The Will in Belief

Abstract It’s bad to hang on to a belief in the face of good evidence that it’s false. That makes you dogmatic. Enter the classic dogmatism puzzle. The standard response? Go for defeat: new evidence can destroy old knowledge. But there are variants on the classic dogmatism puzzle which defeat can’t help with. Worse still, these puzzles threaten to undermine the standard defeatist solution to the classic puzzle. Call these the revenge puzzles. Two are already noted in the literature. This chapter introduces a third, particularly severe revenge puzzle. It then presents a unified solution to the revenge puzzles. The solution motivates a boldly revisionary conception of belief: one on which belief involves the will.