Pure Epistemic Akrasia
It is often claimed that a certain kind of epistemic weakness of will is impossible1 – I will
call it pure epistemic akrasia, and in abbreviated form it requires S to deliberately believe what
she judges she ought not. The impossibility of pure epistemic akrasia is often brought out in
support of the conclusion that we should not be held responsible for what we believe and even
that believing is involuntary. The idea is that since S can never believe that which she thinks she
ought not believe, some limits are placed on S’s freedom to believe. The reason-giving force of
epistemic reasons starts to look irresistible. My goal here is not, however, to look at what might
follow from the impossibility of pure epistemic akrasia, nor to fully explain it, but rather to clear
some important conceptual space for it. At the heart of one sometimes alluded to line of
argument is a claim about the transparency of judgements about what I ought to believe. And at
the heart of another is a claim about the structure of epistemic reasons. Rarely are these
arguments made explicit, and so that is part of my goal here. I hope to show we should find
neither convincing.
Since we want a pure case of epistemic akrasia, we should constrain acceptable forms of
judgement about what to believe. It might plausibly be thought that Pascal deliberated and came
to a conclusion about what he should believe, but this would not be a case of epistemic doxastic
deliberation: his reasons weren’t epistemic, but prudential. The worries about pure epistemic
akrasia involve S judging that she ought to believe p for epistemic reasons, and then also failing
to believe p for reasons of the same sort.2
So we start with pure epistemic doxastic deliberation. Nishi Shah and J. David Velleman
think that the deliberative question whether to believe p is transparent to the question whether p,
by which they mean that the deliberative question whether to believe p inevitably gives way to
the factual question whether p, because an answer to the latter question, and only an answer to
the latter question, will determine an answer to the former.3 Obviously, we need to limit the
“should” here to an epistemic one: if believing p will save all the starving babies all around the
world, it’s not at all clear that coming to think not-p closes the question of whether I should
1
For that claim see: Owens, D. (2002). "Epistemic Akrasia." The Monist 85(3): 381-97; Hurley, S. L.
(1985-86). "Conflict, Akrasia and Cognitivism." Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society: 23-49; Mele, A.
R. (1986). "Incontinent Believing." The Philosophical Quarterly 36(143): 212-222; Pettit, P. and M.
Smith (1996). "Freedom in Belief and Desire." The Journal of Philosophy 93(9): 429-449, to name a few.
2
There is something about this question that gives it an air of superficiality: we rarely deliberate about
what to believe. And when I say ‘I should believe p’ it sounds like a hedge. But surely we sometimes
deliberate doxastically and surely we do deliberate about what is the case and I will take it that these two
questions are intimately related. Also, I hope to have pointed to at least some substantial motivation for
thinking about things this way.
3
Shah, N. and J. D. Velleman (Forthcoming). "Doxastic Deliberation." The Philosophical Review, p.5.
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believe it. I don’t mean to endorse non-epistemic reasons to believe, but I also don’t want to rule
them out.
Shah and Velleman seem to take transparency to be a datum.4 It appears as if they think
that an answer to the question whether p is both necessary and sufficient to answer the question
whether to believe p. From the perspective of first-person doxastic deliberation, the issue of
whether to believe p is resolved only and solely by thinking about whether p.5 I am only really
concerned here with the claim that settling the question whether p is necessary for settling the
question whether to believe p. If epistemic deliberation about what I should believe is
transparent to the questions about what is the case, then an answer to the question is the
judgement p. And the sort of judgement p that we are interested in here is an all things
considered judgement, or what I will call a sans phrase judgement p. Our question here is
whether S can judge that the balance of reasons or evidence supports p and then deliberately fail
to believe p. It’s not clear what it takes for a judgement that p to be sans phrase. What we need
is that S take it that the balance of reasons support p. Judgements like that are sans phrase for
our purposes. Sans phrase judgements that p issue in judgements that I ought to believe p.
These latter sorts of judgements or the oughts they issue are also sans phrase even if I don’t
always say so.
So now we want to know whether if S judges, sans phrase, p (I’ll just call this judging p)
she can then deliberately fail to believe it. And now we have the tools for the first line of
argument against pure epistemic akrasia: S cannot deliberately fail to believe p once she judges
p, since one cannot judge p without believing p. This is quite simply because judging p just
amounts to believing p (or maybe forming a p-belief). So if it’s true that we can only settle the
question whether we ought to believe p via settling the question whether p, and settling the
question whether p amounts to believing p, then if we believe we ought to believe p, we have to
already believe p. Believing that we ought to believe p requires us to have settled the question
whether p affirmatively which just amounts to believing p. Once we believe we ought to believe
p we must already believe p, and so we could never both believe we ought to believe p and fail to
believe it. This means that we cannot deliberately fail to believe p once we believe that we ought
to believe p.6,7
4
So might Gareth Evans in The Varieties of Reference. Oxford University Press (1982).
Shah, N. (2003). "How Truth Governs Belief." The Philosophical Review 112(4): 447-482. p. 463-464
6
There might be a move here to pull apart believing and judging. Perhaps arriving at the judgement that
p doesn’t necessarily settle the question whether one now believes it since one may presumably find
oneself unconvinced of one’s (even sans phrase) judgement. For instance, one may be very surprised that
it turned out that p. The canonical analysis of Moore’s Paradox is a nice way to make the conceptual
space. When S says, “It’s raining, but I don’t believe that it is,” we take her to express an irrational train
of thought, perhaps that she judges p and then that she fails to believe in accordance with her judgement,
but we do not seem to think that there is no train of thought this assertion could express. Or perhaps
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2
This line of argument won’t go through without transparency, and I think it’s pretty clear
that transparency shouldn’t go through. It may very well be the case that one way of settling the
question whether I ought to believe p is to settle the question whether p, but that is surely not the
only way. That is, even if it’s a sufficient condition, it’s not a necessary one. Often we settle the
deliberative question whether to believe p based on, say, evidential considerations: that my
evidence for p is insufficient is reason not to believe p, and in considering that reason I do not
settle the question whether p one way or the other. In fact, it’s not clear that any case in which I
reason that should withhold from believing either p or not p, is a case is which I settle the
question whether p. I should withhold in those sorts of cases precisely because I don’t or can’t
settle the question.
It may be that some of these sorts of cases can be explained via a watered down version
of transparency. Given that Shah and Velleman don’t say much of anything in defense of
transparency, it’s hard to know quite what he might have in mind, and it’s far from clear that a
watered down version can keep the tight conceptual connexion one would need for the argument
against pure epistemic akrasia to work. Even still, we will be left with some cases that look
really difficult to accommodate. There are propositions for which we have no evidence, and
even some where we could have no evidence: propositions that are structurally unknowable (if
one thinks there are any), for instance. But even more humdrum propositions, for example,
about small details in the distant past for which we know we know that out best theories have
nothing at all to say. In these sorts of cases, we seem to consider facts about our evidence alone
in deciding what to believe; facts that don’t even look, by extension, to be about what is the case.
That I couldn’t get any evidence either way that bears on whether p, settles the question whether
I ought to believe p, but makes no progress whatsoever towards settling the question whether p.
That I find out that there’s no possible evidence either way about whether a prehistoric ant
walked on just this spot 65 million years ago is surely sufficient to settle the question whether I
should believe that one did, and just as surely does nothing whatsoever to help me settle the
question of whether one did.
I suspect that more often than not when we deliberate about what to believe (which itself
doesn’t happen very often), we think about the character and content of our evidence, and so
decide that we ought or ought not to believe p without settling for ourselves the question whether
p. When we reason about our normative epistemic requirements we will do so by reasoning
from that which they are comprised – mostly evidential considerations (perhaps some reliability
judging is more like L. Jonathan Cohen’s “accepting” (which he takes not to entail believing). See
Cohen, L. J. (1992). An Essay on Belief and Acceptance. New York, Oxford University Press.
7
I don’t mean to imply that Shah and Velleman take this sort of line against epistemic akrasia, I am just
using their account of transparency to flesh out this line of argument.
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ones as well). ‘Whether p’ might sometimes figure as an intermediary question, but it need not.
No matter how often, if we ever reason from purely evidential considerations to normative
beliefs about what to believe (which we clearly do), then the argument for the impossibility of
pure epistemic akrasia from transparency is unsound – transparency is false. This means that it
is possible for S to judge that she ought to believe p without believing it, since her judgement
that she ought to believe p does not require her to believe p as transparency would have it.
Before I move on to the next argument, I should say a little bit more about pure epistemic
akrasia. The issue is whether S can judge (believe) that she ought to believe p and then
deliberately fail to believe it. Obviously more needs to be said about that ‘deliberately’. I started
by saying that the impossibility of pure epistemic akrasia was brought out as evidence that
believing is involuntary, and so I don’t want anything about the deliberateness of believing to
entail voluntariness. We can take a lesson from the practical case. There what’s required is S’s
not -ing for a reason, rather than S’s not -ing as a result of some sort of compulsion etc. What
we want is that S should fail to believe p for a reason, rather than, say, simply finding herself
having failed to believe. In the latter category might be cases in which S is distracted or
forgetful or gets hit on the head or dies. In these sorts of cases S fails to believe p but does not
deliberately fail to believe p. So now, here’s the possibility we wish to isolate: S judges that
she ought to believe p, but then fails to believe p (withholds from believing p or believing not-p
or believes not-p) for some genuinely epistemic reason (remember, we want to know about the
possibility of pure epistemic akrasia).8
For the remainder of this paper I will be looking at an argument that purports to show that
given the structure of epistemic reasons cases of pure epistemic akrasia of the sort I have tried to
set up here are impossible. One way to frame this is to claim that in the epistemic case we have
no pro tanto reasons – outweighed but still reason-giving considerations. I actually think there is
good reason to suspect that there are pro tanto epistemic reasons, but I will argue that even if
accept there are none this will not eliminate the possibility of pure epistemic akrasia.9
First, I will try to say more about why we should think there are no outweighed but still
reason-giving epistemic considerations. We’re concerned with doxastic deliberation here, so I’ll
put it in those terms. S is deliberating about whether she should believe that Jones is the killer.
She has various pieces of evidence – witnesses who saw Jones commit the crime, DNA that
8
Self-deception might count as a case of impure epistemic akrasia were we to characterize it as a case in
which S judges sans phrase that she (epistemically) ought to believe p, but is influenced by some nonepistemic considerations (reasons) and fails to believe it. To be sure, these are interesting cases as well,
but they aren’t quite what we are after here.
9
What I’m even less sure about is whether this fact succeeds in marking a distinction between the
practical and theoretical: it may be true that -ing is more honest than not -ing even though one ought
not , but that -ing is more honest than not is not clearly still a reason to  if one ought not .
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supports the theory that it was Jones, Jones’ admission. But there is some other (putative)
evidence that Jones was not the killer – Smith was found with the murder weapon at the scene of
the crime. When S weighs all of the evidence, she concludes that (she ought to believe that)
Jones is the killer, and even, say, that Smith is innocent. What happens to her (putative) reasons
for believing that Jones wasn’t the killer, for believing that Smith committed the crime? Does S
have reason to believe that Jones isn’t the killer once she accepts that he is? Does the fact that
Smith was caught at the crime scene count as evidence for Smith committing the murder? Given
that S takes her evidence sufficient to establish that Jones is the killer, the (plausible) thought is
that she should have to offer some alternate explanation of Smith’s presence. That Smith was
caught at the scene won’t count as a reason to believe that Jones is not the killer if she has
already reasoned that he is. If Jones is the killer then Smith’s presence at the scene is going to be
explained some other way. The reason-giving force of the believed proposition that Smith was at
the scene gets sapped by the belief that he’s not guilty; it simply doesn’t hold out. The
proposition that Smith was at the scene no longer supports the belief that he is the killer and the
Jones is innocent. And so on for any other putative evidence that Jones is innocent.
This is the sense in which epistemic reasons are always prima facie (and sans phrase)
rather than pro tanto. It’s instructive to see what happens in the analogous practical case. S is
deliberating about what to do. And some considerations count in favour of -ing and some
against. Crucially, -ing is more just, but not -ing is by far the kinder thing to do. Other
considerations are also weighed and S judges that she has most reason to , that she ought to .
In this case, even though not -ing is outweighed by these other practical considerations, it is still
the kinder thing to do; that is, the reason giving force of the considerations that favoured not ing remain just as they did before she judged that she ought sans phrase to . The good can be
divided up, even against itself, but the truth can’t.
Taking seriously the this structural fact about epistemic reasons, we get the following
argument for the impossibility of pure epistemic akrasia:
1. Pure epistemic akrasia requires deliberately believing or withholding belief against one’s
sans phrase judgement of what one ought epistemically to believe.
2. ‘Deliberately’ here means believing or withholding for a reason rather than merely being
caused or otherwise compelled to form (or not form) a belief.
3. If S judges (believes) that she epistemically ought to believe p, she has no reason
whatsoever for withholding from believing on the question of whether p, nor for
believing not-p.
4. Pure epistemic akrasia is impossible.
Even if we accept that there are no pro tanto epistemic reasons, this doesn’t support (3). In fact,
(3) looks false, and so this argument unsound. First: the antecedent of (3) is a claim about S’s
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judgement about what she has reason to believe, and the consequent is a claim about what she in
fact has reason to believe. I take it to be fairly uncontroversial that there is a distinction to be
made here: S’s normative judgements can be wrong. If I’m right, and they can, then I contend,
we should not accept (3). Understanding this distinction better will also help illuminate at least
the shape of cases of pure epistemic akrasia. 10
Back to S and the murder: imagine that S judges that she ought to believe p, but this
judgement is completely irrational. She bases her judgement that Jones is the killer on the fact
that he has a tattoo of a dolphin and she thinks that dolphins secretly control humans and make
them do evil, even though there is a pile of nearly incontrovertible evidence that he is innocent of
the crime, and she knows the contents of the pile. Even if S judges that Jones is the killer, it
seems quite clear that we should say that S has plenty of reason to believe that he is not.11 Even
if S judges, and even sans phrase, p and that she ought to believe p, it doesn’t follow that she
ought to. Surely, S has not only reason, but good reason to believe that S is innocent. So even
in the case where she weighs all the “evidence” and makes a judgement about what she ought to
believe, it looks like she surely can still have reason to believe its negation, or withhold from
believing. On this reading of what it might be to have reason to believe, the structural fact
cannot be called in to support (3) since it doesn’t follow from the fact that S judges that she
ought to believe p, that she in fact ought to believe p.
The retort here is that all we need is something like an internalist analogue of the
structural fact. When S judges that she ought to believe p, she also must judge that she has no
reason whatsoever to fail to believe and surely she cannot deliberately fail to believe if she thinks
she has no reason to fail to believe. After all, how can she fail to believe for a reason once she
judges that there’s none? There’s something intuitively plausible about this retort. But it won’t
help here. If it’s true that S must judge that she has no reason to fail to believe once she judges
sans phrase that she ought to, this ‘must’ is the must of a rational coherence requirement and not
a conceptual or metaphysical one. Perhaps there is some demand of rational coherence – that
one ought not judge that one has reason to believe not-p once one judges that one ought to
believe p (although this would be a pretty sophisticated one), but that doesn’t mean that it might
not be quite reasonable in some sense for S to believe that she has reason to believe not-p, even
once she believes she ought to believe p. S might have plenty of good reasons to believe not-p,
despite S’s her best judgement that she ought believe p and her reasoning that she has no reason
to believe not-p. We still haven’t closed the conceptual space around pure epistemic akrasia.
For what it is worth, Hurley doesn’t in the end think that this argument goes through, and I will address
her variation in a moment. Owens, it seems, thinks it does.
11
See Arpaly, N. (2000). "On Acting Rationally Against One's Best Judgement." Ethics 110(2): 488-513, for
some arguments for rational akrasia in the practical case.
10
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Anyway, (3) won’t go through on this sort of reading either. Even if judging she had no reason
to believe would guarantee that she didn’t or somehow make her believing not deliberate in some
relevant way, she need not make that judgement. The internalist analogue of the structural fact is
a rational requirement at most. Akrasia is certainly some sort of irrationality. I think that this is
enough to diffuse this second line of argument. Even if there are no pro tanto epistemic reasons
it doesn’t follow that once I judge I ought to believe p, I can have no reason to fail to believe it.
Hurley thinks that the structural fact only gets us as far as a rational requirement, but that
in this case that requirement might be stronger than I have let on here. She claims that as part of
a “theory of interpretations” we will apply the structural fact and explain away any possible case
of pure epistemic akrasia. This won’t make it a conceptual impossibility, but will make it very
difficult for us to coherently attribute to a believer. I’m not at all convinced that pure epistemic
akrasia is too irrational to attribute to a believer. I will end by looking at the shape of pure
epistemic akrasia that has fallen out of this discussion and at Hurley’s irrationality claims.
Hurley wants to say though that every putative case of pure epistemic akrasia can be
redescribed as a case of self-deception without distortion while preserving the rationality of the
believer in a way that describing it as a case of pure epistemic akrasia cannot. Cases of selfdeception for Hurley represent cases in which the subject goes against his sans phrase judgement
just like in the pure epistemic case, but does so for non-epistemic reasons. Hurley claims that we
will always think that S has some non-epistemic reason for not believing p if she doesn’t once
she’s judged she ought to believe p – this is the best way to make sense of S’s epistemic
behaviour. If S judges that she has no reason to believe that she’ll win the lottery and then goes
on to believe it, we’ll suspect that something other than epistemic considerations are motivating
her belief; that her reasons for believing are non-epistemic (say, wishful thinking).
Notice that thinking that S’s reasons are non-epistemic is very different from suspecting
she’s being influenced by non-epistemic considerations with respect to her epistemic reasons. It
may very well be the case that were S to recognize that she ought to believe p, and recognize the
effect of the (putative) structural fact, and so acknowledge that she had no reason whatsoever to
fail to believe p, and then went on to deliberately fail to believe it, we might think something else
is going on. If we think a case like is coherent, we may suspect the influence of non-epistemic
reasons or go looking for a desire to fail to believe to attribute to S. Although I’m not sure even
that’s right. The phobic flyer seems to judge that he has no reason to believe the plane will crash
while believing that it will and basing his belief on irrelevant minutia in the airplane. And the
sexist may judge that he has no reason to believe that women aren’t as smart as men, but
epistemic inertia takes hold and he can’t stop picking up on little details that keep his sexist
beliefs intact. In these cases, non-epistemic considerations may be influential, but they don’t
ground the beliefs.
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Even if one thought that Hurley was right here and that we could never attribute to a
subject this sort of pure epistemic akrasia, there are still the less clear-eyed cases which seem to
me to be the central ones. These are the cases in which S judges that she ought to believe p, but
fails to recognize the structural fact and believes for a reason she has already deemed
outweighed. In this case she does not make the additional judgement that she has no reason to
fail to believe (although, as we’ve seen, perhaps in some sense she ought to). All this tell us is
that if there are no pro tanto epistemic reasons, then there may be an additional irrational
element here as compared to the purely practical cases. Is that enough to set us searching for a
desire here? Is it more irrational to describe S as believing for (something like) an epistemic
reason than to describe her belief as based on some other non-epistemic considerations?12
Looking to the practical case is instructive here. The description of the akratic we were
working with there was one in which we describe her as acting for an acknowledged weaker
reason. If we go back to the case in which justice and kindness recommend different courses of
action, we could construct a case in which considerations of kindness were acknowledged to be
outweighed, but S still acted for reasons of kindness. I submit that we are looking for a desire to
attribute in this case as well. Why shouldn’t we redescribe this as a case in which S just really
wanted to be kind, and even perhaps that really all things considered the balance of reasons
(which here includes her desires) favoured the kind act and her judgement that she ought to be
just was a more limited moral ought (there’s obviously the risk of loosing the phenomenon
altogether here). The point is only that we resist the urge to look for an intervening and rationalmaking desire here, so why not in the epistemic case?
12
For skepticism about our ever being able to base a belief on non-epistemic considerations see, Kelly, T.
(2002). "The Rationality of Belief and Some Other Propositional Attitudes." Philosophical Studies(110):
163-196.
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