Final Remarks

This shows us that practical akrasia doesn’t require “proper action”, or the consummation of a “full-blown action”. Why, then, would things have to be any different when it comes to the epistemic forms of this conduct? Why would they have to require full-blown belief, and only full-blown belief? They do not. And if we have the impression that they do, it’s only because this have been stipulated by the ISO-based characterization of epistemic akrasia.

The bottom line here is that Williams’ and Owens’ arguments work for the sake of showing that the control condition for epistemic akrasia, C2, cannot be met, on account that Control over Beliefs, CB is false. But only if C2 is spelled out in the narrow way: in a way that stipulates that the epistemic attitude involved in akrasia episodes is proper, full-blown belief. But there is no reason to think that it has to be.

That’s because the control condition for practical akrasia, from which C2 is derived, is not, itself, that narrow. It’s not entailed by the use of the relevant concept of an action that it needs to be proper, full-blown, consummated action. Or, if it is, it’s just by a matter of stipulation.

If we accept that the person in the chocolate cake example above is not less akratic than she would be if she had had the means to consummate the intended action, then we have to accept that the concept of practical akrasia itself is broader, or at least less narrow, than the ISO-based characterization has made it look.

Consequently, the concept of epistemic akrasia too has to be a broader one. Being broader, it is more difficult to be proven impossible – it might take more to prove its impossibility, than it would take if it was narrow, full-blown-belief-only-based. That’s because now it can take many forms, involving many different doxastic attitudes; and to prove that it is impossible on account that C2 cannot be met one has to prove that C2 cannot be met in each and any of its many different forms. No arguments have been present so far that attain this.

These arguments, however, cannot be generalized to cover all the forms epistemic akrasia might take. That’s because they cannot be extended to the full range of doxastic attitudes that make up our epistemic agency. The epistemic attitudes at stake in the akrasia episode don’t have to be restricted to full-blown beliefs, as the discussion carried out at the end of last section clarify. They could be other forms of endorsement, or belief-like attitudes. If even practical akrasia of action could involve practical conducts and inclinations that fall short of a proper, full-blown, consummated action, there is no reason to think that an epistemic variant could only involve full-blown beliefs, and not these range of other doxastic attitudes and intellectual conducts. Accordingly, not all conceivable forms of epistemic akrasia have been ruled out as conceptually impossible.

Having shown that not all conceivable forms of epistemic akrasia have been proved conceptually impossible was of crucial importance because, without this, every discussion about epistemic akrasia or about related topics would always be under the shadow of the skeptical claim that what’s being discussed doesn’t really exist, or is a misconception. Therefore, proving that not all conceivable forms of epistemic akrasia are conceptually impossible rehabilitates this concept, in a sense, and frees me from the easily raisable objection that epistemic inefficacy is impossible because epistemic akrasia is impossible (insofar as the two notions are related – they are related to the extent that both purport answers to the question:

“does it make sense to speak of epistemic varieties of weakness of willpower?”).

However, not being conceptually impossible is one thing, and being epistemologically valuable is quite another. Just because it hasn’t been proved that epistemic akrasia is a contradictory concept doesn’t mean that this concept is capable of figuring in the best explanation of seemingly alien conducts that appear to bear some parallelism with weakness of the will, like the ones presented in Chapter 1. If those cases were now accounted for in terms of doxastic belief-cousins, instead of beliefs, they would be immune to the skeptics’ arguments raised in this chapter and in the previous one. But would we understand them better now? It doesn’t look like this would add much. Practically speaking we would be just playing with words.

So even though epistemic akrasia is not impossible, approaching people’s conducts in terms of epistemic akrasia doesn’t take us very far, in terms of understanding (making sense of) these conducts.

This is not to say that all those cases are actually nonsensical, or that nothing in real life exists that parallels them, on the contrary – many of them seem remarkably unexceptional. They are the type of thing we’ve seen happening, if not to ourselves, then to those around us; and if not many times, at least a couple of. Yet, they are puzzling. But there are a few things keeping us from making progress in our goal of making sense of them.

One of those things is the fact that, in each and all of those cases, as well as in the discussion carried on throughout Chapters 2 and 3, to a certain extent, we are pressed into working from what Mele terms a “cold attribution” standpoint (1986:

221), which is, roughly, ascribing propositional attitudes to agents and zooming in.

The cases are presented in a way that zooms in a person’s epistemic performance and clips it at the exact place or moment when a tension between propositional attitudes (like judgment and belief) is identifiable, and then this zoomed-in clipping is tagged “akrasia”. I believe this misses the point. Weakness of willpower is not that particular frame, or zoomed in bit. In other words: it’s not a matter of detachable episodes.

This is easier to understand if you think of a timeline. Let’s go back to the chocolate cake example, the one in which a person knows that the overall best thing to do is to not eat several pieces of cake in a row, but then proceeds to having another piece anyway. The problem with the person in this example does not confine itself to the moment in which she picked, say, the fourth piece of cake (assuming that more than three pieces in a row is “several” by all accounts). That small instant when this action is performed is a part of the problem, but this person’s problem, what’s wrong with her, so to speak, does not exhaust itself at that moment.

Therefore, the real problem is not simply the combination of that action with her (contrary) better judgment, co-existing at a given instant. This person was already being akratic before that moment, though it is difficult to identify precisely since when.

It may have been since it first came into her mind that she shouldn’t be picking the third piece, but it might as well have been since she first formed a resolution to stay away from all cakes. Likewise, the problem does not disappear from the moment she finishes to chew and swallow, because the silent disposition to iteration is always there. It’s a problem within the person. But characterizing akrasia (and epistemic akrasia) episodically misses this point.

In other words: there is a diachronic aspect to akrasia that the typical examples (the ones from Chapter 1), as well as the discussion carried out by scholars (Chapters 2 and 3), completely overlook, because they are all too focused on the synchronic aspect, i.e., the coexistence of conflicting propositional attitudes. This deprives the concept of “epistemic akrasia” from most of the epistemological value it could otherwise have. I believe the concept of akrasia has potential epistemological value, because some of the “essence” of the problem of akrasia appears to have echoes everywhere in our lives, including our epistemic lives. Bur I also think that its value has much more to do with the diachronic dimension of the phenomenon than with its synchronic aspect.

The second thing keeping us from progressing in our goal of sense-making is the fact that, in the alleged cases of epistemic akrasia discussed, as well as in the biggest part of the discussion over the (im)possibility of epistemic akrasia, the conflict between judgment and conduct has been taken as the problem, the “something wrong”, as if this was a bad thing in itself. That is, the mere fact that there is a conflict between one’s judgment and her conduct has taken precedence over the epistemological and ethical consequences of there being such a conflict. But this is not, I suppose, the main issue with akrasia, the interesting issue that we should be focusing on.

The interesting aspect of the very notion of akrasia, the one that has the potential to be of epistemological value, is the fact that this conduct gets in the way of some important epistemic good. Ancient and medieval philosophers, as well as some of the contemporary scholars engaged in the discussion of akrasia, like Amélie Rorty (1983), acknowledged this fact: practical akrasia is above all an ethical problem, because it gets in the way of something that is important from an ethical standpoint. It has been historically regarded as a personal trait that stands in the way of a moral ideal, such as moderation, or living a virtuous life, or leading a life without sin (Snellen 2018: 13-14); and this is why it became a topic of discussion, in the first place. In the same fashion, what makes this notion worth discussing in epistemology is its potential to stand in the way of an epistemic ideal, such as knowledge, responsible inquiry, or the virtuous epistemic life.

For us to fully appreciate the ways in which akrasia is capable of generating the consequences it generates to our epistemic lives, we need to understand it as encompassing a much more comprehensive phenomenon than just particular,

episodic undertaking of a conduct against one’s better judgment (even because one single episode of acting against what we judge best is unlikely to have far reaching consequences, unless, of course, what’s at stake is something really big). And we need to get specific about this phenomenon, which means we need to examine the specific ways in which is presents itself, its more relevant traits, what type of consequence it generates, and so forth.

In sum, I believe forms of personal weaknesses that resemble (either superficially or not) the phenomenon of weakness of the will do show up in our intellectual lives, and they do so unexceptionally, but they are not intrinsically valuable to the epistemological discussion just by virtue of mirroring the conceptual definition of akrasia. Actually, most of the cases presented in the literature as paradigmatic examples of epistemic akrasia (the examples laid out in Chapter 1) are not, because we’re left in the dark both about their diachronic aspect as about the damage consequences they provoke. We don’t even know if they have a diachronic aspect, or noxious consequences. Nevertheless, they serve the important purpose of paving the way for the most substantial discussion, by allowing me to clear misunderstandings.

Stepping into what I take to be the most substantial discussion will require that a number of moves be made. First, that akrasia in the intellectual domain be seen as an epistemic vice. The fact that intellectual forms of akrasia amount to personal flaws that generate negative epistemic consequences, on the one hand, and the fact that the most pressing issue pertaining this very notion is precisely that those consequences get in the way of some epistemic ideal, on the other hand, both indicate that the discussion needs to be redirected towards a virtue-based approach, if it is to be profitable. This idea is not new, John Heil (1984: 70) has already suggested that intellectual forms of akrasia be viewed as epistemic vices, although he hasn’t gone very far in this project himself. Chapter 4, then, will have the aim of getting clear on what an epistemic vice is, as well as on what the discipline of vice epistemology is all about.

Second, since not all cases of epistemic akrasia are rich in epistemological value, only the ones that negatively affect our epistemic ideals, another move that needs to be made is a shift of focus. I propose that we abandon the idea of

“epistemic akrasia” broadly understood as practical akrasia’s mirror concept and start dealing with more specific types of things in our intellectual lives that echo, or at least

appear to echo akrasia, to some extent. We grab a hold of the epistemologically more interesting cases by picking, from the many forms of epistemic weaknesses that bear resemblances to the phenomenon of weakness of the will, the ones that generate the worst epistemic consequences by virtue of being what they are, and by abandoning the ones that either don’t generate any noxious consequences or that are such that we do not know whether or not they do generate some.

In other words, I’m suggesting that there is an epistemic vice that do bear similarities with the phenomenon of weakness of the will; and that concrete manifestations of this vice is what we should focus on from now on. Examples of this vice won’t always resemble the cases presented in Chapter 1, because they won’t always share the necessary and sufficient conditions discussed in Chapters 2 and 3.

And they might even not be acknowledgeable as members of the same general class as those cases, specially because the latter have been spelled out from the “cold attribution standpoint” mentioned, which doesn’t work very well for the purposes of describing vices.

To reflect this clipping, and to avoid conceptual misunderstandings, I propose using the name epistemic inefficacy to refer to this vice, and abandoning the umbrella-concept of epistemic akrasia³⁵. Both have their roots on the idea of weakness of the will, but, contrary to “epistemic akrasia”, which is a vague and episodic concept with a very diverse range of alleged examples and without a serious concern with consequences, “epistemic inefficacy” will be specific, less heterogeneous and with a bigger emphasis on detrimental consequences generated.

In other words, epistemic inefficacy refers to a vice, and brings with it all the implications that the very notion of a vice carries, including the implication that the primary purpose this notion is intended to serve is the purpose of sense-making (Verstehen).

I call it “inefficacy” to be truthful to the intuition that in the biggest part of our epistemic lives we neither do nor fail to do what we want to (an insight Williams’ and Owens’ got right). Willpower is the ability to control our actions and thoughts. We

35 This move, abandoning a concept in favour of one with a more specific scope, might be thought of in terms of a Carnapean process of explication. Carnap thought that “ordinary language and traditional concepts were to be overcome; they were to be replaced by better and more scientific ones” (Leitgeb

& Carus 2022: §1.1). In more or less the same fashion, I submit that the notion of epistemic akrasia be overcome, that is, replaced by the notions corresponding to the (specific) vices affecting people’s intellectual performance, when that performance involves the undertaking of contradictory attitudes.

Epistemic inefficacy is one of those vices.

don’t really exercise this ability a lot when coping with epistemic situations, even if we possess it. So in our epistemic lives, or in epistemic contexts, the notions of will and willpower are not the key concepts. Efficacy, on the other hand, is the ability to generate an adequate outcome, to produce an adequate result. Therefore, this is a more suitable concept to be used in epistemological discussions focused in evaluating people’s performance as knowers, or as inquirers. Chapters 5 and 6, then, will be devoted to a detailed discussion of the vice of epistemic inefficacy.