2. EVIDENTIALISM

According to strict evidentialism, evidence is the sole mark of a justified belief.Footnote ⁷ On this view, S's belief that P at time t is justified if and only if S's evidence at t supports P and S believes that P on the basis of said evidence. More generally, the evidentialist holds that the right doxastic attitude – belief, disbelief, or suspension of judgment – is the one that fits the evidence, where evidence is understood as all the information that a person has to go on, at the time (Feldman Reference Feldman2003: 45–7). This notion of evidence is thoroughly normative; one proposition is evidence for another just in case the first tends to boost the justification of the second. It is also thoroughly objective; the evidential support relation is a matter of fact, independent of what any individual thinks about it (Feldman Reference Feldman and Hetherington2006: 435).

By narrowing in on an individual's access to her doxastic states and the facts that ground them evidentialism opens the door to the internalist idea that to be justified is to be epistemically blameless. Having cognitive access to the reasons which support our beliefs means that our reasons for belief are defensible from a first-person perspective, or at least would be, were we to reflect upon them, where reflection is understood as a higher-order judgment (allowing for the fact that many of our beliefs are formed automatically – a point I will return to shortly). Unfortunately, strict evidentialism fails to capitalize fully on this opportunity.Footnote ⁸ At first glance, this may not appear to be a damning objection to Feldman and Conee, who, as noted earlier, reject this deontological conception of justification. However, in rejecting this conception, Feldman and Conee throw out the baby with the bathwater.

As I discuss below, the strict evidentialist looks at only two factors when assessing justification: a doxastic state – belief, disbelief, or suspension of judgment – and the evidence on which that state is based (Feldman Reference Feldman2003: 45–6). What this means is that doxastic attitudes are, in an important sense, detachable from the subjects who hold them; they are essentially interchangeable, from subject to subject. If proposition P is supported by evidence E then so long as S believes that P on the basis of E, S's belief that P is justified, regardless of how important or trivial P is to S. If P is justified for you on the basis of E, in other words, then, on the basis of E, it will be justified equally for me, and for any Tom, Dick or Harry.

Again, this is precisely the result that Conee and Feldman are looking for, and there is something prima facie appealing about the symmetry of this position – the suggestion that all knowers be treated alike. But in the same way that, for example, equality of access requires special accommodations for certain individuals – wheelchair ramps, for instance – ignoring important differences between knowers results in a number of related kinds of problems. On this view, for instance, whether I have a greater interest than you in P is irrelevant, and therefore so is the fact that I adjust my confidence in P appropriately, given my interests, as well as the diligence I exhibit when I judge that my evidence regarding P is sufficient, or when I decide instead that I need to pursue the matter further. Indeed, according to strict evidentialism, any particular non-evidential facts about me, qua subject, are irrelevant. The range of mental state experiences that count as legitimate for evaluating a doxastic attitude toward a proposition P is limited to those experiences which are not uniquely mine, but are shared by anyone similarly considering evidence E. As such a subject's epistemic conscientiousness – the fact that she responds to evidence in the right way – is, on this view, irrelevant to the normative status of her beliefs.

Now, there may be something intuitively off about this position. After all, it is reasonable to think that how well a subject evaluates her evidence for her beliefs in light of her interests ought to be relevant to the normative status of her beliefs. But there is more than just intuitive pull to this notion. By limiting our information about a subject's interest in a proposition we are left hamstrung in our attempt to apply the epistemic norm offered by evidentialism, or any other theory of justification, for that matter. This fact is easily overlooked because of our mechanical-like tendency to fill in the assumptions needed to make the relevant judgments, but without those assumptions, by looking at evidence and evidence alone, the strict evidentialist is left unable to evaluate the justificatory status of a subject's beliefs. And this is the real worry for strict evidentialism. Let us explore this claim in a bit more detail.

3. THEORIES OF JUSTIFICATION

Despite significant differences, all theories of justification stipulate epistemic norms that govern belief. S's belief that P at time t is either justified or it is not, and the main job of a theory of justification is to elaborate the conditions under which a subject's beliefs live up to this norm, whether that consists in meeting an evidential standard, coherence with other beliefs, or using a reliable belief-forming mechanism, to name a few possibilities. But whatever the theory of justification – internalist or externalist, reliabilist or coherentist – these epistemic norms are what enable us to make after-the-fact normative judgments about belief. Perhaps, one might argue, we should further be able to use these norms when deciding what to believe, although the issue of doxastic voluntarism is a vexed one (I will return to this point shortly). But even if we cannot pick and choose our beliefs at will, certainly we ought to be able to assess how well supported they are, upon reflection – especially in the case of internalist theories of justification, like evidentialism, in which reasons for belief are first-person accessible – just as we ought to be able to evaluate the justificatory status of someone else's beliefs. If a theory of justification fails to provide us with the tools to make this evaluation, then it is failing at its most basic task.

According to strict evidentialism, the epistemic norm that governs belief is met by evidence alone, and we can determine which beliefs live up to this standard by looking at the subject's evidence and her beliefs. Together, says the evidentialist, these factors will enable us to demarcate those beliefs that are justified from those which are not. But it is this idea that we need to put some pressure on, and when we do we see that the evidentialist is sneaking in some important assumptions about a third factor, namely, the relative value of the matter in question for the subject, assumptions without which we would be unable to evaluate the justificatory status of her beliefs.

To see why this is so, let me repeat that, on strict evidentialism, a judgment about the normative status of beliefs requires us to decide whether S's belief that P has satisfactorily met an evidential standard. So, the question arises, how is that standard determined? Since evidence can never tell us how much evidence is needed for justification in any given case, the answer is that it is up to us, the individuals evaluating the epistemic status of belief, to decide, in each case, how much evidence is sufficient for justification. But how do we make this determination? Because there is no bird's-eye view or god-given standard to guide us here, the only real tool available to help us determine appropriate standards of evidence is to look at the context in which a belief is held. This context enables us to make some snap judgments about a subject S and her interest in P, or at least what we think her interest should be, given the context. We might be wrong, of course, about how important P is to S, but notwithstanding we rely on these assumptions in our everyday assessments of the normative status of beliefs. And indeed we ought to rely on them, for without that framework it is impossible to decide whether something even counts as evidence, in the first place, or how much probative force it has for a subject. After all, what looks like a whole lot of evidence to one person might look paltry to someone else; indeed, there can be widespread disagreement on whether something even counts as evidence, in the first place.

Looking at the context in which a subject S believes that P enables us to make a reasonable judgment about how important P is to S, which in turn enables us to determine the appropriate standard of evidence E for S with respect to P. If S's belief is about the start time of Star Wars, Episode 68 (Feldman Reference Feldman2003: 47), for instance, well, then, a glance at the newspaper listings should be sufficient evidence for justification; our assumption here is that this is a relatively trivial matter for S and as such requires modest evidential support, which is met by looking at the newspaper listings. But if we learn that S's daughter has a starring role in the movie, then we will adjust our expectations of how much evidence is needed to justify S's belief that P – certainly, much more than a cursory glance at the newspaper listings is required. This point can be further illustrated by looking at a couple more examples.

4. JACK THE NEIGHBOR

Take the case of Jack the Neighbor. Imagine that at time t I hear some talk on the street that one of my next-door neighbors, Jack, is selling his house and leaving town, and based on this information I form the belief that P, namely, Jack is selling his house and leaving town. Using the epistemic norm offered by strict evidentialism, suppose that we now want to determine whether at time t my belief that P is a justified belief. According to the evidentialist we have all the information that we need to make this assessment. We have some evidence and the doxastic state which it is based upon. So is this belief justified? One reason why we may think it is so is that the testimony of others provides some positive epistemic support in favor of P; it is evidence that P is true, in other words, and based on that, it seems, we are entitled to conclude that, at time t, P is justified for me.

5. JACK THE EVIL NEIGHBOR

That's at least how it looks at first glance, but imagine that we are given some background information about Jack and my relationship with him. Take the case now of Jack the Evil Neighbor. Suppose that we learn that Jack is not just any next-door neighbor, but that Jack is my evil next-door neighbor who has been tormenting me for years with his loud music, late night parties and all around raucous ways. Jack's behavior has seriously compromised the quality of my home life, indeed my very well-being, and as a result I am deeply invested in the truth of P. Playing around with the example of Jack the Neighbor in this way frees up some of the assumptions hidden within our initial epistemic judgment, and asks us to rethink our evaluation of the status of my doxastic attitude towards P. Note that the evidence is the same in both cases; it is my interest in the truth of P, or, as the case has been described, your awareness of my interest in the truth of P, which is the difference.

So, in the case of Jack the Evil Neighbor, is my belief that P at time t justified? It is true that I have some evidence in favor of P, but whereas the testimony of a neighbor may be adequate support for P when my interest in the truth of P is relatively low, when the truth of P matters to me, when the stakes are high, the say-so of a neighbor is insufficient to ground my belief. Once the context changes so does the evidential standard for justified belief. And note, this is not a point about testimony as a source of belief. We could tell a similar story if instead I had some marginal perceptual evidence in favor of P, say, for instance, that I had seen Jack on his front porch talking to a real estate agent. Nor is the point here that considerations about the relative importance of P are taken into account only in the example of Jack the Evil Neighbor. The point, rather, is that in learning about my complex relationship with Jack we reveal the assumptions hidden in our initial assessment in the case of Jack the Neighbor – namely, that we had supposed that the news of his moving out would be relatively insignificant to me. The case of Jack the Evil Neighbor forces us to adjust our understanding of the context in which my belief that P is held, and in doing so we expose the snap judgment which informed our initial epistemic evaluation. The kinds of considerations at play in the case of Jack the Evil Neighbor are thus likewise at play in the case of Jack the Neighbor, it is just that in this case they are not transparent; they are tacit, functioning as default, background assumptions, only brought to the fore with the additional nuance of the example.

The evidentialist asks us to look at an attitude – belief, disbelief, or suspension of judgment – and decide if it is justified by determining if the subject has sufficient evidence to support it. But, as these examples suggest, what counts as sufficient evidence in any given case can only be determined by looking at the context in which a belief is held. Like Feldman's Star Wars: Episode 68 or the case of Jack the Evil Neighbor, an individual's doxastic attitude towards a proposition cannot be evaluated without making certain judgments about the context in which that belief is held. The context tells us how important a proposition is to a subject and this, in turn, allows us to determine what counts as sufficient evidence in any given case. Because Jack is a pivotal figure in my life, if I were to believe that P based on the say-so of my neighbors we would rightly judge my belief to be unjustified; suspension of judgment is the more appropriate doxastic attitude for me to adopt. If the fact about where Jack lives were inconsequential to me, on the other hand, we would rightly judge my belief that P to be justified. And if you happened to be walking down my street and overheard my neighbors chatting about some guy named Jack who was said to be selling his house and leaving town, your belief that P would also be sufficiently grounded. Our meticulousness about evidence, our responsiveness to reasons, hinges – or at least ought to – on how important the matter in question is to us, both from a first-person perspective, as I decide to tool around for more information about my evil neighbor Jack, and also from a third-person perspective, as you attempt to evaluate whether my belief that P at time t is justified.

When we evaluate a subject's belief that P we decide whether her reasons are sufficient to ground her belief or whether she needs to do more digging based on the epistemic merit of the evidence in hand relative to how important we estimate the proposition in question to be for her. But, again, this kind of consideration is rarely articulated; it is typically an automatic assumption, a subconscious appreciation of the context in which a belief is held by a subject. It is only where our snap judgments are put to the test, when an unanticipated twist challenges our standard expectations, such as in the case of Jack the Evil Neighbor, that these tacit suppositions become transparent.

6. QUASI-EVIDENTIALISM: SOME CLARIFICATIONS

Time to take stock. Quasi-evidentialism is an interest-relative theory of justification, which, by privileging a subject's interest in a proposition, allows for non-evidential mental states to play a role in evaluating doxastic states. Our hopes and desires, our likes and dislikes, our concerns – what we care about – none of these mental states count in favor of the truth of a proposition P, and none of them are thus evidential, but, as the cases above illustrate, they are nevertheless relevant to the justificatory status of an individual's beliefs. Quasi-evidentialism holds that S has a justified belief that P at time t if and only if S's evidence E at time t supports P in proportion to S's interest in P.

A possible objection to this view is that in tethering justification to interests, we have what looks, at least at first glance, like a peculiar consequence. Insofar as I care a lot about P, my evidence in favor of P must rise to meet the standard of justification. But conversely, if I do not care at all about P, then it looks like I can be justified with very little evidence. This seems peculiar, at least at first glance, because it suggests that not caring is a way to lower the evidential burden. But if that sounds a bit odd, it is precisely the correct result. If it does not matter at all to me if Jack is moving out, then overhearing someone's say-so on the issue should be enough to justify my belief in the matter. Likewise, if it does not matter to me when the train leaves the station, then hearing a faint train whistle in the background should be enough to ground my belief that it has just departed. It might seem counter-intuitive that one could be more justified by caring less, but once we look at how that works in various cases, we can see that it is the correct result. Indeed, we ought to say that the individual who believes in accordance with her evidence, given her interests, is a conscientious believer. I will explain the role of epistemic conscientiousness shortly, but first I want to distinguish this view from one which sounds a bit like it, namely, the view that when the stakes in believing that P are raised by S's interest in P, S has a duty to seek out further evidence for P.

This particular view is one that Feldman has, on occasion, discussed and rejected (Reference Feldman and Moser2002: 370–2).Footnote ⁹ He argues that while there may be certain kinds of reasons – moral or prudential ones, for instance, which require us to gather further information about a proposition P, this obligation should not be conceived of as epistemic. From a strictly epistemic perspective the only duty that we have, if we are to believe at all, is to believe according to the evidence that we currently possess. If S's belief that P at time t is insufficiently supported by S's evidence E, then, on this view, S's only epistemic duty, if she adopts any attitude towards P, is to suspend judgment. Thus, even when one is obliged to get evidence for prudential or moral sorts of reasons, from an epistemic perspective, as Feldman puts it, “the thing to do at any given time is to be guided by the evidence that one does have” (Reference Feldman2003: 48).

I think that Feldman is right here up to a point, but that point is decisive. As we have seen, a subject's interest in a matter raises or lowers the burden of evidence in any particular case, and, as I have argued, unless we know where to draw this line we cannot assess the normative status of beliefs. We need to look at the context in which beliefs are held in order to determine a subject S's interest in P, for only then can we assess both the appropriate evidential standard for S with respect to P, and also what counts as sufficient evidence in meeting it.

It is not, therefore, that an interest-relative theory of justification demands that I seek out more information about my evil neighbor Jack, for instance, and his plans to relocate. That is an important point, and on that matter I agree with Feldman. However, in the absence of further information about Jack's plans, my belief that he is planning to sell his home and leave town is unjustified. And it is on precisely this point that Feldman moves too quickly, for even if one tries to be ‘guided by the evidence that one does have’, the discussion here illustrates that evidence, on its own, is, strictly speaking, unable to guide us. Evidence cannot tell us when some matter is trivial to us or worth inquiring further over, for certainly not every matter that crosses our mind is worthy of inquiry. To figure out whether a matter is worth further investigation we must look at certain facts about the subject. Thus, Feldman's suggestion that ‘one ought to be guided by the evidence that one has’ is as much misleading as it is unhelpful. How facts function as reasons for individuals varies from person to person. What looks like a marginal bit of evidence to one person may look like a lot of evidence to someone else. Indeed, as I noted earlier, there can be widespread disagreement on whether something even counts as evidence, in the first place. The same evidence functions differently for different individuals, depending on their interests.Footnote ¹⁰

7. EVIDENCE AND INTERESTS

This idea that certain personal facts about a subject play an ineliminable role in evaluating the normative status of her doxastic attitudes goes a long way to explaining our intuitions around particular examples in the literature on evidentialism. Take Cases 1 and 2 of the Train to Foxboro, by Fantl and McGrath (Reference Fantl and McGrath2002). In Case 1, you are at Back Bay Station in Boston getting ready to board the commuter rail to Providence. You are going on a vacation and you've got all the time in the world, so that when you query a fellow traveler about whether the train pulling in is a milk run (stopping everywhere along the way, including Foxboro), and he replies yes, that's good enough evidence for you to believe that the train which just pulled in stops in Foxboro. In Case 2 you are again at Back Bay Station, but this time around you absolutely need to be in Foxboro – the sooner the better. In fact your career depends on it. You overhear a conversation like that in Train Case 1, but because of what you have at stake, the say-so of a stranger isn't good enough evidence to justify your belief that the train that just pulled in stops in Foxboro.

As Fantl and McGrath point out, if our intuitions are correct in these cases – and they claim that they are – then justification cannot simply be a matter of the evidence one has, since the evidence in both cases is the same but in one case your belief is justified, and in the other it is not. This, according to Fantl and McGrath, illustrates the failure of strict evidentialism, but, in their view, does not as such count as an argument against the position. They go on to construct such an argument, which aims to show that pragmatic considerations are a necessary component of epistemic justification.Footnote ¹¹

I am not convinced by their argument, but mostly I am weary of the strategy of using pragmatic considerations to close the gap left by evidentialism.Footnote ¹² Although it is often the case that our interest in a proposition is raised or lowered because of some practical consequences to our believing it, the focus on pragmatic concerns is too narrow. As the cases of Jack the Neighbor and Jack the Evil Neighbor illustrate, our caring about a matter, our investment in the truth, can be independent of any action we might undertake with respect to it. To deny this is to diminish the legitimate role that our general well-being plays in raising or lowering evidential standards for justified belief.

Fantl and McGrath might object to this by pointing out that there are some practical consequences to nearly all of our beliefs. I think this is right, however, as an objection to broadening the notion of interests to encompass our general well-being in addition to practical concerns, it misses the mark. Suppose that I decide to celebrate Jack's moving out by opening a bottle of champagne. This, one might argue, is surely a practical consequence of my belief that P. But while that is true, this incidental consequence is simply not the reason why, in the first place, the epistemic risk I take in believing that P is high, and as such it does no explanatory work in accounting for the raised evidential standards I must meet in order to have a justified belief that P. If we want to be able to account for the epistemic risk believers take in cases like Jack the Evil Neighbor, then we need to broaden our notion of interests beyond the strictly practical.

Nevertheless, Fantl and McGrath express a widely shared intuition in their analysis of Cases 1 and 2 of the Trains to Foxboro, and an interest-relative theory of justification goes some way to help explain these intuitions. The shared intuition is just that the person who has a pressing need to get to Foxboro ought to be more rigorous in her investigation of the train schedule than the person who is indifferent to where she arrives, and when. And if that is so, then two individuals with the same evidence are not necessarily the same, justificationally, which means that strict evidentialism is wrong. Quasi-evidentialism, with its emphasis on the relationship between one's interests and one's evidence, has the explanatory power to make clear why this is so. A true belief is true no matter how important it is, so if getting at truth varies from case to case, that variation must be accounted for by looking at something other than evidence. Quasi-evidentialism says that the place to look is the relative importance of the true belief for a particular individual. That said, not everyone shows the right amount of diligence in seeking out evidence, given her interests. The person who responds to evidence in the right way is the one who appropriately adjusts her confidence in a belief, in proportion to her interests. To borrow language from virtue epistemology, this person is the epistemically conscientious individual.

8. EPISTEMIC CONSCIENTIOUSNESS

Epistemic conscientiousness is an intellectual virtue, indeed as I see it, it is the overriding intellectual virtue, a manifestation of a constellation of subsidiary intellectual virtues. There are those who define intellectual virtues in terms of reliable functions or processes, but I prefer to see intellectual virtues as traits of character.Footnote ¹³ But they are not just any kind of traits of character; they are traits that are linked, motivationally, to an agent's desire for truth.Footnote ¹⁴ On this view, the intellectually virtuous agent is one whose beliefs are regulated through her character by her desire for truth.

But what, exactly, does this mean? What distinguishes the character of conscientiousness from other character traits whose aim is true belief? The conscientious individual, I suggest, is one who has an appropriately regulated desire for truth. Not every matter which crosses our mind is worthy of our attention; a commitment to truth, on the part of inquirers, is not always appropriate. What we want is a commitment to significant truth, where ‘significance’ varies across individuals, as is determined by a subject's interests. Thus, the conscientious individual is the one who strikes the right balance in pursing the truth, given her interests.

Epistemic conscientiousness is thus an overriding intellectual virtue, and it is displayed through the manifestation of a cluster of subsidiary intellectual virtues, including intellectual openness, intellectual carefulness and fairness, and intellectual autonomy.Footnote ¹⁵ These virtues, when enacted in the right measure, ensure an appropriately regulated desire for truth. We might think that each of these intellectual character traits deserves the status of an intellectual virtue on its own, which is partly right, but on its own no one virtue will ensure an appropriately regulated desire for truth, and thus will not result in epistemic conscientiousness. Intellectual carefulness is an intellectual virtue, for instance, insofar as the careful inquirer is one who has a desire for true beliefs, but only the epistemically conscientious person displays carefulness when it matters. As Cases 1 and 2 of the Train to Foxboro illustrate, it is not always worth our time to double-check the evidence. The same point can be made for intellectual openness, autonomy and fairness. The epistemically conscientious individual knows when to open her mind, for instance, and when to close it, when to rely on her own intellectual resources, and when instead to turn to an expert. The person who gets this right, who manifests a measure of this family of intellectual virtues, will be appropriately regulated in her desire for true beliefs. Epistemic conscientiousness is thus a kind of mediating or regulating virtue. It is the virtue that tells us in what measure to employ our intellectual virtues, and in cases where we have conflicting or overlapping virtues, it tells us how to apply each one.

Contrast the conscientious individual with someone who displays intellectual vice, say the dogmatist, for instance, whose desire for truth blinds her to opinions other than her own, or the intellectually lazy individual, who fails to take appropriate care to ground her beliefs. Or take John, for example, in Montmarquet's the sad case of John and Jill (Reference Montmarquet2008):

Here John believes, through wishful thinking, that Jill has done something morally wrong, and reports this with the result that Jill loses a job and her faith. This case is particularly striking because of the egregious consequences of John's actions. But his blameworthy actions, as Montmarquet notes, are based in his blameworthy belief, which is itself blameworthy because it involves epistemic vice, i.e. wishful thinking – a lack of due effort regarding truth (Reference Montmarquet2008: 396). The sad case of John and Jill is a paradigm case of a failure of intellectual virtue.

9. DOXASTIC CONTROL

A key feature of epistemic conscientiousness, and the intellectual virtues more generally, is that they are qualities of character that are in our control. They are traits that can be improved upon. We instruct people to be intellectually careful and autonomous, for instance, to ‘think for themselves’; we call someone out for believing on shaky grounds; we encourage open-mindedness and courage in intellectual debates; and we teach critical thinking to our students, more or less successfully. We can distinguish these intellectual character traits from what David Owens calls ‘intellectual talents’, such as good visual acuity or memory, features of our cognitive apparatuses which seem not to be subject to our control in the same way (Owens Reference Owens2000: 125). Thus, it might not be the case that we are all equally talented, that we are all endowed with the same intellectual powers, for instance, but we are all able to display our talents, for better or for worse, through the development of intellectual virtues.

By carving out a role for epistemic conscientiousness in the evaluation of doxastic attitudes quasi-evidentialism paves the way for a meaningful notion of doxastic responsibility in a theory of justification. This is a key feature of the theory, for talk of epistemic obligation is at risk of being undermined if we have no control over what we believe, and yet it seems clear that in some respect we lack direct doxastic control. Most of our beliefs are more or less forced upon us. I hear talk on the street that my neighbor Jack is moving out, and I automatically form a belief about Jack's plans to relocate, just as I automatically believe that it's raining when I look outside my office window and see pools of water filling up with rain pellets. But, as Miranda Fricker has argued in the case of testimonial virtues (Reference Fricker2007), our so-called ‘automatic’ responses can be trained or cultivated in the intellectual case, just as they can in many other kinds of cases. Sidney Crosby lets go a wrist shot automatically as he breaks away in on net, but his superb hockey skill is one that he refines in practice every day, just like the morally courageous person who automatically responds to a cry for help coming from inside a burning building. Our cognitive responses to stimuli may likewise be automatic, but they can likewise be refined, and this means that we are able to have some direct influence over which beliefs we adopt. Cultivating our intellectual character is not idle, in other words, for it is our intellectual character that enables us to determine what kinds of propositions are worthy of our attention, how much time we ought to give to them, and, finally, how much evidence we need in order to be justified. Our intellectual character determines, often without conscious reflection, which beliefs we endorse, which ones we suspend judgment over, and which ones we reject. As such, the epistemically conscientious individual has a greater chance than someone who is not conscientious at arriving at true beliefs, barring the usual skeptical concerns. But whether or not she succeeds in landing on a true belief, the epistemically conscientious individual will land on justified beliefs more often than not, because she will have taken care to have the appropriate amount of evidence for her beliefs, given her interests. Finally, if intellectual virtues can be improved upon, then we can be held responsible for them, and if we can be held responsible for them, then there is a non-negligible role for epistemic agency in doxastic matters: we are responsible for our own responsiveness to reasons.