Text

theses

ETD doctoral

Our capacity for reflective agency, the capacity to critically reflect on the contents of our minds and form deliberative judgments on the basis of such reflection, has enjoyed widespread appeal in philosophy. Surprisingly, philosophy has long been without a concrete account of the mental phenomenon by which we endeavor to form reflective judgments. In an effort to fill the deficit, and seeking to offer an adequate account of this phenomenon, which I call deliberation, I introduce two explanatory constraints for an adequate account of deliberation. First, an account of deliberation should be sufficiently general so as to provide a unified explanation of various subspecies of deliberation (e.g., theoretical, practical, and moral deliberation). Second, any account should treat deliberation as a mental process in which intentional and reflective agency contribute to the causal structure of the process.

To satisfy these constraints, I offer an account of deliberation that I call the Question-Directed Attitude View (QDAV). According to the view, deliberation is a mental process that has the function of resolving a deliberative state: a unique kind of interrogative attitude consisting of a question and an intentional, attitudinal relation to that question. Deliberative states are resolved relative to the information to which a deliberator reflectively attends. In order to update her reflective information and resolve her deliberative question, a deliberator will shift her attention to different fragments of information. Thus, a crucial component of the view expands on the idea of belief fragmentation by envisioning a deliberator's system of beliefs, desires, intentions, and normative judgments as collections of compartmentalized fragments which might contain distinct, perhaps even conflicting, information.

Drawing on research on iterated belief revision, a formal implementation of QDAV is also developed. The resulting framework models the content of a deliberative state as a partition on a space of possibilities and explores question-resolution using updates to a deliberator's fragmented information structure. The framework helps investigate a crucial distinction drawn by QDAV. Namely, two distinct operations jointly constitute a given update to a deliberator's fragmented information structure: i) the selection of some accessible fragment of information of which to reflectively attend and ii) the integration of that fragment into the deliberator's reflective information. I go on to suggest that norms for deliberation govern the selection operation. I also explore a method for evaluating the way in which a deliberator's information is structured so as to render her an efficient or inefficient deliberator.

The success of QDAV requires that we admit interrogative attitudes into our ontology of the mind. In some sense, this is a radical departure from canonical assumptions within the philosophy of mind, as it calls for the recognition of attitudes bearing non-propositional semantic content. To further motivate recognition of questions as a kind of mental content, I contend that aside from helping explain deliberation, there are other considerations for viewing interrogative attitudes as a useful addition to our theoretical toolbox. To this end, I advance a view of belief-forming processes on which such processes have the function of resolving an interrogative attitude. The view provides for a method of identifying the causes of a belief which are constitutive of belief-formation. I argue that this allows for a useful distinction -- one which affords the causal theorist of epistemic basing with a stronger solution to the problem of causal deviance.

ETD_11184

Ph.D.

Includes bibliographical references

doi:10.7282/t3-5p1e-qk06

The author owns the copyright to this work.