Doxastic Autonomy: A Preview

Can the value in philosophy consist in part in its contribution to something that might be called "Doxastic Autonomy" -- where philosophy would generate this value independently of its value as a source of knowledge? It can produce knowledge, let's suppose, and that is a Very Good Thing, but it can also produce doxastic autonomy.

I have sometimes thought that one good reason to do philosophy is it allows for gaining a kind of ownership over central features of our believing lives. It might be that I began my adult life knowing that P, and I continue to know it, and never ceased to know it. But now, having engaged in thought about foundational issues, I can take special responsibility for my belief that P, while before I couldn't. This talk of ownership suggests close connections to agential concepts.

You also might join Nagel (see The View from Nowhere) in being moved by certain analogies between skepticism and hard determinism to think that our doxastic lives can be defective in virtue of being non-autonomous. The skeptic and the hard determinist both often proceed by showing that we are in the relevant respects leaves on the wind.

I am pretty suspicious of this stuff, though. Partly, the problem has to do with disanalogies between acting/deciding and believing. The will is involved in each in different ways, and you might expect that this has consequences for the applicability of the concept of autonomy. But I think there is something here... so expect more on this soon!