---
pubDate: 2021-11-01
title: Is Belief a Choice?
tags:
  - philosophy
abstract: |
  Do you choose to belief something, or do you recognize that you already
  believe it?
table_of_contents: false
---

My intuition is that belief is not a choice. When someone asks me if I believe
that the sky is blue, I don't decide to believe the sky is blue and then say
"yes, I believe the sky is blue". Instead, I introspect and notice that yes, I
believe the sky is blue, and then say "yes, I believe the sky is blue".

As a less trivial example, if in an argument I am asked if I believe the thing I
was originally arguing for, I introspect and consider whether or not I still
believe it after thinking about what the other person has said. This process
doesn't _feel_ like making a choice. If the other person has convinced me, then
I notice that I feel like I am noticing that I have been convinced. It doesn't
feel like it is up to me whether or not to be convinced, it just happens.

Of course, it isn't as simple as this though. In an arugment, there can often
come a point where I am "on the edge" about a question --- based on what I've
thought about so far, I could see my belief going either way. But not strongly.
At this point, its useful to consider the idea of _credence_, which is the
degree of beleif. When I say that I believe something, what I usually mean is
that I have a reasonably high (certainly more than 50%) credence in it. So if I
could see the argument convincing me either way, my credence is very close to
50%. Under this view, perhaps my belief is not really in question yet, because
it doesn't seem like my credence will swing significantly enough towards on
direction or the other in order to become strong enough to be called a belief,
without further consideration. The counter to this would be that I could
_choose_ to swing my credence significantly enough to yield a belief.

A common sticking point here and in the free will debate is on the meaning of
"choice". One approach is to try to define "choose" as a fundamental physical
action that humans (at least) can do with their minds. This approach leads
quickly to the conclusion that there really is no such thing as choice because
there could not be some basic physical action that minds can do that isn't
explainable in terms of just the more basic physical processes that clearly
arent under the human mind's control (some are deterministic, some are
stochastic). While this is sometimes used as an argument against the existence
of (libertarian) free will, it is actually a reductio ad absurdum of the
approach itself. This shouldn't be an argument about the definition of words, it
should be about the actual _thing_ that we refer to when we say "choice". Choice
is a social construct (as opposed to a physical one) that is used to refer to
actual actions all the time, so it certainly exists. To refute its existence is
to deny that people can communicate meaning with language. Note, however, that I
am not claiming that everyone's conceptions about the properties of choice are
true --- I am only asserting that "choice" refers to something real, even if its
users would also make false claims about the things being referred to. I.e.
"choice" means whatever kind of thing it is that is referred to when people talk
about choice.

With this consideration, come back to the concern about choosing to believe. It
does sometimes appear that people end up believing what they believe regardless
of their desire to believe otherwise. Even if I try to believe the sky is green,
I cannot. At the same time, it also sometimes appear that people choose to
believe what they believe. Often this happens by them making a series of choices
that leave them in a circumstance where they are strongly influenced to believe
something, and sometimes even a person appears to just decide to believe
something on the spot by an act of will. Even in these latter situations,
usually there are _some_ reasosn for a believe to form beyond the pure willing
of it. But even with that considered, there is undeniably a choice involved in
swinging the credence one way rather that another.

In conclusion, beliefs are influenced by a combination of factors some of which
are chosen and some of which are not. There can often be many more non-chosen
factors than are recognized by the chooser, but undeniably there _can_ still be
choice involved.