Essay Philosophy of Mind: Menno Lievers
Introduction.
In a seminal paper entitled “Deciding to Believe” Bernard Williams (1973) argued that the process of deciding to believe is not something that can be controlled voluntarily. There has already been much discussion in the philosophical literature about “what to make of this idea”, that is: the relation between belief and decision. As
Chrisman (2008) formulates it: “Belief formation seems to be much more like digestion than ordinary actions such as raising one’s hand or turning on the lights…..We seem to lack the sort of control that we have over ordinary actions.”
Williams’ idea is sometimes called, as we will do in this essay, “The Williams
Thesis” (Funkhauser, 2003). In order to understand these discussions and to put them in the proper context, as well as to add some critical remarks to his thesis myself, I will first consider what Williams himself actually means with, and how he qualifies, the terms “belief” and “decide”. Then I will evaluate what is added to the Williams
Thesis by various critics, and I will conclude my essay by formulating my doubts about Williams’ insistence to call it an essential feature of belief that one can insincerely asserta belief.

The Williams Thesis.
Although beliefs can be classified in terms of, say, morality (“I believe murder to be bad”), religion, politics, Williams does not concern himself with these types of beliefs but with the fundamental question “what is it to believe something?” He does not consider the content of a belief but “the psychological state of somebody who believes something”. [zijn dit citaten? Zo ja, van welke pagina?] In investigating the nature of such a psychological state he tries to make his life easy by limiting himself to simple factual beliefs such as beliefs referring to ‘whether it is raining outside’.
Williams starts with defining “belief” by identifying five features, which features he then needs to discuss the relation between beliefs and decisions. [zin loopt niet]
-First, beliefs aim at the truth: truth is an essential assessment of belief (contrary to other psychological state – say being in love) and therefore recognizing a belief to be false forces one to abandon this belief. Put otherwise, to believe that p is to believe that p is true, and, in addition, to claim that p is true.
-Beliefs can be expressed as an assertion: Williams emphasizes that a most straightforward assertion of a belief is ‘p’, and not ‘I believe that p’ (inserting ‘it is raining’ for ‘p’ illustrates his point, as saying ‘it is raining’ conveys a belief stronger than ‘I believe it is raining’). Williams emphasizes that beliefs “can”, but not “must”, be expressible as assertions: he does not want to deny that beliefs can be ascribed to

non-language using animals. However, these animal beliefs are “somewhat impoverished” in the sense that they cannot express their beliefs as assertions.
Bernard Williams (page 138) has shown this by taking the dog as an example. Dogs are supposed to believe that somebody may be their master, but one would not normally construe his barking when he sees his master as an assertion.
-Thirdly, having a belief is not the same as asserting a belief: one may not want to utter a belief that ‘p’ or an uttered assertion of ‘p’ may be insincere. Williams considers the possibility of assertions being insincere an important fact, as this shows that an assertion of P is not a sufficient condition for having the belief that P. This third point is crucial for the defense of his thesis. (For our discussion later it is relevant to point out that a certain discrepancy exists with the previous feature of belief: it is hard to see how believing animals can utter insincere assertions).
-As he limits himself to factual beliefs he states that factual beliefs can be based on evidence. A person believes that p because he has the evidence q, making the relation between p and q a causal one: when he stops believing q he stops believing p. In case the relation between p and q is also a rational one can say ‘p because q’: the relation between p and q is rational and causal. One can also believe p because one believes q, without there being a rational relationship between p and q – in this case the relation between p and q is ‘only’ causal. Factual beliefs can, but should not [or ‘are not necessarily’], be based on evidence, that is, on other beliefs: it is quite clear that perceptual beliefs, obtained by using one’s senses, belong to this category of beliefs

that are not based on further evidence.
-The last, and fifth, of Williams’ belief features concerns his wish to emphasize shortly the feature of beliefs that they are explanatory. Knowing one’s beliefs may explain one’s actions, provided of course that one’s projects are also known. A kind of triangle exists between one’s belief, project and action: knowing two of them allows us to infer the third one.
In his description of the third feature Williams clearly emphasizes his conviction that the crucial importance of assertions of belief is their possibly to be insincere. In order to prove this he constructs an imaginary machine that only uses the first, second and fourth feature of beliefs, but not the crucial third one. Such a machine may produce assertions, by gathering information from the environment, but it would not manifest a state of belief in terms of the psychological question “what is it to have a belief”.
Williams claims this to be the case as the machine does not fulfill the requirement of being able to produce insincere statements, that is the possibility of deciding to produce assertions that do not reflect what it believes to be true.
Therefore such a machine produces knowledge but not beliefs. One may ask why
Williams spends so much effort in designing such a machine, but his motive is to show that – contrary to what he believes to be commonly misunderstood in philosophy – knowledge is not “as grand as beliefs and it is not beliefs plus quite a lot”. So, according to Williams, for “full-blown belief we need the possibility of

deliberate reticence, not saying what I believe, and of insincerity, saying something other than what I believe”. He then concludes that it is only with “the ability to decide to assert either what I believe or what I do not believe, the ability to decide to speak rather than to remain silent about something, that we get that dimension which is essential to belief”.
With this conclusion he reaches one connexion between (full-blown) belief and decision, namely, the connexion between belief and the decision to say or not to say what one believes, i.e. the decision to use words or not to say what one believes. He realizes quite well that a decision to utter a belief is not the same as a decision to believe something: “This is a decision with regard to what we say and do; it is not the decision to believe something”.
Williams then arrives at his “thesis” that one cannot voluntarily decide to believe
[something], by proposing two reasons for a belief not being something that one can freely decide to have or acquire.
(1)“If I could acquire a belief at will, I could acquire it whether it was true or not: moreover I would know that I could acquire it whether it was true or not. […] there must be a restriction on what is the case after the event; since I could not then, […] regard this belief of mine, i.e. something I take to be true, and also know that I acquired it at will. But if I can acquire beliefs at will, I must know that I am able to do this; and could I know that I was capable of this feat, if with regard to every feat of

this kind which I had performed I necessarily had to believe that it had not taken place?” (p. 148) Obviously Williams suggests a contradiction between acquiring a belief at will and knowing afterwards that the belief has been acquired at will. [This is not immediately obvious to me.]
(2) “A very central idea with regard to empirical belief is that of coming to believe that p because it is so, that is, the relation between a mans perceptual environment , his perceptions, and the beliefs that result. …. But a state that could be produced at will would not satisfy these demands.[welke?] ” Hence, beliefs about p because it is so cannot be willed freely.
In both arguments, one notes his introduction of the expressions “will” and “at will”, as equivalents to [‘of’?], and replacements for, “decide”. As he does not clarify the relation between, or prove the equivalency of, “deciding” and “willing”, and as he sometimes uses in his text the word “wanting” as well, one must conclude that he, and his followers and criticizers alike, use these words to express the same concept, namely (the (in)voluntarily of - dubbelop) deciding to belief.
Williams qualifies his thesis by accepting room “for the application of decision to belief by [what he calls] roundabout routes”. There are causal factors that are not truth connected but nevertheless can produce beliefs: he mentions explicitly hypnosis, drugs, self-deception as examples. “Suppose a man wanted to believe p and knew that if he went to a hypnotist or a man who gave him certain drugs he would end up

believing that p. …. Well, in some cases he could ….” But then one has the situation that “wanting to believe p” actually means “wanting p to be the case”, which is a psychological state of mind differing from “wanting, or deciding, to believe p”.
Does belief aim at truth?
Of the five features of belief as mentioned by Williams the one mostly singled out for extended arguments advanced against his thesis is his first one: belief aims at the truth, or, believing that p means believing p to be true. As the first reason of
Williams’s thesis, i.e one cannot believe at will just because belief is “truth-seeking”, depends strongly on this first feature of belief, criticism of “aiming at the truth” is actually directed against this first reason [or ‘feature’?].
In his article, “Why is Belief Involuntary?”, Bennett (1990) presents a classical example of arguing against the involuntary of deciding to believe [this is an odd phrase]. He tries to find methods to induce beliefs in somebody by offering inducements other than the truth, starting with the question whether there is a relation between acceptance and subjective probability. If to believe that p means to regard p as highly likely (p has a high probability), then acquiring a belief is to raise the probability of a proposition to highly likely. While increasing the probability is not something one can do freely, Bennett argues that one could distinguish increasing

probability from acceptance. As acceptance is more associated with belief than the former, and as acceptance is easier to associate with voluntarism, philosophers interested in keeping belief formation to be free can have their way. Thus they can argue, for example, that with this in mind, one can buy a lot in a lottery with a chance of only one in a million to win, and still believe (that is “accept” according to these philosophers) that one will win.
Bennett does not want to follow this path to inquire about Williams’ first reason, but gives a counter example instead; he introduces a village Credam where each of its members can be “immediately induced to acquire beliefs … and then forgets that this is how he came by it”. Although Bennett does not believe such villages to be possible
[doesn’t that undermine his argument?] he finds Credam a sufficient reason to disagree with Williams’ first reason, although by doing so he in fact uses a
“roundabout” argument which Williams explicitly excluded.
Bennett applies the same argument to Williams’ second reason: as perceptual beliefs can be introduced by “roundabouts”, say hypnosis, the second reason should be considered to be incorrect as well.
Bennetts’ final conclusion however (page 107), that “the question whether or why belief is essentially involuntary may be unanswerable…”, shows that he does not trust his own arguments against the Williams Thesis that well – a conclusion which with I tend to agree as he uses arguments (“roundabouts”) that Williams explicitly mentioned to be left out.

It is noteworthy though that Bennett amends Williams’ belief features with two refinements: he distinguishes between belief and acceptance, and he considers belief as a disposition covering not only beliefs about means to an end but also beliefs having a bearing on the end: “x believes that p means that x is disposed to behave in ways which would (or will) satisfy x’s desires if it were (or is) the case that p”, thus linking belief and desires (Bennett, page 97).
More recently, Walker (2001) contends squarely that Williams’ first reason leads to a conclusion diametrically opposed to the Williams Thesis, namely that “truthaimedness …. proves to be the key to understanding why [beliefs] are necessarily voluntary”. His contention is based on the premise that “truth-aimedness of a belief involves the agent’s forming the belief with the aim of collecting the truth about some proposition, and to regard this in turn as equivalent to their having formed the belief out of a desire to collect the truth together with a belief that by forming the given belief they would satisfy that desire”. Walker thus follows Bennett, who, we saw above, already proposed a link between belief and desire. Walker calls this link a belief-desire combination – leading to an absurd series of inferences, which trap he avoids by distinguishing between ‘beliefs as a disposition’ from ‘beliefs as a judgement’ and then sees only the latter (judgement) as possibly voluntary. In his view beliefs (….) are “truth-aimed only in the sense of being defined as issuing in judgements which are truth-aimed (…) only in the sense of being defined in a relation

to behaviour which is such as to satisfy the believer’s desires if a given proposition were true.”
One should conclude that in doing so Walker basically agrees with Williams’ involuntariness insofar it concerns ‘belief as a disposition’ but disagrees with
Williams’ qualification that belief is [only] a (dispositional) “psychological state”.
[why?] And by preferring instead Bennett’s sort of belief that p involves “just being disposed to behave on ways which would (or will) satisfy [one’s] desires if it were (or is) the case that p” (Bennett, page 97), he justifies his claim that ‘belief as a judgement’ can clearly be voluntary. In doing so, Bennett does not address beliefs as in Williams’ five features, and therefore I conclude that Bennett presents a (useful) amendment to, but not a negation of, the Williams Thesis.
In 2003, Funkhouser follows a different road to counter William’s claim that
“believers necessarily respect truth-conducive reasons and evidence”. He presents a series of stronger cases that show believers to be able to consciously disregard the demand for truth but he does not directly reject the Williams Thesis about the inability to directly will to believe. Instead he wants to argument that such an inability is at most a contingent truth.
Funkhouser realizes that as Williams’ conclusion is qualified there are some possibilities left that are not addressed by Williams; they are: willing a belief but immediately forgetting that one willed it, knowing that one beliefs something but not

knowing the content of one’s belief, and biasing one’s belief-forming capacities such that one ends up with the desired belief. This allows conceptual space for beliefs to be voluntary (“willed”).
His strategy to explore this conceptual space is to show ways in which believers fall short with regard to the truth, i.e. do not aim for the truth, “for the purposes of getting the truth value right” (page 183). The question then is what is it for a believer to be someone who shows disrespect for the norm of truth, and Funkhouser tries to answer this question by presenting counter examples to the Williams claim.
Take a believer in a conspiracy to hide alien visitors to our earth who thinks that he aims at the truth, but who obviously does not do so in the eyes of an objective observer. This believer does not violate Williams thesis, as the believer’s aim is still at the truth (as he sees it). Or take a believer who wishes to believe the best of his criminal friends or family members – he may supersede actual evidence, and in such cases the wish, rather than the evidence, may lead to the actual belief that they did not commit crimes. Funkhouser finds this a violation of the spirit of Williams’s claim about the connection between evidence and belief, but as one could argue convincingly, a wish to belief something else than “the facts” allow, can only turn into a belief when the believer sincerely thinks that the available “facts” are not convincing enough. I, therefore,do not share Funkhouser’s conviction that he made a point here.
Funkhouser may have an argument where he considers a third person party like an

advertiser who may cause a belief that his products X are truly better than somebody else’s product Y without any reference to the truth, or even more so when he presents the example of a religious person who knows that had he grown up in a different culture, he might have had a different religion – but again the believer probably still believes himself to aim after the truth, which does not show “disrespect for the truth”.
It is not sufficient to find “how easy it can be to maintain a belief in the face of challenges that should, rationally, lead the agent to suspend judgment” (page 188) to fill the conceptual space of “falling short of the truth” as Funkhouser so dearly wants.
Also Funkhouser’s last example that there may be persons that consciously will a belief, and hence willingly violate the norm of truth, is not convincing as he does not show the actual existence of such “direct-willers”.
The issue then whether “someone can maintain the conviction that p is true while being consciously aware of the fact that this conviction is based solely on accidental causes and is not supported by truth-conducive reasons?” cannot be answered with
“yes” on the basis of Funkhouser’s arguments – although he thinks otherwise himself
(page 192). Therefore, it is my opinion that Funkhouser does not succeed in turning
Williams’s truth seeking claim down.
“If I am considering whether to believe that p, I invariably jump to the question whether p . And whether p is, at least in normal cases, beyond my control”. That is how Steglich-Peterson (2006) explains in a nutshell why many philosophers adhere to

the involuntariness of belief. As he wants to show the opposite, he first defines voluntarism in terms of what it is not. For example, it is not the view that beliefs are kinds of actions, and it is not committed to all beliefs being voluntary. He then makes a difference between two steps in believing: first one may want to have the intention to form a belief about p and thereafter one may will to deliberate whether to believe that p or not-p. In other words, Steglich-Peterson argues that the first step of deliberating whether one wants to form a belief about something is not necessarily involuntary, while the second step is truth seeking (or transparent) and hence involuntary.
His straightforward end conclusion: “deciding whether to be a voluntarist or not is thus more than anything else a matter of where in the process of belief formation [one wants] to place the emphasis”.
As the Williams qualification of a belief clearly does not include the intentional step before entering the formation of a belief, but “the psychological state of somebody who believes something”, Steglich-Peterson’s conclusion does not contradict the
Williams thesis but rather amends it. [This is a very condensed summary.]
Does belief require insincere assertions?
Assuming the preceding critical remarks towards the Williams Thesis to be representative of current thinking about deciding to believe to be involuntary as it

aims at the truth, it is surprising that critics have not focused on another of Williams’ belief features, namely the third one: that it is of the utmost importance to realize that
“although the most straightforward, simple, and elementary expression of a belief is an assertion, the assertion of p is neither a necessary nor, and this is the point I want to emphasize, a sufficient condition of having the belief that p (….) That is to say that assertion of beliefs can be insincere (….), which is an extremely important fact about assertion”.
As I mentioned earlier, Williams supports his stance by considering a virtual machine that produces knowledge but is not able to produce insincere assertions. As such a machine does not fulfill Williams’s third feature of beliefs, it can obviously, and by definition, not produce “belief”. It produces just knowledge instead. As there are more differences between human believers and such a machine than just the capacity of uttering insincere assertions, I claim that such a machine adds nothing to the essence of the Williams thesis [which is?]. Let us just look at one of the differences; a human can assert, and be consciously aware of, a belief, while a machine has no such awareness. I think the possibility of uttering a belief inwards, to oneself, is an essential property of ‘having’ a belief or, to put it in Williams’s terms, of having a
“belief as a psychological state” – and it should be obvious that one cannot attach a psychological state to a machine. That a machine cannot utter insincere assertions is then just a contingency [why?], but not essential as Williams asserts. [No, that was an assumption of the thought experiment. The point of the machine thought experiment

was that it can possess knowledge, but does not entertain beliefs. So beliefs require more and are more sophisticated, then knowledge, contrary to what most philosophers think.] A second reason to doubt the usefulness of Williams’s third feature of belief is that it seems quite impossible for a believer to be consciously insincere to oneself in uttering his belief. [But doesn’t that show that Williams is right?]
A third reason is that Williams contradicts himself, as he describes the possibility of beliefs to non-language using animals (Williams, page 138). Although animals may be able to assert beliefs (for example the belief that his boss will take him out for a walk) they cannot make insincere assertions. In that way animals resemble his virtual machine, and Williams, following his own machine argument, should not have attributed beliefs to animals either. [But he does say that animals have impoverished beliefs. Still, this is a very good point, which you could elaborate.]
Does it matter?
If we look at the Williams Thesis as it is laid down in his two reasons, then we conclude (assuming of course that the four critics I discussed are representing the general mood among philosophers) that his critics have not succeeded in discrediting his first (truth aiming) reason, but instead added some useful clarifications and qualifications. Also, Williams’s second reason (concerning the relation between perceptual belief and the environment), although less criticized, holds quite well.
Williams himself, although spending much effort in defending his third feature of belief (its insincerity), does not use this feature in his two reasons for his claim that

you cannot decide to believe.
The best thing to do, [why?] is to follow his example and consider his argument about the need of assertions of belief to have the possibility of being insincere, as an irrelevant “faux pas”, that is irrelevant for the content of his Williams thesis.
Conclusion
Although there has been much discussion about what to make of Williams endorsement of the principle that to believe something is involuntary as it is truth seeking, those discussions have not led to a significant change in current philosophical thinking about the involuntariness of deciding (as defined by Williams).
An evaluation of Williams third feature of belief (its possibility of being insincerely asserted) shows us that this feature is probably logically incorrect [why ‘logically’?] but irrelevant [This we haven’t seen.] for the Williams Thesis.
Literature.
Bennett, Jonathan, “Why is belief involuntary?”, Analysis, 50, 1990, 87-107
Chisman, Matthew, “Ought to Believe”, forthcoming in Journal of Philosophy, 2008
Funkhauser, Eric, “Willing Belief and the Norm of Truth”, Philosophical Studies,

115, 2003, 179-195
Steglich-Petersen, Asbjorn, “Voluntarism and Transparent Deliberation”, S. Afr. J.
Philos., 25, 2006, 171-176
Williams, Bernard, “Deciding to Believe”, in: Bernard Williams, “Problems of the
Self”, Cambridge University Press, London, 1973, 136-151
Walker, Mark Thomas, Williams, “Truth-Aimedness and the Voluntarines of
Judgement”, Ratio, 14, 2001, 68-83