THE VOLUNTARINESS OF JUDGEMENT

While various items closely associated with belief, such as speech-acts of assertion, or what have recently been termed acts of ‘acceptance’, can clearly be voluntary, it is commonly supposed that belief itself, being intrinsically truth-directed, is essentially passive. I argue that while this may be true of belief proper, understood as a kind of disposition, it is not true of acts of assent or ‘judgment’. Judgments, I contend, must be deemed voluntary precisely because of their truth-aimedness, for in their case this feature entails that they can always be regarded as the subjects of a kind of implicit practical reasoning. By emphasizing the familiar point that voluntariness need not involve anything more than this, and byinvoking the soft determinist option of holding causation to be compatible with choice, I seek to deflect some anticipated objections to this argument. © 1996 Taylor & Francis Group, LLC.