzle of Doxastic Responsibility  5. Responsibility without Voluntary Control  6. The Possibility of Doxastic Agency  Conclusion

If McCormicks case for her two main theses strikes you as highly plausible, you are not alone: this book very effectively criticizes much of contemporary orthodoxy...Anyone henceforth interested in questions about agency, and its relation to normativity, will need to engage with McCormicks important book. -- Ram Neta, forthcoming in Mind

McCormick does an outstanding job drawing our attention to questions about the ultimate basis for epistemic normativity and the extent of our control over belief. --Peter J. Graham, Notre Dame lób