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The problem of the basing relation

Synthese 190 (14):2943-2957 (2013)

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  1. Evidentialism.Giada Fratantonio - forthcoming - In Kurt Sylvan, Ernest Sosa, Jonathan Dancy & Matthias Steup (eds.), The Blackwell Companion to Epistemology, 3rd edition. Wiley Blackwell.
    At the core of evidentialism lies a very plausible claim: rational thinkers follow their evidence. While this seems to be a very intuitive, almost trivial, claim, providing a full and complete evidentialist theory is complicated. In this entry, I begin with elucidating what kind of theory evidentialists aim to provide us with. I will show that, in order to provide a complete evidentialist theory, we have to provide a lot of details on what evidence is and how it relates to (...)
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  • Can the Epistemic Basing Relation be a Brain Process?Dwayne Moore - 2023 - Global Philosophy 33 (2):1-19.
    There is a difference between having reasons for believing and believing for reasons. This difference is often fleshed out via an epistemic basing relation, where an epistemic basing relation obtains between beliefs and the actual reasons for which those beliefs are held. The precise nature of the basing relation is subject to much controversy, and one such underdeveloped issue is whether beliefs can be based on brain processing. In this paper I answer in the negative, providing reasons that the basing (...)
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  • Perceptual learning and reasons‐responsiveness.Zoe Jenkin - 2022 - Noûs 57 (2):481-508.
    Perceptual experiences are not immediately responsive to reasons. You see a stick submerged in a glass of water as bent no matter how much you know about light refraction. Due to this isolation from reasons, perception is traditionally considered outside the scope of epistemic evaluability as justified or unjustified. Is perception really as independent from reasons as visual illusions make it out to be? I argue no, drawing on psychological evidence from perceptual learning. The flexibility of perceptual learning is a (...)
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  • Doxastic justification through dispositions to cause.Julius Schönherr - 2022 - Synthese 200 (4):1-18.
    According to the standard view, a belief is based on a reason and doxastically justified—i.e., permissibly held—only if a causal relation obtains between a reason and the belief. In this paper, I argue that a belief can be doxastically justified by a reason’s mere disposition to sustain it. Such a disposition, however, wouldn’t establish a causal connection unless it were manifested. My argument is that, in the cases I have in mind, the manifestation of this disposition would add no positive (...)
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  • Group Belief for a Reason.Jessica Brown - 2022 - Aristotelian Society Supplementary Volume 96 (1):1-22.
    In this paper I investigate what it is for a group to believe something for a reason. I defend a non-summative account on which a group can believe that p for a reason even though none of its members believe that p for that reason. By contrast, a summative account would hold that the reason for which a group believes that p is a function of the reason for which its members believe that p. I argue that the proposed non-summative (...)
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  • Believing for a Reason is (at least) Nearly Self-Intimating.Sophie Keeling - 2022 - Erkenntnis.
    This paper concerns a specific epistemic feature of believing for a reason (e.g., believing that it will rain on the basis of the grey clouds outside). It has commonly been assumed that our access to such facts about ourselves is akin in all relevant respects to our access to why other people hold their beliefs. Further, discussion of self-intimation - that we are necessarily in a position to know when we are in certain conditions - has centred largely around mental (...)
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  • No Kind of Reason is the Wrong Kind of Reason.Miriam Schleifer McCormick - 2018 - In McCain Kevin (ed.), Believing in Accordance with the Evidence: New Essays on Evidentialism. Cham: Springer Verlag. pp. 261-276.
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  • Knowing our Reasons: Distinctive Self‐Knowledge of Why We Hold Our Attitudes and Perform Actions.Sophie Keeling - 2021 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 102 (2):318-341.
    Philosophy and Phenomenological Research.
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  • The Basing Relation.Ram Neta - 2019 - Philosophical Review 128 (2):179-217.
    Sometimes, there are reasons for which we believe, intend, resent, decide, and so on: these reasons are the “bases” of the latter, and the explanatory relation between these bases and the latter is what I will call “the basing relation.” What kind of explanatory relation is this? Dispositionalists claim that the basing relation consists in the agent’s manifesting a disposition to respond to those bases by having the belief, intention, resentment, and so on, in question. Representationalists claim that the basing (...)
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  • Suspending is Believing.Thomas Raleigh - 2019 - Synthese (3):1-26.
    A good account of the agnostic attitude of Suspending Judgement should explain how it can be rendered more or less rational/justified according to the state of one's evidence – and one's relation to that evidence. I argue that the attitude of suspending judgement whether p constitutively involves having a belief; roughly, a belief that one cannot yet tell whether or not p. I show that a theory of suspending that treats it as a sui generis attitude, wholly distinct from belief, (...)
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  • What Acquaintance Teaches.Alex Grzankowski & Michael Tye - 2019 - In Jonathan Knowles & Thomas Raleigh (eds.), Acquaintance: New Essays. Oxford, United Kingdom: Oxford University Press. pp. 75–94.
    In her black and white room, Mary doesn’t know what it is like to see red. Only after undergoing an experience as of something red and hence acquainting herself with red can Mary learn what it is like. But learning what it is like to see red requires more than simply becoming acquainted with it. To be acquainted with something is to know it, but such knowledge, as we argue, is object-knowledge rather than propositional-knowledge. To know what it is like (...)
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  • The Problem of Culturally Normal Belief.Susanna Siegel - forthcoming - In Robin Celikates, Sally Haslanger & Jason Stanley (eds.), Rethinking Ideology. Oxford University Press.
    This paper defends an analysis of the epistemic contours of the interface between individuals and their cultural milieu.
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  • Confabulating Reasons.Marianna Bergamaschi Ganapini & Marianna Bergamaschi Ganapini - 2020 - Topoi 39 (1):189-201.
    In this paper, I will focus on a type of confabulation that emerges in relation to questions about mental attitudes whose causes we cannot introspectively access. I argue against two popular views that see confabulations as mainly offering a psychological story about ourselves. On these views, confabulations are the result of either a cause-tracking mechanism or a self-directed mindreading mechanism. In contrast, I propose the view that confabulations are mostly telling a normative story: they are arguments primarily offered to justify (...)
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  • Prime Time (for the Basing Relation).Kurt Sylvan & Errol Lord - 2019 - In Joseph Adam Carter & Patrick Bondy (eds.), Well Founded Belief: New Essays on the Epistemic Basing Relation. New York: Routledge.
    It is often assumed that believing that p for a normative reason consists in nothing more than (i) believing that p for a reason and (ii) that reason’s corresponding to a normative reason to believe that p, where (i) and (ii) are independent factors. This is the Composite View. In this paper, we argue against the Composite View on extensional and theoretical grounds. We advocate an alternative that we call the Prime View. On this view, believing for a normative reason (...)
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  • (1 other version)Propositional Justification and Doxastic Justification.Paul Silva & Luis R. G. Oliveira - 2024 - In Maria Lasonen-Aarnio & Clayton Littlejohn (eds.), The Routledge Handbook of the Philosophy of Evidence. New York, NY: Routledge.
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  • The peculiar case of Lehrer’s lawyer.Kevin Wallbridge - 2018 - Synthese 195 (4):1615-1630.
    The peculiar case of Lehrer’s lawyer purports to describe a scenario in which a subject has a justified belief, indeed knowledge, despite the fact that their belief is not causally or counterfactually sustained by any good reasons for it. The case has proven controversial. While some agree with Lehrer’s assessment of the case, others disagree, leading to a schism among accounts of the basing relation. In this paper I aim to reconcile these camps and put simple causal and counterfactual accounts (...)
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  • A writing guide for professional philosophers.Neil Mehta - manuscript
    This guide focuses on the content and form of excellent philosophical writing, with further comments on reading, thinking, writing processes, publication strategies, and self-cultivation.
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  • Explanationist aid for phenomenal conservatism.Kevin McCain - 2018 - Synthese 195 (7):3035-3050.
    Phenomenal conservatism is a popular theory of epistemic justification. Despite its popularity and the fact that some think that phenomenal conservatism can provide a complete account of justification, it faces several challenges. Among these challenges are the need to provide accounts of defeaters and inferential justification. Fortunately, there is hope for phenomenal conservatism. Explanationism, the view on which justification is a matter of explanatory considerations, can help phenomenal conservatism with both of these challenges. The resulting view is one that respects (...)
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  • Epistemic Reasons II: Basing.Kurt Sylvan - 2016 - Philosophy Compass 11 (7):377-389.
    The paper is an opinionated tour of the literature on the reasons for which we hold beliefs and other doxastic attitudes, which I call ‘operative epistemic reasons’. After drawing some distinctions in §1, I begin in §2 by discussing the ontology of operative epistemic reasons, assessing arguments for and against the view that they are mental states. I recommend a pluralist non-mentalist view that takes seriously the variety of operative epistemic reasons ascriptions and allows these reasons to be both propositions (...)
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  • A New Evil Demon? No Problem for Moderate Internalists.Kevin McCain - 2015 - Acta Analytica 30 (1):97-105.
    The New Evil Demon Problem is often seen as a serious objection to externalist theories of justification. In fact, some internalists think it is a decisive counterexample to externalism. Recently, Moon has argued that internalists face their own New Evil Demon Problem. According to Moon, it is possible for a demon to remove one’s unaccessed mental states while leaving the justificatory status of her accessed mental states unaffected. Since this is contrary to the claims of many forms of internalism, Moon (...)
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  • Controlling our Reasons.Sophie Keeling - 2023 - Noûs 57 (4):832-849.
    Philosophical discussion on control has largely centred around control over our actions and beliefs. Yet this overlooks the question of whether we also have control over the reasons for which we act and believe. To date, the overriding assumption appears to be that we do not, and with seemingly good reason. We cannot choose to act for a reason and acting-for-a-reason is not itself something we do. While some have challenged this in the case of reasons for action, these claims (...)
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  • The Reasons-Responsiveness Account of Doxastic Responsibility.Anne Meylan - 2019 - Erkenntnis 84 (4):877-893.
    In several papers (2013, 2014, 2015) Conor McHugh defends the influential view that doxastic responsibility, viz. our responsibility for our beliefs, is grounded in a specific form of reasons-responsiveness. The main purpose of this paper is to show that a subject’s belief can be responsive to reasons in this specific way without the subject being responsible for her belief. While this specific form of reasons-responsiveness might be necessary, it is not sufficient for doxastic responsibility.
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  • Responsibility Beyond Belief: The Epistemic Condition on Moral Responsibility.Christopher Michael Cloos - 2018 - Dissertation,
    In this dissertation, I argue for a new conception of the epistemic condition on moral responsibility.
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  • Basing for the Bayesian.Cameron Gibbs - 2019 - Synthese 196 (9):3815-3840.
    There is a distinction between merely having the right belief, and further basing that belief on the right reasons. Any adequate epistemology needs to be able to accommodate the basing relation that marks this distinction. However, trouble arises for Bayesianism. I argue that when we combine Bayesianism with the standard approaches to the basing relation, we get the result that no agent forms their credences in the right way; indeed, no agent even gets close. This is a serious problem, for (...)
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  • Epistemic infinitism and the conditional character of inferential justification.Erhan Demircioglu - 2018 - Synthese 195 (5):2313-2334.
    In this paper, I will present and defend an argument from the conditional character of inferential justification against the version of epistemic infinitism Klein advances. More specifically, after proposing a distinction between propositional and doxastic infinitism, which is based on a standard distinction between propositional and doxastic justification, I will describe in considerable detail the argument from conditionality, which is mainly an argument against propositional infinitism, and clarify some of its main underlying assumptions. There are various responses to be found (...)
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  • Responsibilist Evidentialism.Christopher Michael Cloos - 2015 - Philosophical Studies 172 (11):2999-3016.
    When is a person justified in believing a proposition? In this paper, I defend a view according to which a person is justified in believing a proposition just in case the person’s evidence sufficiently supports the proposition and the person responsibly acquired and sustained the evidence that supports the proposition. This view overcomes a deficiency in a prominent theory of epistemic justification. As championed by Earl Conee and Richard Feldman, Evidentialism is a theory subject to counterexamples at the hands of (...)
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  • No practical reasons for belief: the epistemic significance of practical considerations.Hamid Vahid - 2022 - Synthese 200 (2):1-18.
    On some versions of evidentialism, only evidential reasons can be normatively relevant to belief. An opposed philosophical view denies this. Unfortunately, the debate between these contrasting views quickly ends in a stalemate because while evidentialists typically point to the difficulty of believing for practical reasons, pragmatists respond by citing cases where people seem to hold beliefs in the absence of evidence. Recently, however, some pragmatists have adopted a new strategy that seeks to combine the evidentialist insight that only evidence can (...)
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  • Putting Reasons in their Place.José Ángel Gascón - 2020 - Informal Logic 40 (4):587-604.
    Hilary Kornblith has criticised reasons-based approaches to epistemic justification on the basis of psychological research that shows that reflection is unreliable. Human beings, it seems, are not very good at identifying our own cognitive processes and the causes of our beliefs. In this article I defend a conception of reasons that takes those empirical findings into account and can avoid Kornblith’s objections. Reasons, according to this account, are not to be identified with the causes of our beliefs and are useful (...)
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  • Inferential basing and mental models.Luis Rosa - 2017 - Philosophical Psychology 30 (1-2):102-118.
    In this paper, I flesh out an account of the inferential basing relation using a theory about how humans reason: the mental models theory. I critically assess some of the notions that are used by that theory to account for inferential phenomena. To the extent that the mental models theory is well confirmed, that account of basing would be motivated on empirical grounds. This work illustrates how epistemologists could offer explications of the basing relation which are more detailed and less (...)
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  • Why We Really Cannot Believe the Error Theory.Bart Streumer - 2017 - In Diego E. Machuca (ed.), Moral Skepticism: New Essays. New York: Routledge.
    According to the error theory, normative judgments are beliefs that ascribe normative properties, but these properties do not exist. I have argued elsewhere (in "Can We Believe the Error Theory?") that we cannot believe this theory. Several philosophers have replied to this argument. In this chapter, I respond to their replies.
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  • Can experiences be rational?Susanna Siegel - 2018 - Analytic Philosophy 59 (1):149-74.
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  • Why we can still believe the error theory.Marianna Bergamaschi Ganapini - 2016 - International Journal of Philosophical Studies 24 (4):523-536.
    The error theory is a metaethical theory that maintains that normative judgments are beliefs that ascribe normative properties, and that these properties do not exist. In a recent paper, Bart Streumer argues that it is impossible to fully believe the error theory. Surprisingly, he claims that this is not a problem for the error theorist: even if we can’t fully believe the error theory, the good news is that we can still come close to believing the error theory. In this (...)
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  • Agency of belief and intention.A. K. Flowerree - 2017 - Synthese 194 (8):2763-2784.
    In this paper, I argue for a conditional parity thesis: if we are agents with respect to our intentions, we are agents with respect to our beliefs. In the final section, I motivate a categorical version of the parity thesis: we are agents with respect to belief and intention. My aim in this paper is to show that there is no unique challenge facing epistemic agency that is not also facing agency with respect to intention. My thesis is ambitious on (...)
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  • Revisiting the Argument from Action Guidance.Philip Fox - 2019 - Journal of Ethics and Social Philosophy 15 (3).
    According to objectivism about the practical 'ought', what one ought to do depends on all the facts; according to perspectivism, it depends only on epistemically available facts. This essay presents a new argument against objectivism. The first premise says that it is at least sometimes possible for a normative theory to correctly guide action. The second premise says that, if objectivism is true, this is never possible. From this it follows that objectivism is false. Perspectivism, however, turns out to be (...)
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  • Propositional epistemic luck, epistemic risk, and epistemic justification.Patrick Bondy & Duncan Pritchard - 2018 - Synthese 195 (9):3811-3820.
    If a subject has a true belief, and she has good evidence for it, and there’s no evidence against it, why should it matter if she doesn’t believe on the basis of the good available evidence? After all, properly based beliefs are no likelier to be true than their corresponding improperly based beliefs, as long as the subject possesses the same good evidence in both cases. And yet it clearly does matter. The aim of this paper is to explain why, (...)
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  • Appreciating the need for autonomy, or recognizing the truth of evidentialism?Kevin McCain - forthcoming - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy.
    Adam Carter’s book Autonomous Knowledge: Radical Enhancement, Autonomy, and the Future of Knowing is excellent. It is clear, well-written, and interesting. On the whole, Autonomous Knowledge is rea...
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  • Can Perceptual Experiences be Rational?Susanna Siegel - 2018 - Analytic Philosophy 59 (1):149-174.
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  • Counterfactuals and Epistemic Basing Relations.Patrick Bondy - 2016 - Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 97 (4):542-569.
    This article is about the epistemic basing relation, which is the relation that obtains between beliefs and the reasons for which they are held. We need an adequate account of the basing relation if we want to have a satisfactory account of doxastic justification, which we should want to have. To that end, this article aims to achieve two goals. The first is to show that a plausible account of the basing relation must invoke counterfactual concepts. The second is to (...)
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  • No, We Cannot.Bart Streumer - 2016 - International Journal of Philosophical Studies 24 (4):537-546.
    Marianna Bergamaschi Ganapini argues that we can believe the error theory. In this reply, I explain why I still think we cannot.
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  • (1 other version)Schaffer's Demon.Ian Evans Nathan Ballantyne - 2013 - Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 94 (4):552-559.
    Jonathan Schaffer (2010) has summoned a new sort of demon – which he calls the debasing demon – that apparently threatens all of our purported knowledge. We show that any debasing skeptical argument must attack the justification condition and can do so only if a plausible thesis about justification is false.
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  • (1 other version)Schaffer's Demon.Nathan Ballantyne & Ian Evans - 2013 - Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 94 (4):552-559.
    Jonathan Schaffer (2010) has summoned a new sort of demon – which he calls the debasing demon – that apparently threatens all of our purported knowledge. We show that any debasing skeptical argument must attack the justification condition and can do so only if a plausible thesis about justification is false.
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