Solving the Doxastic Integration Problem

I suggest that we address the doxastic integration problem as follows. First, with respect toPolice-Disagreeing I propose a rather straightforward solution. In chapter 5, I have put forward the following view:

Collectivism. For any context of epistemic advice cA, ‘S should have D to

P’ is true at cA iff adopting Dto P accurately reflects how much the collective

evidence supports P.

OnCollectivism, Kima is speaking relative to her and Lester’s collective evidence. This helps with respect to Police-Disagreeing if we assume that Lester is speaking relative to the same body of evidence. This is plausible. As Bj¨ornsson and Finlay (2010: 13) put it with respect to the practical ‘should’, where someone

is deliberating publicly, that is, in a dialogue with others, they arguably see their deliberation “as a shared problem, to be solved with collective resources.” On this account, (4) is false, but we can give a good explanation for it. It is hasty for Lester to conclude that he should suspend judgement on whether it was Omar, if he could simply ask Kima what her evidence concerning the case is.

The story is a bit more complicated concerning Police-Unexpected. Since Lester is not publicly deliberating—but rather privately on his own—we need to assume that by uttering (4) he is answering the question of what he should believe, in light of his own evidence, about who killed Bob.11 When Kima appears and utters (5), she talks about what he should believe in light of their collective evidence. It therefore seems like she is addressing another question.12

My main claim is that insome sense she is addressing the same question: They are both trying to answer the question ‘What should Lester believe about who killed Bob?’ True, according to Doxastic Contextualism this answer has different contents if asked in Lester’s and Kima’s contexts respectively. Nonetheless, they are in some sense the same.

Let me explain. Consider the following analogy: When Ann and Boris are respectively asking ‘Who am I?’, they are in some sense asking the same question. In some other sense, they are not. Ann’s question means ‘Who is Ann?’ and Boris’ question means ‘Who is Boris?’. They are the same questions in the sense that their Kaplanian (1989a, 1989b) character is identical; they are different questions in the sense that their Kaplanian content is different. The character of ‘Who am I?’ is a function from contexts to contents, where the assigned content changes with the speaker of the respective context. Let’s distinguish accordingly between the character and the content of a question.

The question Kima is addressing has the same character as Lester’s.13 _The

character of ‘What should Lester believe about who killed Bob’ ? is a function

11_{More precisely, he is answering the question of which doxastic attitudes he should adopt}

towards the propositions<Omar killed Bob>and<Marlo killed Bob>. I use ‘what he should believe’ as a short form for this.

12

For more on the distinction between private and public doxastic deliberation, see section 5.2.

13

This is not entirely correct. Since Lester formulates the question in the first person, his question is ‘What shouldI ...?’, whereas Kima’s question is ‘What .... shouldLester...?’. Because Lester’s question contains the indexical ‘I’ and Kima’s the proper name ‘Lester’, the questions actually do not have the same character. However, this difference in character is irrelevant to the point I’m making.

from contexts to contents, where the content differs with the information-state that is provided by the respective context.

When Ann tells Boris the answer to her question ‘Who am I?’, she is hardly helping him with his question ‘Who am I?’ Thus, one might think that the fact that Kima is addressing a question which has the same character as Lester’s doesn’t help solving the doxastic integration problem. However, there are cases where addressing a question with the same character, but different content, seems to help:

Score. Carlo is watching a football match between Borussia Dortmund and Bayern M¨unchen. At 8 pm, the score is 0:0. His friend Diana calls him at 8 pm and asks:

(9) ‘What is the score?’.

Before Carlo can reply, the telephone connection is interrupted. At 8.05 pm, Aubameyang scores for Dortmund. Carlo calls Diana and says:

(10) ‘Hey! To answer your question: The score is 1:0.’

(10) sounds perfectly fine; Carlo seems to answer Diana’s question expressed by (9). However, notice that there is a hidden indexicality in (9). (9) means ‘What’s the scorenow?’ Carlo is answering the content this question has at the context of his utterance of (10), that is, he’s answering ‘What is the score at 8.05 pm?’ However, the content of (9) at the context where Diana uttered it is ‘What is the score at 8 pm?’ Nonetheless, (10) sounds right: Carlo is answering, at least in some sense, Diana’s question.

To conclude, at least in some cases it looks like speakers are answering the question of their addressee when they are answering the content of a question that has the same character as the addressee’s question, but a different content. I suggest that questions like ‘What should I believe about who killed Bob?’ are in this respect more similar to questions like ‘What’s the score?’ than they are similar to questions like ‘Who am I?’

One reason to think this is that it simplyseems like Kima is answering Lester’s question. And asScoreshows, the mere fact that there is an indexical element

in the question is not necessarily a theoretical reason undermining this intuition. Furthermore, Score and Police-Unexpected share a property that makes it likely that they are alike in the mentioned respect. Diana is more interested in an answer to the content of her question relative to the context of 8.05 pm rather than relative to the context of 8 pm. That is, she wants to know what the score is at 8.05 pm, rather than what the score is at 8 pm. Similarly, Lester is more interested in an answer to the content of his question at the context where Kima utters (5) than at the context where Lester utters (4). Thus, where a speaker’s and a subject’s questions have the same character but not the same content, the speaker might be taken to answer the subject’s question if the subject is more interested in an answer to the content of the speaker’s question rather than their own. This also explains why it sounds wrong to say that Ann addresses Boris’ question ‘Who am I?’ by telling him the answer to the question ‘Who is Ann?’ Boris is not interested in an answer to this question, or at least not more than in an answer to the question ‘Who is Boris?’

Notice that this is the same explanation as the one Bj¨ornsson and Finlay (2010) offer for how it is possible that the physicist can, legitimately, address a question that is not the one Sean originally asked, but nonetheless be said to advice Sean. The difference between us is only that Bj¨ornsson and Finlay (2010) concede that the physicist is answering a different question, full stop. I, on the other hand, argue that there is no need to make such a concession. The physicist is answering the same question in the sense that it has the same character. In the end, Bj¨ornsson and Finlay (2010) would probably be happy to accept this improvement on their account.

Contra Bj¨ornsson and Finlay (2010), I argued that Practical News-Sensitive Contextualism can solve the practical integration problem. However, the same reasoning I just outlined with respect to the doxastic integration problem can arguably also be applied to solve the practical integration problem. I will leave the question of whether the latter is to be preferred to Practical News-Sensitive Contextualism to future research and turn now to the second challenge to Doxastic Contextualism.