Doxastic Deliberation and the Puzzles of Transparency

Doxastic deliberation about how to doxastically relate to a given proposition p is said to be transparent, in that the central deliberative question of ‘Whether to believe p?’ is equivalent to ‘Whether p?’. I discuss four challenges to this thesis based on non-evidential epistemic reasons, deliberative dilemmas, self-effecting attitudes, and permissivist pragmatism. By employing recent insights from both the theory of epistemic normativity and the literature on practical deliberation, I argue that each of these puzzles can be squared with a properly limited and constrained version of the transparency thesis. Ultimately, I show that the claim that doxastic deliberation is after settling ‘Whether p?’ can only be understood as an approximation of a sub-question of the initial normative deliberative question concerning a very specific set of attitudinal options. Nevertheless, the resulting theory retains the core motivation and upshots of the transparency thesis: one is still able to explain why the deliberative norms of doxastic deliberation appear to be, for the most part, epistemic norms.