Parrot's Agentive Authority Argument Analysis

Parrott’s argument avoids problems that authority which are grounded epistemically faces. However, Parrot’s agentive authority argument runs into an objection. It seems like we can defer authority to people who come to form beliefs or desires irrationally. Consider this scenario where a person desires to fill up the whole house full of balloons. When you question him why does he desires to do it, he replies ‘I just feel like doing it out of the blue’. In this case though he did not form his beliefs or come to know them through reasoning, we nevertheless defer him the authority – we accept his desire to fill his house with balloons without further questioning. Thus, from the example it shows that being cognitive agents we do not always have …show more content…
In this case, if the agent chooses to skip past the process of reasoning and pick a belief, it seems like the agent is not really committed towards his beliefs. The agent is merely choosing between A or B where it does not really seem to matter to him which one he chooses. For example, imagine Jenny forms two contradicting beliefs – A. The president is a good president and B. The president is not a good president. When Jenny asserts statement A without choosing to go through the process of reasoning in the ‘deliberation stage’, it seems plausible for her to pick A yet remain committed to the sentence as she has somewhat believed in that to form the existence of the belief in the first place. However, it does not mean that the level of commitment for the belief that bypass reasoning in the ‘deliberation stage’ will be the same as one that did. Without the process of reasoning at the ‘deliberation stage’, the commitment Jenny expressed towards the belief does not seem to be as strong as the one that went through the reasoning at both levels. Just like how a house will have more defense against intruders if the owner installed double security, a belief will have a higher commitment level as the agent secures more reason why he chose that particular belief over the rest. Intuitively, it looks like a lot of beliefs bypass the process of reasoning in the ‘deliberation stage’. However, it is plausible for the agent to believe that he is strongly committed to a belief that only undergoes the process of reasoning in the ‘formation stage’. But this seems counterintuitive to the idea that a belief, which only undergoes the process of reasoning at one level can express the same degree of commitment to one that undergoes the process of reasoning at both