In this paper I present a criticism of Sarah Moss‘ recent proposal to use scoring rules as a means of reaching epistemic compromise in disagreements between epistemic peers that have encountered conflict. The problem I have with Moss‘ proposal is twofold. Firstly, it appears to involve a double counting of epistemic value. Secondly, it isn‘t clear whether the notion of epistemic value that Moss appeals to actually involves the type of value that would be acceptable and unproblematic to regard as (...) epistemic. (shrink)

I present an account of epistemic autonomy as a distinctively wide-ranging epistemic virtue, one that helps us to understand a range of phenomena that might otherwise seem quite disparate – from the appropriate selection of epistemic methods, stances and topics of inquiry, to the harms of epistemic oppression, gaslighting and related phenomena. The account draws on four elements commonly incorporated into accounts of personal autonomy: (i) self-governance, (ii) authenticity, (iii) self-creation and (iv) independence. I further argue that for a distinctively (...) epistemic virtue of autonomy; the above elements must ultimately reliably lead to valuable epistemic goods (for the agent herself and others). I then turn to the domains or ways in which epistemic autonomy so understood, can be made manifest. I suggest that epistemic autonomy is a virtue that allows us to appropriately choose (i) subject matters and areas of inquiry, (ii) methods, sources, and processes of belief formation, (iii) epistemic goals and (iv) epistemic stances or frameworks. So understood, epistemic autonomy has a role to play in shaping most every aspect of our epistemic lives. (shrink)

The normative force of evidence can seem puzzling. It seems that having conclusive evidence for a proposition does not, by itself, make it true that one ought to believe the proposition. But spelling out the condition that evidence must meet in order to provide us with genuine normative reasons for belief seems to lead us into a dilemma: the condition either fails to explain the normative significance of epistemic reasons or it renders the content of epistemic norms practical. The first (...) aim of this paper is to spell out this challenge for the normativity of evidence. I argue that the challenge rests on a plausible assumption about the conceptual connection between normative reasons and blameworthiness. The second aim of the paper is to show how we can meet the challenge by spelling out a concept of epistemic blameworthiness. Drawing on recent accounts of doxastic responsibility and epistemic blame, I suggest that the normativity of evidence is revealed in our practice of suspending epistemic trust in response to impaired epistemic relationships. Recognizing suspension of trust as a form of epistemic blame allows us to make sense of a purely epistemic kind of normativity the existence of which has recently been called into doubt by certain versions of pragmatism and instrumentalism. (shrink)

On the dominant contemporary accounts of how practical considerations affect what we ought to believe, practical considerations either encroach on epistemic rationality by affecting whether a belief is epistemically justified, or constitute distinctively practical reasons for belief which can only affect what we ought to believe by conflicting with epistemic rationality. This paper shows that a promising alternative view can be found in a surprising source: the writings of Søren Kierkegaard. I argue that in light of two of his central (...) epistemological commitments—belief-credence dualism and epistemic permissivism about outright belief—Kierkegaard holds that practical considerations can affect what we ought to believe without either encroaching on or (necessarily) conflicting with epistemic rationality. The central idea is that practical considerations can determine which among the epistemically permitted outright doxastic attitudes one should all-things-considered adopt. In addition to constituting a novel, systematic interpretation of Kierkegaard’s account of how practical considerations affect what we ought to believe, this suggests that Kierkegaard holds a distinctive and underexplored view that constitutes a serious philosophical rival to dominant contemporary views. (shrink)

David Hunter’s On Believing is an ambitious, extremely carefully argued, discussion of what it means to believe. He urges readers to re-think the way to categorize beliefs (or more precisely believ...

This paper discusses varieties of normative phenomena, ranging from morality, to epistemic justification, to the rules of chess. It canvases a number of distinctions among these different normative phenomena. The most significant distinction is between formal and authoritative normativity. The prior is the normativity exhibited by any standard one can meet or fail to meet. The latter is the sort of normativity associated with phenomena like the "all-things-considered" ought. The paper ends with a brief discussion of reasons for skepticism about (...) authoritative normativity. (shrink)

Elsewhere I and others have argued that evidence one should have had can bear on the justification of one's belief, in the form of defeating one's justification. In this paper, I am interested in knowing how evidence one should have had (on the one hand) and one's higher-order evidence (on the other) interact in determinations of the justification of belief. In doing so I aim to address two types of scenario that previous discussions have left open. In one type of (...) scenario, there is a clash between a subject's higher-order evidence and the evidence she should have had: S's higher-order evidence is misleading as to the existence or likely epistemic bearing of further evidence she should have. In the other, while there is further evidence S should have had, this evidence would only have offered additional support for S's belief that p. The picture I offer derives from two “epistemic ceiling” principles linking evidence to justification: one's justification for the belief that p can be no higher than it is on one's total evidence, nor can it be higher than what it would have been had one had all of the evidence one should have had. Together, these two principles entail what I call the doctrine of Epistemic Strict Liability: insofar as one fails to have evidence one should have had, one is epistemically answerable to that evidence whatever reasons one happened to have regarding the likely epistemic bearing of that evidence. I suggest that such a position can account for the battery of intuitions elicited in the full range of cases I will be considering. (shrink)

Epistemic paternalism is the practice of interfering with someone’s inquiry, without their consent, for their own epistemic good. In this chapter, I explore the relationship between epistemic paternalism and two other epistemological theses: epistemic permissivism and standpoint epistemology. I argue that examining this relationship is fruitful because it sheds light on a series of cases in which epistemic paternalism is unjustified and brings out notable similarities between epistemic permissivism and standpoint epistemology.

The zetetic turn in epistemology raises three questions about epistemic and zetetic norms. First, there is the relationship question: what is the relationship between epistemic and zetetic norms? Are some epistemic norms zetetic norms, or are epistemic and zetetic norms distinct? Second, there is the tension question: are traditional epistemic norms in tension with plausible zetetic norms? Third, there is the reaction question: how should theorists react to a tension between epistemic and zetetic norms? Drawing on an analogy to practical (...) philosophy, I develop a focal point view to resolve these motivating questions. On the focal point view, traditional epistemic norms and zetetic norms answer different types of normative questions. There is nevertheless a familiar type of evaluative tension between traditional epistemic norms and zetetic norms, but this tension is an unavoidable feature of the normative landscape and not a sign that traditional epistemic norms need revision. But if traditional epistemic norms are not zetetic norms, then in what sense is zetetic epistemology a project for epistemologists? I conclude by articulating a sense in which some nontraditional epistemic norms are zetetic norms, and in which zetetic epistemology is an important part of the study of theoretical rationality. (shrink)

Call the norms of inquiry zetetic norms. How are zetetic norms related to epistemic norms? At first glance, they seem quite closely connected. Aren't epistemic norms norms that bind inquirers qua inquirers? And isn't epistemology the place to look for a normative theory of inquiry? While much of this thought seems right, this paper argues that the relationship between the epistemic and the zetetic is not as harmonious as one might have thought and liked. In particular, this paper argues that (...) some familiar contemporary epistemic norms are in tension with, and even in conflict with, central zetetic norms. (shrink)

In this paper, we argue that there are epistemic norms on evidence-gathering and consider consequences for how to understand epistemic normativity. Though the view that there are such norms seems intuitive, it has found surprisingly little defense. Rather, many philosophers have argued that norms on evidence-gathering can only be practical or moral. On a prominent evidentialist version of this position, epistemic norms only apply to responding to the evidence one already has. Here we challenge the orthodoxy. First, we argue that (...) there is no significant normative difference between responding to evidence you have and gathering more evidence. Second, we argue that our practices of epistemically criticizing agents for their poor evidence-gathering indicate the existence of epistemic norms on evidence-gathering. Finally, we show that our thesis has important implications for recent debates about the relationship between epistemic norms and inquiry. (shrink)

Gilbert Harman’s famous principle of Clutter Avoidance commands that “one should not clutter one’s mind with trivialities". Many epistemologists have been inclined to accept Harman’s principle, or something like it. This is significant because the principle appears to have robust implications for our overall picture of epistemic normativity. Jane Friedman (2018) has recently argued that one potential implication is that there are no genuine purely evidential norms on belief revision. In this paper, we present some new objections to a suitably (...) formulated version of the clutter principle qua norm on belief revision. Moreover, we argue that the clutter principle is best understood as a norm on non-doxastic stages of inquiry. In our view, it is a norm of asking and considering questions rather than a norm of settling on an answer to a question by forming a belief. (shrink)

چکیده علامه­ طباطبایی فیلسوفی کلاسیک بر ممشای حکمت متعالیه و مفسر بزرگ قرآن کریم است اما اندیشه­ی وی در این دو حوزه محدود و متمرکز نشده و در حوزه‌های معرفتی دیگر نیز دارای اندیشه‌های بدیعی است. یکی از این حوزه‌ها فلسفه‌ی اخلاق است. بی‌تردید اصلی‌ترین بحث در فلسفه‌ی اخلاق به تقسیم‌بندی واقع‌گرایی و غیر واقع‌گرایی اخلاقی تعلق دارد. هدف از این پژوهش پردازش این مسأله است که علامه طباطبایی در کدام‌یک از این دسته‌بندی‌ها جای دارد و تبیین آن با کدام (...) موضوعات فلسفی انجام می‌پذیرد؟ این مقاله که با روشی اسنادی­_تحلیلی تألیف شده است، تلاش دارد با تحلیل و تبیین مساله­ی «اعتباریات» و نگهداشت مساله­ی «احساس» ذیل عنوان اعتباریات به این موضوع بپردازد. نتیجه­ی پژوهش این است که علامه طباطبایی یک واقع‌گرای اخلاقیِ تعریف گرایانه است. (shrink)

It is a platitude that belief is subject to a standard of correctness: a belief is correct if and only if it is true. But not all standards of correctness are authoritative or binding. Some standards of correctness may be arbitrary, unjustified or outrightly wrong. Given this, one challenge to proponents of the truth norm of belief, is to answer what Korsgaard (1996) calls ‘the normative question’. Is the truth norm of belief authoritative or binding regarding what one ought to (...) or may believe? If so, what grounds its authority? The aim of this paper is to offer a novel answer to the grounding challenge on a reason-based normative framework. I develop and defend a practice-based account of the truth norm, according to which, the authority of the truth norm of belief is grounded in what I call the T-practice, a justified social practice that functions to facilitate knowledge production, maintenance, and social cooperation. (shrink)

This paper proposes that the question “What should I believe?” is to be answered in the same way as the question “What should I do?,” a view I call Equal Treatment. After clarifying the relevant sense of “should,” I point out advantages that Equal Treatment has over both simple and subtle evidentialist alternatives, including versions that distinguish what one should believe from what one should get oneself to believe. I then discuss views on which there is a distinctively epistemic sense (...) of should. Next I reply to an objection which alleges that non-evidential considerations cannot serve as reasons for which one believes. I then situate Equal Treatment in a broader theoretical framework, discussing connections to rationality, justification, knowledge, and theoretical vs. practical reasoning. Finally, I show how Equal Treatment has important implications for a wide variety of issues, including the status of religious belief, philosophical skepticism, racial profiling and gender stereotyping, and certain issues in psychology, such as depressive realism and positive illusions. (shrink)

There is, I shall assume, such a thing as moral evil (more on which below). My question is whether is also such a thing as non-moral evil, and in particular whether there are such things as aesthetic evil and epistemic evil. More exactly, my question is whether there is such a thing as moral evil but not such a thing as non-moral evil, in some sense that reveals something special about the moral, as opposed to such would-be non-moral domains as (...) the aesthetic and the epistemic. The philosophical issue at stake here is that of the nature of these different normative domains, and the nature and extent of their difference. (shrink)

Moral encroachment holds that the epistemic justification of a belief can be affected by moral factors. If the belief might wrong a person or group more evidence is required to justify the belief. Moral encroachment thereby opposes evidentialism, and kindred views, which holds that epistemic justification is determined solely by factors pertaining to evidence and truth. In this essay I explain how beliefs such as ‘that woman is probably an administrative assistant’—based on the evidence that most women employees at the (...) firm are administrative assistants—motivate moral encroachment. I then describe weaknesses of moral encroachment. Finally I explain how we can countenance the moral properties of such beliefs without endorsing moral encroachment, and I argue that the moral status of such beliefs cannot be evaluated independently from the understanding in which they are embedded. (shrink)

In this paper, I discuss some of the recent developments in the political turn of Social Epistemology, focusing on the notions of epistemic injustice and epistemic oppression. In the first part of the work, I introduce Kristie Dotson’s characterization of the epistemic injustices presented by Miranda Fricker, through the understanding of systematic ways of violating epistemic agency in terms of oppressions. In the second part, I discuss Dotson’s critique of Fricker on the grounds that there is an important kind of (...) epistemic injustice that is not dealt with in Fricker’s proposal, and which could help us to perceive a particular, pervasive kind of violation of the epistemic agency. (shrink)

Defenders of pragmatic encroachment in epistemology (or what I call practicalism) need to address two main problems. First, the view seems to imply, absurdly, that knowledge can come and go quite easily—in particular, that it might come and go along with our variable practical interests. We can call this the stability problem. Second, there seems to be no fully satisfying way of explaining whose practical interests matter. We can call this the “whose stakes?” problem. I argue that both problems can (...) be addressed in roughly the same terms. More exactly, I argue that by first clarifying the whose stakes? problem an answer to the stability problem naturally falls out. (shrink)

The ethics of belief is concerned with the question of what we should believe. According to evidentialism, what one should believe is determined by evidence only. Pragmatism claims that practical considerations too can be relevant. But pragmatism comes in two shapes. According to a more traditional version, practical considerations can provide practical reasons for or against belief. According to a new brand of pragmatism, pragmatic encroachment, practical considerations can affect positive epistemic status, such as epistemic rationality or knowledge. In the (...) literature, the distinction between the two versions of pragmatism is not always made. If it is mentioned, it is quickly put aside. Sometimes, it is simply overlooked. As evidentialists face two distinct pragmatist challenges, they must get clearer on the distinction. But it matters for pragmatists too. As I see it, if one accepts one version of pragmatism, one should reject the other. This paper’s goals are to get clearer on the distinction and argue that both pragmatisms are independent. Accepting one version does not commit one to accept the other. Moreover, even if both pragmatisms tend to be neutral toward one another, I will argue that traditional pragmatism has good reasons to reject pragmatic encroachment and vice versa. (shrink)

A popular objection to theistic commitment involves the idea that faith is irrational. Specifically, some seem to put forth something like the following argument: (P1) Everyone (or almost everyone) who has faith is epistemically irrational, (P2) All theistic believers have faith, thus (C) All (or most) theistic believers are epistemically irrational. In this paper, I argue that this line of reasoning fails. I do so by considering a number of candidates for what faith might be. I argue that, for each (...) candidate, either (P1) is false or (P2) is false. Then, I make two positive suggestions for how faith can be epistemically rational but nonetheless have a unique relationship to evidence: one, that Jamesian self-justifying attitudes describe a distinctive kind of faith in oneself and others, and two, that faith is not solely based on empirical evidence. (shrink)

It is often argued that there are no practical reasons for belief because we could not believe for such reasons. A recent reply by pragmatists is that we can often believe for practical reasons because we can often cause our beliefs for practical reasons. This paper reveals the limits of this recently popular strategy for defending pragmatism, and thereby reshapes the dialectical options for pragmatism. I argue that the strategy presupposes that reasons for being in non-intentional states are not reducible (...) to reasons to act. Pragmatists who want to preserve a motivational constraint on reasons therefore have exactly two options: either arguing that there are irreducible reasons for being in non-intentional states ; or arguing that we can believe directly for practical reasons. I argue that the prospects for the former option are dim because irreducible reasons to be in states are hard to square with the motivational constraint on reasons. Returning to the more traditional route of arguing for pragmatism by defending a version of doxastic voluntarism therefore seems to be the more promising way for pragmatists to go. (shrink)

I argue that beliefs based on irresponsibly formed experiences — whose causes were not appropriately regulated by the subject — are doxastically unjustified. Only this position, I claim, accounts for the higher epistemic standard required of perceptual experts. Section I defends this standard and applies it to a pair of cases in which either an expert umpire or a complete novice judge a force play in baseball. I argue that when the latter, but not the former, fails to follow rules (...) about perceiving force plays, their resulting belief is justified. Section II shows that this difference can be explained by the fact that the novice, but not the expert, formed her experience responsibly. Section III shows that alternative explanations of the expert’s unjustified belief — from defeat, reliability, and inference — fail. Section IV shows that the epistemic relevance of responsible experience formation has broad implications for the epistemology of perceptual beliefs. (shrink)

The overwhelmingly dominant view of epistemic normativity has been an extreme form of deontology. I argue that although the pull towards deontology is quite understandable, given the traditional concerns of epistemology, there is no good reason for not also adopting a complementary consequentialist notion of epistemic normativity, which can be put to use in applied epistemology. I further argue that this consequentialist notion is not, despite appearances and popular sentiment to the contrary, any less genuinely epistemic than the deontological notion (...) and that it may even be considered more genuinely normative. (shrink)

O presente Volume é a primeira obra publicado no Brasil que trata acerca da Epistemologia Social.

Evidentialism is generally taken to be a position which is not friendly to a religious epistemology. However, in this paper, I will argue for a religious epistemology which is compatible with fundamental tenets of an evidentialist position on epistemic justification. It is a position which entails both a “will to believe” which goes beyond the standard evidentialist principles governing the appropriate doxastic attitude towards a proposition, but nonetheless satisfies epistemic principles at the basis of an evidentialist position on justification. If (...) my argument is successful, a proponent of a conception of religious faith may be able to have her cake and eat it too: namely, she may be able to fundamentally accept both the evidentialist demand that epistemically rational belief fit, or be supported by evidence as well as the position that rational faith is willing belief beyond what one’s evidence strictly demands. (shrink)

It’s widely accepted that higher-order defeaters, i.e., evidence that one’s belief is formed in an epistemically defective way, can defeat doxastic justification. However, it’s yet unclear how exactly such kind of defeat happens. Given that many theories of doxastic justification can be understood as fitting the schema of proper basing on propositional justifiers, we might attempt to explain the defeat either by arguing that a higher-order defeater defeats propositional justification or by arguing that it defeats proper basing. It has been (...) argued that the first attempt is unpromising because a variety of prominent theories of propositional justification don’t imply that we lose propositional justification when gaining higher-order defeaters. This leads some scholars to take the second attempt. In this paper, I criticize this second attempt, and I defend the first attempt by arguing that a theory of propositional justification that requires intellectual responsibility can nicely account for higher-order defeat. My proposal is that we lose doxastic justification when we gain higher-order defeaters because there is no intellectually responsible way for us to maintain our original beliefs due to the defeaters. (shrink)

I focus on an overlooked aspect of the challenge of irrelevant influences. The challenge is often framed in terms of whether recognizing the presence of irrelevant factors in the pedigree of a belief provides a defeater. I argue that the epistemic significance of irrelevant factors goes beyond their status as defeaters. I focus on what I call gray cases, where learning about such factors causes epistemic worry without justifying giving up the belief. I argue that in gray cases, the subject (...) finds a commendatory epistemic practical reason to engage in an activity intended to assuage that epistemic worry. (shrink)

One prominent feature of belief is that a belief cannot be formed at will. This paper argues that the best explanation of this fact is that belief formation is a process that takes aim at the truth. Taking aim at the truth is to be understood as causal responsiveness of the processes constituting belief formation to what facilitates achieving true beliefs. The requirement for this responsiveness precludes the possibility of belief formation responding to intentions in a way that would count (...) as forming a belief at will. (shrink)

An epistemic duty would be a duty to believe, disbelieve, or withhold judgment from a proposition, and it would be grounded in purely evidential or epistemic considerations. If I promise to believe it is raining, my duty to believe is not epistemic. If my evidence is so good that, in light of it alone, I ought to believe it is raining, then my duty to believe supposedly is epistemic. I offer a new argument for the claim that there are no (...) epistemic duties. Though people do sometimes have duties to believe, disbelieve, or withhold judgment from propositions, those duties are never grounded in purely epistemic considerations. (shrink)

ABSTRACT: Epistemic duties would be duties to believe, disbelieve, or withhold judgement from propositions, and they would be grounded in purely evidential considerations. I offer a new argument for the claim that there are no epistemic duties. Though people may have duties to believe, disbelieve, or withhold judgement from propositions, those duties are never grounded in purely epistemic considerations. Rather, allegedly epistemic duties are a species of moral duty.RÉSUMÉ: Les fonctions épistémiques sont censées désigner le fait de croire ou de (...) ne pas croire des propositions, ou de suspendre notre jugement, et seraient fondées uniquement sur la prise en compte de l’évidence. Je présente un nouvel argument soutenant que les fonctions épistémiques n’existent pas. Bien que nous devions recourir aux fonctions de croire ou de ne pas croire des propositions, ou de suspendre notre jugement, ces fonctions ne sont jamais fondées sur d’uniques considérations épistémiques. Ce que l’on reconnaît comme des fonctions épistémiques appartient plutôt à l’espèce des fonctions morales. (shrink)

A long line of epistemologists including Sosa (2021), Feldman (2002), and Chisholm (1977) have argued that, at least for a certain class of questions that we take up, we should (or should aim to) close inquiry iff by closing inquiry we would meet a unique epistemic standard. I argue that no epistemic norm of this general form is true: there is not a single epistemic standard that demarcates the boundary between inquiries we are forbidden and obligated to close. In short, (...) such norms are false because they are insensitive to the potentially ambitious epistemic goals that agents may permissibly bring to bear on an inquiry. Focusing particularly on knowledge-oriented versions of the norm, I argue that ignorance has a positive role to play in epistemic life by licensing prolonged inquiry into questions that we especially care about. (shrink)

A growing number of epistemologists have endorsed the Ignorance Norm for Inquiry. Roughly, this norm says that one should not inquire into a question unless one is ignorant of its answer. I argue that, in addition to ignorance, proper inquiry requires a certain kind of knowledge. Roughly, one should not inquire into a question unless one knows it has a true answer. I call this the Knowledge Norm for Inquiry. Proper inquiry walks a fine line, holding knowledge that there is (...) an answer in the left hand and ignorance of the answer in the right. (shrink)

Recently, a number of epistemologists (notably Feldman [2007], [2009] and White [2005], [2013]) have argued for the rational uniqueness thesis, the principle that any set of evidence permits only one rationally acceptable attitude toward a given proposition. In contrast, this paper argues for extreme rational permissivism, the view that two agents with the same evidence may sometimes arrive at contradictory beliefs rationally. This paper identifies different versions of uniqueness and permissivism that vary in strength and range, argues that evidential peers (...) with different interests need not rationally endorse all the same hypotheses, argues that evidential peers who weigh the theoretic virtues differently can sometimes rationally endorse contradictory conclusions, and finally defends the permissivist appeal to standards against objections in the works of Feldman and White. (shrink)

It is widely assumed that it is rational to suspend one’s belief regarding a certain proposition only if one’s evidence is neutral regarding that proposition. In this paper I broaden this condition, and defend, on the basis of an improved ancient argument, that it is rational to suspend one’s belief even if the available evidence is not neutral – or even close to neutral.

It is commonplace to claim that it is good to believe the truth. In this paper, I reject that claim and argue that the considerations which might seem to support it in fact support a quite distinct though superficially similar claim, namely, that it is bad to believe the false. This claim is typically either ignored completely or lumped together with the previous claim, perhaps on the assumption that the two are equivalent, or at least that they stand or fall (...) together. Such assumptions, I argue, are mistaken. While it is not always good to be right, it is always bad to be wrong. This is an interesting and overlooked asymmetry, which calls for further investigation. (shrink)

It is common to hear talk of the aim of belief and to find philosophers appealing to that aim for numerous explanatory purposes. What belief 's aim explains depends, of course, on what that aim is. Many hold that it is somehow related to truth, but there are various ways in which one might specify belief 's aim using the notion of truth. In this article, by considering whether they can account for belief 's standard of correctness and the epistemic (...) norms governing belief, I argue against certain prominent specifications of belief 's aim given in terms of truth, and advance a neglected alternative. (shrink)

It is common in popular depictions to portray the attitude of trusting and the norms associated with rationality as standing in some kind of tension. In this article, we suggest a way of capturing this tension, and explore some recent attempts at resolving it.

There is an unresolved conflict concerning the normative nature of desire. Some authors take rational desire to differ from rational belief in being a normatively unconstrained attitude. Others insist that rational desire seems plausibly subject to several consistency norms. This article argues that the correct analysis of this conflict of conative normativity leads us to acknowledge intrinsic and extrinsic reasons to desire. If sound, this point helps us to unveil a fundamental aspect of desire, namely, that we cannot desire at (...) will. Unlike belief, however, desire can unproblematically accommodate a notion of instrumental attitude. (shrink)

Doxastic involuntarists, as I categorize them, say that it’s impossible to form a belief as an intentional action. But what exactly is it to form a belief, as opposed to simply getting yourself to have one? This question has been insufficiently addressed, and the lacuna threatens the involuntarists’ position: if the question isn’t answered, their view will lack any clear content; but, after considering some straightforward ways of answering it, I argue that they would make involuntarism either false or insignificant. (...) I also examine several involuntarist arguments, and find them faltering at just this point: inadequate attention to belief-formation results in unsound arguments or insignificant conclusions. The viability of involuntarism as a meaningful position, I conclude, turns on whether the notion of belief-formation can be further developed. (shrink)

I explore the possibility and rationality of interpersonal mechanisms of doxastic self-control, that is, ways in which individuals can make use of other people in order to get themselves to stick to their beliefs. I look, in particular, at two ways in which people can make interpersonal epistemic commitments, and thereby willingly undertake accountability to others, in order to get themselves to maintain their beliefs in the face of anticipated “epistemic temptations”. The first way is through the avowal of belief, (...) and the second is through the establishment of collective belief. I argue that both of these forms of interpersonal epistemic commitment can function as effective tools for doxastic self-control, and, moreover, that the control they facilitate should not be dismissed as irrational from an epistemic perspective. (shrink)

Sometimes a belief that p promotes having true beliefs, whether or not p is true. This gives reasons to believe that p, but most epistemologists would deny that it gives epistemic reasons, or that these reasons can epistemically justify the belief that p. Call these reasons to believe “truth promoting non-evidential reasons for belief.” This paper argues that three common views in epistemology, taken together, entail that reasons of this sort can epistemically justify beliefs. These three claims are: epistemic oughts (...) are normative, epistemic oughts have a source, and the source of epistemic oughts is an end that has true belief as a necessary component. These claims would be hard for many epistemologists to deny, but accepting them, and thus accepting that truth promoting non-evidential reasons can justify beliefs, has significant consequences for epistemology. The paper considers accounts of epistemic oughts that endorse these claims but might seem to avoid the consequence that truth promoting non-evidential reasons generate real epistemic oughts, and shows that none do. (shrink)

We examine whether the "evidence of evidence is evidence" principle is true. We distinguish several different versions of the principle and evaluate recent attacks on some of those versions. We argue that, whatever the merits of those attacks, they leave the more important rendition of the principle untouched. That version is, however, also subject to new kinds of counterexamples. We end by suggesting how to formulate a better version of the principle that takes into account those new counterexamples.

Having direct doxastic control would not be particularly desirable if exercising it required a failure of epistemic rationality. With that thought in mind, recent writers have invoked the view that epistemic rationality gives us options to defend the possibility of a significant form of direct doxastic control. Specifically, they suggest that when the evidence for p is sufficient but not conclusive, it would be epistemically rational either to believe p or to be agnostic on p, and they argue that we (...) can in these cases effectively decide to form either attitude without irrationality. This paper argues against the version of epistemic permissivism invoked by these writers and shows that other plausible versions of permissivism do not support their cause. It concludes that if we can exercise direct doxastic control without irrationality, it is not because epistemic rationality gives us options. (shrink)

I will be arguing that a subject’s belief that p is justified if and only if he knows that p: justification is knowledge. I will start by describing two broad classes of allegedly justified beliefs that do not constitute knowledge and which, hence, cannot be what they are often taken to be if my view is correct. It is far from clear what my view is until I say a lot more about the relevant concept or concepts of justification that (...) concern me. The following section describes several concepts of justification that epistemologists have employed, and, in particular, identifies the two concepts of justification that I claim are coextensive with the concept of knowledge. One of those is the deontological conception of justification: I will be arguing that one ought not believe that p unless one knows that p. I imagine that the major opposition to my view will be that it is simply obvious that there are justified false beliefs, a feeling that I try to dispel in the lengthy section on concepts of justification before I finally get around to giving the main arguments in favor of my view. A view as unorthodox as mine demands more than a single argument: I offer four in the third section. Everyone allows that many people have many unjustified beliefs, and everyone has some unjustified beliefs, but such beliefs appear to be far more prevalent on my view than on more orthodox views. In the last section, I argue that unjustified beliefs, although widespread, are not quite as common as they might appear to be on my view. (shrink)

Some versions of empiricism have been accused of being neither empirically confirmable nor analytically true and therefore meaningless or unknowable by their own lights. Carnap, and more recently van Fraassen, have responded to this objection by construing empiricism as a stance containing non-cognitive attitudes. The resulting stance empiricism is not subject to the norms of knowledge, and so does not self-defeat as per the objection. In response to this proposal, several philosophers have argued that if empiricism is a stance, then (...) there can be no distinctively epistemic reasons in favor of adopting it, but only prudential or moral reasons. I defend stance empiricism against this objection by showing that stance empiricism furthers many plausibly epistemic goals, such as false belief avoidance, wisdom, and justification. I respond to three objections to my argument: that I assume a conception of epistemic reason that leads to problematic tradeoffs, that to have epistemic reason is just to be epistemically justified, and that my premise that experience is the only source of information has no empirical content. (shrink)

Epistemic instrumentalists seek to understand the normativity of epistemic norms on the model practical instrumental norms governing the relation between aims and means. Non-instrumentalists often object that this commits instrumentalists to implausible epistemic assessments. I argue that this objection presupposes an implausibly strong interpretation of epistemic norms. Once we realize that epistemic norms should be understood in terms of permissibility rather than obligation, and that evidence only occasionally provide normative reasons for belief, an instrumentalist account becomes available that delivers the (...) correct epistemic verdicts. On this account, epistemic permissibility can be understood on the model of the wide-scope instrumental norm for instrumental rationality, while normative evidential reasons for belief can be understood in terms of instrumental transmission. (shrink)