WiP - Robert Ragsdale / The evaluative dimensions of belief
WiP - Robert Ragsdale / The evaluative dimensions of belief
Wednesday February 18 our Works in Progress series has Robert Ragsdale presenting his current project on reflective belief formation.
Philosophers have traditionally assumed that reflectively formed beliefs are comparatively insulated from motivational influences. When we reflect on whether to believe that p, we are thought to be guided primarily – if not exclusively – by evidence and reasons rather than by affect. At the same time, however, many of the same philosophers characterize reflective belief as a species of mental action. On standard views, to form a belief through reflection is to accept p if and only if p is true. But if reflective belief formation is a kind of action, then it plausibly recruits the same evaluative decision-making mechanisms implicated in overt action, which are widely agreed to be guided by motivational influences. This generates a tension: if reflective belief is genuinely action-like, why think that it is uniquely protected from motivational influences that shape other forms of decision-making?
I argue that it is not. Reflective belief formation routinely involves upstream motivational influences, even when agents experience themselves as reasoning and constructing arguments. Motivational influences instead operate “under the hood,” i.e., are unconscious and introspectively opaque, yet can shape how options are evaluated before any conscious endorsement of p occurs. Sometimes the motivations involved are epistemic, for instance, when the stakes of getting p’s truth-value correct are high. But they may also be non-epistemic, depending on the agent’s goals, values, and practical context. In many cases, one comes to believe p because it feels right to do so. Importantly, such influence need not be categorical. Even when minimally recruited, it remains structurally possible for motivational factors to shape the process by which reflective beliefs are formed. On this view, affective influence is not an occasional intrusion into reflection but a standing feature of the mechanisms that make reflective belief possible.
The broader implication is that philosophical theories of belief must take seriously its multifunctional character. If reflective belief formation is pervasively shaped by motivational structures, then belief may serve functions beyond the exclusive tracking of truth. One promising possibility is that belief plays a role in enhancing cultural learning and coordination, integrating epistemic evaluation with practical and social functions. By situating reflective belief within the broader framework of action and evaluative decision-making, this account offers a more unified and psychologically realistic model of belief – one that reconceives motivational influence not as a defect in our cognitive lives but as partly constitutive of it.
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