How Responsibility For Doxastic States Is Possible? ——An Inquiry Based On Conor McHugh’s Guidance Control Approach

Are people typically responsible for forming,maintaining and revising certain doxastic states including belief,disbelief,and suspension of judgement? In the world we live in together,many daily practices and academic discussions presuppose the existence of doxastic responsibility.But the argument from doxastic involuntarism challenges the possibility of doxastic responsibility from the twin premises that people cannot voluntarily control their doxastic states and that responsibility depends on voluntary control.Confronted with the challenge from doxastic involuntarism to the possibility of doxastic responsibility,Connor Mc Hugh’s response strategy is,on the one hand,to acknowledge that we cannot voluntarily control our doxastic states because there are strict limits on how doxastic states can respond to non-epistemic considerations;on the other hand,he argues that responsibility does not require voluntary control because epistemic responsibility for doxastic states does not require that the agent be able to respond to considerations other than epistemic reasons.Drawing on and developing Fischer and Ravizza’s guidance control theory,Mc Hugh uses epistemic guidance control which comprises reasons-responsiveness and mechanism ownership to build the foundations of doxastic responsibility.Although the approach based on guidance control has been challenged,there are sufficient intellectual resources in Mc Hugh’s theory of doxastic responsibility to respond to these challenges.