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Many philosophers seem to believe that belief is involuntary. But if this were the case, wouldn't it be true that every human being, when presented with the right information, would automatically assume a certain belief? So when person A and person B are presented with information Y, the will always comes to believe X. Just as in other involuntary acts of the human body. If person A and person B are both given a chemical depressant, let's say a tranquilizer, they will always fall asleep. They have no control over it, it is just an involuntary chemical reaction in the body. It does not seem to me that belief works with this same type of involuntary, automatic, mechanistic quality. For example, we could take a sample of 100 Americans and show them all the evidence in support of Darwin's evolutionary process. About half would afterwards support evolution, and half afterwards would say it is phoey. Although I have not seen the results of such a study, I think it is safe to assume that this would be the outcome. Same information given to persons 1-100, with some having belief X and some having belief Y.

October 11, 2005

Response from Peter Lipton on October 11, 2005
Uniformity does not follow from involuntariness: the tranquilizer example notwithstanding, different people sometimes have strikingly different reactions to the same drug. So different that a drug that cures one person kills another. Getting back to beliefs, I venture that even if two individuals were brought up in exactly the same environment, they would not end up with the same beliefs. But of course no two individuals are brought up in anything like exactly the same environment.

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