3. Agreements as the Grease (Not the Glue) of Society: A Cognitive and Social Science Perspective

Even doxastic voluntarism (Ginet 2001; Wansing 2006) entails a much more nuanced view of our volitional control over belief formation, and it is anyway a highly controversial position in epistemology, where the dominant view is that beliefs cannot be willed or decided (doxastic irresistibility; Woods 2005). Alternatively, one might object that certain facts, to wit, conventional facts, such as Paris being the capital of France, are precisely the product of an agreement to believe in that particular fact. I think this view of conventions is fundamentally wrong: conventions are agreements to act in certain ways, and the resulting coordinated efforts of all the agents endorsing a convention creates an objective (social) reality, to which people’s beliefs refer in the usual way. As a case in point, that Paris is the capital of France is a (social) fact, no less real than the non-metallic nature of hydrogen, and believing it does not depend on any worldwide agreement to do so. However, the fact that Paris is the capital of France does depend on a worldwide agreement to act accordingly to such notion, but this is an H-agreement on actions, not beliefs. For further details on the relationship between conventions and agreements, see Gilbert (1983, 1993) and Andrighetto et al. (2009).