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Bad believers: evidence-resistance, rational persuasion, and social change
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Flores Henrique, Carolina. Bad believers: evidence-resistance, rational persuasion, and social change. Retrieved from https://doi.org/doi:10.7282/t3-vy9h-5g28

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TitleBad believers: evidence-resistance, rational persuasion, and social change
NameFlores Henrique, Carolina (author); Schellenberg, Susanna (chair); Sosa, Ernest (member); Mandelbaum, Eric (member); Guerrero, Alex (member); Rutgers University; School of Graduate Studies
Date Created2022
Other Date2022-10 (degree)
SubjectPhilosophy, Psychology, Belief, Evidence, Evidence-resistance, Irrationality, Persuasion, Social change
Extent1 online resource (179 pages)
DescriptionCan a belief be rational despite being resistant to counter-evidence? Why are some beliefs resistant to counter-evidence in the first place? Given the pervasiveness of evidence-resistant beliefs, how can we institute widespread belief change? My dissertation Bad Believers develops a general theory of belief and belief revision that addresses these questions.

The theory I argue for is a form of rationalism about belief, the view that there is an important connection between belief and rational agency. I develop and defend it by carefully considering pervasive evidence-resistance and strong external influences on how believers interact with evidence. My aim is to establish not only that rationalism is compatible with these facts, but also that the version of rationalism I defend is needed to account for this data.

This project has two parts. The first part is a defense of the rationalist idea that belief is constitutively evidence-responsive. Specifically, I argue that, if an attitude is a belief, then the subject has the capacity to rationally update it in light of relevant evidence. I support this view by arguing that it best accounts for the descriptive and normative roles of belief. I then apply the view to account for clinical delusions, showing how it can illuminate even deep, pathological evidence-resistant beliefs.

In the second part, I develop theoretical tools to help us understand the role of agency in belief maintenance and revision. Against pure structuralist accounts of belief maintenance, I aim to show that we need to consider individual personality and agency to understand resistant social beliefs. I then build on this work by developing the notion of epistemic style. I use this notion to argue that paradigmatic instances of belief updating (in adult humans) express the agent’s epistemic personality, making room for sophisticated self-regulation.

The account of belief and belief revision that emerges offers new theoretical resources for thinking about epistemic normativity and about the distinctiveness of the mental. At a social and political level, it aims to provide tools for rational persuasion and for exploring the role of individual beliefs in social change. In this way, my dissertation contributes to a social turn in philosophy of mind, mirroring similar developments in epistemology, philosophy of language, and metaphysics.
NotePh.D.
NoteIncludes bibliographical references
Genretheses
Persistent URLhttps://doi.org/doi:10.7282/t3-vy9h-5g28
LanguageEnglish
CollectionSchool of Graduate Studies Electronic Theses and Dissertations
Organization NameRutgers, The State University of New Jersey
RightsThe author owns the copyright to this work.
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