ABSTRACT
In sum, I have tried in this section to explicate several related philosophical theses (omitting many nuances, I am afraid). These are: (1) believing is necessarily involuntary; (2) refl ection about what to believe makes no essential use of the concept of the fi rst person; and (3) beliefs that are opaque to one’s current take on the evidence, or that are held on the basis of a past judgment, are a rational failure and exhibit a problematic form of alienation. These claims are each meant to follow from the premise that transparency is both a conceptual constraint on doxastic deliberation and a normative ideal for belief in general. I do not claim that any particular philosopher endorses all of these theses, or the reasoning I have suggested is behind them, but I do think the spirit of this view has wide appeal. I aim in the rest of the paper to deny all three of them.
