Faced with the live, forced, and momentous option of whether to accept some form of theism, William James had the will to believe in God. Moved by similar pragmatic principles, Aaron Zimmerman advises self-professed egalitarians to believe they lack racist beliefs—even in the face of less explicit indices that, for some, point in the opposite direction.
He founds this advice on the “two main theses” of his book Belief: A Pragmatic Picture: first, that “belief is canonically manifested in controlled, attentive information-guidance and can be distinguished from other mental/neural phenomena on this basis”; and, second, that “the nature of belief cannot be determined by scientific theorizing alone, but must be relativized to a set of theoretically underdetermined taxonomic choices” (98, emphasis added). In light of the first of these principles, behaviors that are not controlled and attentive are, by definition, not guided by beliefs and perforce not evidence...
