This paper considers the relationship between evidence and self-fulfilling beliefs – beliefs whose contents will be true just in case an agent believes them because she believes them. Following Grice (1971), many philosophers hold that... more
This paper considers the relationship between evidence and self-fulfilling beliefs – beliefs whose contents will be true just in case an agent believes them because she believes them. Following Grice (1971), many philosophers hold that believing such propositions would involve an impermissible form of bootstrapping.
I argue that such objections gets their force from a popular but problematic model of theoretical deliberation which pictures deliberation as a function, treating the deliberation’s inputs as given, fixed prior to and independently from the deliberation. Though such a picture may seem plausible, attending to the case of self-fulfilling beliefs can help us see how such a function-model is inadequate for a general understanding of theoretical deliberation. Because it is unable to accommodate the possibility that the outcomes of our deliberation can sometimes be evidence for the proposition we are deliberating about, the function model is unable to account for cases where what we believe affects the truth of what is believed.
I show that on a revised model of theoretical deliberation our evidence will problematically underdetermine any appropriate doxastic attitude: when belief in a proposition is self-fulfilling, our evidence is insufficient to support belief, disbelief, or even suspended judgment toward that proposition.
