Online Radicalization and Voluntary Belief

I discuss voluntary belief in the context of a phenomenon unique to our current political moment: self- brainwashing. Using the very public QAnon movement as a case study, I argue that, although the conditions in which QAnon beliefs are formed is highly similar to those that produce false confessions, the QAnon believer and not the false confessor is morally and epistemically responsible because the former’s beliefs are voluntary: belief is voluntary when the believer has both the capacity and the opportunity to revise their belief. I conclude that this voluntariness is because of the uniquely distributed, Internet-based nature of QAnon

Informationskompetenz, Informationsverhalten, Informationsverarbeitung

Die mediale Verfügbarkeit von Information hat sich durch die zunehmende digitale Vernetzung drastisch ausgeweitet. Mediale Verfügbarkeit ist jedoch nicht hinreichend dafür, dass Information für die eigenen Zwecke effektiv und effizient genutzt werden kann. Der vorliegende Band zeigt, dass die Beschäftigung mit den notwendigen Informations- und Medienkompetenzen, mit dem eigenen Informationsverhalten und mit den menschlichen Fähigkeiten und Bedingungen der Informationsverarbeitung von ebenso hoher Bedeutung ist

Negative Doxastic Voluntarism and the concept of belief

Pragmatists have argued that doxastic or epistemic norms do not apply to beliefs, but to changes of beliefs; thus not to the holding or not-holding, but to the acquisition or removal of beliefs. Doxastic voluntarism generally claims that humans (sometimes or usually) acquire beliefs in a deliberate and controlled way. This paper introduces Negative Doxastic Voluntarism according to which there is a fundamental asymmetry in belief change: (i) humans tend to acquire beliefs more or less automatically and unreflectively, but (ii) they tend to withdraw beliefs in a controlled and deliberate way. I first present a variety of philosophical, empirical and logical arguments for Negative Doxastic Voluntarism. Then I raise two objections against it. First, the apparent asymmetry may result from a confusion of belief with other doxastic attitudes like assumption, supposition, hypothesis or opinion. Second, the apparent asymmetry seems to vanish if we focus on doxastic states rather than just beliefs. Some rejoinders and their consequences for the vague concept of belief are sketched

The normativity of truth for the human person: a person-centric approach

After countering claims that truth cannot be a norm of belief, this dissertation argues that truth’s normativity is grounded in personhood. It does so by attending to the fact that truth is a norm for the human person, and to the relationships between the human person and the objective goodness and value of truth. The dissertation develops this argument by critically appropriating writings of Thomas Aquinas and representatives of twentieth-century personalism on the relationship between truth and the human person. The dissertation’s initial chapters rebut objections (1) that the involuntariness of belief rules out any possibility of norms of belief, (2) that truth cannot be a norm of belief because truth is unable to provide guidance in determining what to believe, and (3) that it is incompatible with other norms of belief such as justification. It rebuts the first objection by challenging its general account of belief and outlining an alternative account. It responds to the second argument by criticizing its understanding of guidance as overly narrow and sketching an alternative notion of guidance-by-value. It counters the third objection by arguing for the primacy of the truth-norm. The dissertation then takes up the question of what grounds the truth-norm. Chapter Three surveys recent accounts, drawing from its survey a set of desiderata for any satisfactory account. Chapter Four begins the dissertation’s account of the normativity of truth. Working from Dietrich von Hildebrand’s conception of objective goods, it argues that truth is an objective good for the person by showing how deeply interwoven truth is with friendship. Given that friendship is an objective good for the person, and that truth stands in certain intimate relationships to friendship, it follows that truth is an objective good for the person. Chapter Five rounds out the argument. The objective goodness of truth entails that truth is a value. Values are normative for persons. Therefore, truth is normative for the human person. This chapter defends the claim that values are normative for persons by elucidating the dependency of the realization of personhood—in several of its various dimensions—on value-grasping and value-realizing acts