Alienated Belief and the Limits of Belief-Relative Pragmatism

Abstract The Belief-Relative Value account, or BRV, evaluates the rationality of belief by expected practical value relative to the agent’s actual beliefs and ends. One attraction of BRV is that it seems to capture what makes sense “from the inside”, from the agent’s own perspective. I argue that this motivation is unstable. Cases of alienated belief show that a belief can guide an agent’s attention, inference, and action while the standpoint from which it guides her remains intrusive, imposed, or estranged. BRV can preserve its austerity by identifying the agent’s perspective with the operative standpoint fixed by her actual beliefs and ends. But then belief-relativity secures only instrumental intelligibility, not deliberative self-guidance from a standpoint the agent can inhabit as her own. Alternatively, BRV can enrich the relevant perspective with an ownership condition, but only by giving up some of the austerity that makes the view distinctive.