Dr Vanessa Carr | LMU München

Date | 25 March 2026

Title | 'Believing in Success Against the Odds'

Abstract:

We sometimes intend to do things in contexts that make it difficult to evaluate whether we should believe that we will manage to do as we intend, or not. That is, you might intend to do something when your evidence indicates a high chance of ability to do as you intend, but yet also a significant chance of failure.

I argue that, in such a context, you should believe both that you will do as you intend and that there is significant chance that you won’t. In this sort of context, believing both these things is not only consistent, but rationally required. I suggest that we can understand this in the following way: we generally ought to view ourselves from both a personal-agentive stance and an objective stance, and there are contexts in which these two stances don’t align in the standard manner.