On the assumption that genuinely normative demands concern things connected in some way to our agency, i.e. what we exercise in doing things with or for reasons, epistemologists face an important question: are there genuine epistemic norms governing belief, and if so where in the vicinity of belief are we to find the requisite cognitive agency? Extant accounts of cognitive agency tend to focus on belief itself or the event of belief-formation to answer this question, to the exclusion of the (...) activity of maintaining a system of beliefs. This paper argues that a full account of epistemic normativity will need to make sense of this activity as a core locus of cognitive agency. This idea is used to motivate the conclusion that one important and often overlooked kind of epistemic norms is the kind of norms governing the various cognitive activities by which we check, sustain, and adjust our belief systems. (shrink)

Sosa famously argues that epistemic normativity is a species of “performance normativity,” comparing beliefs to archery shots. However, philosophers have traditionally conceived of beliefs as states, which means that they are not dynamic or telic like performances. A natural response to this tension is to argue that belief formation rather than belief itself is the proper target of epistemic normativity. This response is rejected here on grounds of the way it obscures the “here and now” exercise of cognitive agency that (...) I view as central to any account of epistemic normativity and doxastic agency. Although the etiology of a belief can be relevant to its normative status, often so much more is relevant and more centrally so. This generates a dilemma for anyone following Sosa in pursuing the idea that epistemic normativity is a species of performance normativity. (shrink)

Sosa famously argues that epistemic normativity is a species of “performance normativity,” comparing beliefs to archery shots. However, philosophers have traditionally conceived of beliefs as states, which means that they are not dynamic or telic like performances. A natural response to this tension is to argue that belief formation rather than belief itself is the proper target of epistemic normativity. This response is rejected here on grounds of the way it obscures the “here and now” exercise of cognitive agency that (...) I view as central to any account of epistemic normativity and doxastic agency. Although the etiology of a belief can be relevant to its normative status, often so much more is relevant and more centrally so. This generates a dilemma for anyone following Sosa in pursuing the idea that epistemic normativity is a species of performance normativity. (shrink)