Abstract: In recent years, there has been a lively debate among epistemologists on the implications of irrelevant influences on belief (White, 2010) (Vavova, 2016) (Shoenfield, 2022) (among others). Seemingly, many of our sophisticated, complex beliefs are significantly influenced by (presumably epistemically irrelevant) factors such as our personal histories and the circumstances of our upbringing. If true, what does this mean for the epistemic status of these beliefs and the presumed rationality of our belief-forming methods? Are beliefs ‘debunked’ when shown to have contingent origins, where epistemically irrelevant factors (i.e., those that do not pertain directly to the truth or falsity of the beliefs in question) played a decisive role? This concern has been described as genealogical anxiety: the worry that the origins of beliefs, once revealed to be influenced by irrelevant factors, will undermine or cast doubt on those beliefs (Srinivasan 2015, 2019).

The literature so far has predominantly focused on the contingency of irrelevant influences for the beliefs we come to hold. But there is another seemingly unsettling aspect of belief-forming processes which are heavily influenced by social and cultural factors that merits examination: that certain (most?) beliefs seem to be imposed on me by my epistemic environment suggests that I passively adopt them instead of exercising epistemic agency (Sosa, 2013). To address this lacuna, in this paper I present a model of belief-forming processes that highlights how circuits of attention and trust/distrust influence our belief-forming processes (Dutilh Novaes, 2020). Cultural and social factors are naturally understood in terms of complex epistemic environments where not only (or not even primarily) first-order evidence matters; to a large extent, our beliefs are formed by mechanisms of deference (Levy, 2021). According to this model, our beliefs are indeed largely shaped by the representations we happen to be exposed to and our attributions of trustworthiness (or lack thereof) to others. But the model also suggests that, while there is a lot going on beyond our control that significantly shapes what we come to believe, we still retain a certain degree of agency to the extent that we are able to rewire our circuits of attention and trust/distrust.