Doxastic Agency and Epistemic Responsibility

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Heinrich Wansing
• Subject Area: Theoretical Philosophy
• Term: from 2015 to 2018
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 269646665

The project investigates some important concepts from epistemology, namely "doxastic agency" and "epistemic responsibility." Epistemic subjects, who hold beliefs and possess knowledge, are regarded not only as entertaining certain mental attitudes toward propositions, but as agents capable of making choices. This topic is today a central one in philosophy: on the one hand, contemporary theoretical philosophy has deeply investigated the connection between the practical dimension of responsibility and that of agency and knowledge; on the other hand, contemporary epistemology has developed a number of theories that deal with the these concepts. This project aims at integrating the basic concepts assumed in the epistemological debate with a formal apparatus that allows for a precise definition of such concepts and the rigorous checking of valid principles and verifiable statements. The project approaches epistemic responsibility of agents from the perspective of philosophical logic. In particular, the aim of the project is to provide clarification and new insights on three key issues: (i) the crucial distinction between a passive reception of updates and an active search for information; (ii) the connection between the idea that we could have formed our beliefs otherwise and the assessment of our conduct; (iii) the distribution of cognitive labor in cases of testimonial belief. While the methodology of the project is formal, the problems it deals with are key problems in theoretical philosophy, and they are connected with some of the most important topics in epistemology. The considered forms of doxastic agency contribute to our practice of belief formation and they give us an active role in this enterprise. Doxastic agency can prove reliable or unreliable, and in both cases (but more pressingly in the second one), the chance for an alternative belief formation proves essential in assessing the agent's epistemic performance. In particular, such a chance seems to be crucial in order to assess the epistemic responsibility of the agent. In this project, the notion of a reliable belief formation will be investigated and given formal expression. In bringing doxastic agency into the modal logic of agency and modal epistemic logic, the overall aim of this research is a new, conceptually sustained and detailed formal account of epistemic responsibility, which essentially refers to the appropriate exercise of doxastic control.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants