Explaining Our Own Beliefs: Non-epistemic Believing and Doxastic Instability

It has often been claimed that ourbelieving some proposition is dependent uponour not being committed to a non-epistemicexplanation of why we believe that proposition.Very roughly, I cannot believe that p andalso accept a non-epistemic explanation of mybelieving that p. Those who have assertedsuch a claim have drawn from it a range ofimplications: doxastic involuntarism, theunacceptability of Humean naturalism, doxasticfreedom, restrictions upon the effectiveness ofpractical (Pascalian) arguments, as well asothers. If any of these implications are right,then we would do well to have a precisestatement of the nature of this phenomenoncentral to first-person doxastic explanations,as well as of our reasons for believing that itholds. Both of these are lacking in theliterature. This paper is an attempt toelucidate and defend this claim.