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  1. (1 other version)The Problem of Intrinsic Epistemic Significance.Marko Jurjako - 2013 - Prolegomena 12 (1):83-100.
    Why conduct research concerning human genome or proving the existence of Higgs particle? What makes these problems significant or worthy of investigation? In recent epistemological discussions one can find at least two conceptions of the problem of epistemic significance: research question or cognitive problem can be practically significant or intrinsically epistemically significant, in a way that depends on the consideration whether reasons that support the significance of the problem are practical or epistemic. In this paper I am dealing with the (...)
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  • Commentary/Elqayam & Evans: Subtracting “ought” from “is”.Natalie Gold, Andrew M. Colman & Briony D. Pulford - 2011 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 34 (5).
    Normative theories can be useful in developing descriptive theories, as when normative subjective expected utility theory is used to develop descriptive rational choice theory and behavioral game theory. “Ought” questions are also the essence of theories of moral reasoning, a domain of higher mental processing that could not survive without normative considerations.
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  • Pragmatic Interests and Imprecise Belief.Brad Armendt - 2013 - Philosophy of Science 80 (5):758-768.
    Does the strength of a particular belief depend upon the significance we attach to it? Do we move from one context to another, remaining in the same doxastic state concerning p yet holding a stronger belief that p in one context than in the other? For that to be so, a doxastic state must have a certain sort of context-sensitive complexity. So the question is about the nature of belief states, as we understand them, or as we think a theory (...)
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  • Why humans are (sometimes) less rational than other animals: Cognitive complexity and the axioms of rational choice.Keith E. Stanovich - 2013 - Thinking and Reasoning 19 (1):1 - 26.
    (2013). Why humans are (sometimes) less rational than other animals: Cognitive complexity and the axioms of rational choice. Thinking & Reasoning: Vol. 19, No. 1, pp. 1-26. doi: 10.1080/13546783.2012.713178.
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  • Delusions, Modernist Epistemology and Irrational Belief.Dominic Murphy - 2013 - Mind and Language 28 (1):113-124.
    Jennifer Radden argues that delusions play an important role in modernist epistemology, which is preoccupied with the justification and evaluation of beliefs. Another theme running through the book is the importance of culture for attribution of delusion. Beliefs that look delusional will not be treated as pathological if they are expressions of religious views or other culturally acceptable forms of life. It is hard to see why cultural acceptability should play a role in the modernist project of justification. I suggest (...)
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  • Getting it right.Kristoffer Ahlstrom-Vij & Stephen R. Grimm - 2013 - Philosophical Studies 166 (2):329-347.
    Truth monism is the idea that only true beliefs are of fundamental epistemic value. The present paper considers three objections to truth monism, and argues that, while the truth monist has plausible responses to the first two objections, the third objection suggests that truth monism should be reformulated. On this reformulation, which we refer to as accuracy monism, the fundamental epistemic goal is accuracy, where accuracy is a matter of “getting it right.” The idea then developed is that accuracy is (...)
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  • Teleological Justification of Argumentation Schemes.Douglas Walton & Giovanni Sartor - 2013 - Argumentation 27 (2):111-142.
    Argumentation schemes are forms of reasoning that are fallible but correctable within a self-correcting framework. Their use provides a basis for taking rational action or for reasonably accepting a conclusion as a tentative hypothesis, but they are not deductively valid. We argue that teleological reasoning can provide the basis for justifying the use of argument schemes both in monological and dialogical reasoning. We consider how such a teleological justification, besides being inspired by the aim of directing a bounded cognizer to (...)
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  • Pascal’s Wager and the Nature of God.Greg Janzen - 2011 - Sophia 50 (3):331-344.
    This paper argues that Pascal's formulation of his famous wager argument licenses an inference about God's nature that ultimately vitiates the claim that wagering for God is in one's rational self-interest. In particular, it is argued that if we accept Pascal's premises, then we can infer that the god for whom Pascal encourages us to wager is irrational. But if God is irrational, then the prudentially rational course of action is to refrain from wagering for him.
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  • The Ethics of False Belief.Timothy Lane - 2010 - EurAmerica 40 (3):591-633.
    According to Allen Wood’s “procedural principle” we should believe only that which can be justified by evidence, and nothing more. He argues that holding beliefs which are not justified by evidence diminishes our self-respect and corrupts us, both individually and collectively. Wood’s normative and descriptive views as regards belief are of a piece with the received view which holds that beliefs aim at the truth. This view I refer to as the Truth-Tracking View (TTV). I first present a modest version (...)
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  • Truth Evaluability in Radical Interpretation Theory.Eleni Manolakaki - 2000 - Dissertation, Philosophy
    The central problem of the dissertation concerns the possibility of a distinction between truth-evaluable and non-truth-evaluable utterances of a natural language. The class of truth-evaluable utterances includes assertions, con. ectures and other kinds of speech act susceptible of truth evaluation. The class of non-truth-evaluable utterances includes commands, exhortations, wishes i.e. utterances not evaluated as being true or false. The problem is placed in the context of radical interpretation theory and it shown that it is a substantial problem of Davidson‘s early (...)
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  • Philosophy of education and economics: A case for closer engagement.Stephen Gough - 2009 - Journal of Philosophy of Education 43 (2):269-283.
    Relatively little contemporary philosophy of education employs economic concepts directly. Even where issues such as marketisation of education are discussed there may be little clarification of underlying concepts. The paper argues that while much contemporary economic thinking on education may be philosophically naive, it is also the case that philosophy of education can productively engage with particular economic insights and perspectives. The paper examines particular conceptualisations of 'economics' and 'the market', drawing upon these to consider aspects of an issue that (...)
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  • In defence of repugnance.Michael Huemer - 2008 - Mind 117 (468):899-933.
    I defend the 'Repugnant' Conclusion that for any possible population of happy people, a population containing a sufficient number of people with lives barely worth living would be better. Four lines of argument converge on this conclusion, and the conclusion has a simple, natural theoretical explanation. The opposition to the Repugnant Conclusion rests on a bare appeal to intuition. This intuition is open to charges of being influenced by multiple distorting factors. Several theories of population ethics have been devised to (...)
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  • The Frequency Hypothesis and Evolutionary Arguments.Yuichi Amitani - 2008 - Kagaku Tetsugaku 41 (1):79-94.
    Gerd Gigerenzer's views on probabilistic reasoning in humans have come under close scrutiny. Very little attention, however, has been paid to his evolutionary component of his argument. According to Gigerenzer, reasoning about probabilities as frequencies is so common today because it was favored by natural selection in the past. This paper presents a critical examination of this argument. It will show first, that, _pace_ Gigerenzer, there are some reasons to believe that using the frequency format was not more adaptive than (...)
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  • Altruism and selfishness.Howard Rachlin - 2002 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 25 (2):239-250.
    Many situations in human life present choices between (a) narrowly preferred particular alternatives and (b) narrowly less preferred (or aversive) particular alternatives that nevertheless form part of highly preferred abstract behavioral patterns. Such alternatives characterize problems of self-control. For example, at any given moment, a person may accept alcoholic drinks yet also prefer being sober to being drunk over the next few days. Other situations present choices between (a) alternatives beneficial to an individual and (b) alternatives that are less beneficial (...)
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  • Money as tool, money as drug: The biological psychology of a strong incentive.Stephen E. G. Lea & Paul Webley - 2006 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 29 (2):161-209.
    Why are people interested in money? Specifically, what could be the biological basis for the extraordinary incentive and reinforcing power of money, which seems to be unique to the human species? We identify two ways in which a commodity which is of no biological significance in itself can become a strong motivator. The first is if it is used as a tool, and by a metaphorical extension this is often applied to money: it is used instrumentally, in order to obtain (...)
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  • Reason and rationality.Richard Samuels, Stephen Stich & Luc Faucher - 2004 - In Ilkka Niiniluoto, Matti Sintonen & Jan Woleński (eds.), Handbook of Epistemology. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic. pp. 1-50.
    Over the past few decades, reasoning and rationality have been the focus of enormous interdisciplinary attention, attracting interest from philosophers, psychologists, economists, statisticians and anthropologists, among others. The widespread interest in the topic reflects the central status of reasoning in human affairs. But it also suggests that there are many different though related projects and tasks which need to be addressed if we are to attain a comprehensive understanding of reasoning.
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  • Is the public incompetent? Compared to whom? About what?Gerald Gaus - 2008 - Critical Review: A Journal of Politics and Society 20 (3):291-311.
    From Mill to, most recently, Bryan Caplan, political and economic elites have been seen as the solution to the public’s ignorance and incompetence. In order to show that elites are actually more competent than the public, however, we would have to find out what type of knowledge is necessary to enact good public policy. The empirical evidence shows that economic experts have a slight advantage over the general public in knowledge of how to achieve policy goals. But, contrary to Caplan, (...)
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  • Intrinsic vs. extrinsic value.Michael J. Zimmerman - 2019 - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
    Intrinsic value has traditionally been thought to lie at the heart of ethics. Philosophers use a number of terms to refer to such value. The intrinsic value of something is said to be the value that that thing has “in itself,” or “for its own sake,” or “as such,” or “in its own right.” Extrinsic value is value that is not intrinsic.
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  • Practical reason.R. Jay Wallace & Benjamin Kiesewetter - 2024 - The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
    Practical reason is the general human capacity for resolving, through reflection, the question of what one is to do. Deliberation of this kind is practical in at least two senses. First, it is practical in its subject matter, insofar as it is concerned with action. But it is also practical in its consequences or its issue, insofar as reflection about action itself directly moves people to act. Our capacity for deliberative self-determination raises two sets of philosophical problems. For one thing, (...)
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  • Epistemology.Matthias Steup - 2008 - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
    Defined narrowly, epistemology is the study of knowledge and justified belief. As the study of knowledge, epistemology is concerned with the following questions: What are the necessary and sufficient conditions of knowledge? What are its sources? What is its structure, and what are its limits? As the study of justified belief, epistemology aims to answer questions such as: How we are to understand the concept of justification? What makes justified beliefs justified? Is justification internal or external to one's own mind? (...)
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  • Epistemic rationality as instrumental rationality: A critique.Thomas Kelly - 2003 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 66 (3):612–640.
    In this paper, I explore the relationship between epistemic rationality and instrumental rationality, and I attempt to delineate their respective roles in typical instances of theoretical reasoning. My primary concern is with the instrumentalist conception of epistemic rationality: the view that epistemic rationality is simply a species of instrumental rationality, viz. instrumental rationality in the service of one's cognitive or epistemic goals. After sketching the relevance of the instrumentalist conception to debates over naturalism and 'the ethics of belief', I argue (...)
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  • Sunk costs, rationality, and acting for the sake of the past.Thomas Kelly - 2004 - Noûs 38 (1):60–85.
    If you are more likely to continue a course of action in virtue of having previously invested in that course of action, then you tend to honor sunk costs. It is widely thought both that (i) individuals often do give some weight to sunk costs in their decision-making and that (ii) it is irrational for them to do so. In this paper I attempt to cast doubt on the conventional wisdom about sunk costs, understood as the conjunction of these two (...)
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  • Reasons without principles.Herman E. Stark - 2004 - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 47 (2):143 – 167.
    What is required for one thing to be a reason for another? Must the reason, more precisely, be or involve a principle? In this essay I target the idea that justification via reasons of one's beliefs (e.g., epistemic or moral) requires that the 'justifying reasons' be or involve (substantive and significant) principles. I identify and explore some potential sources of a principles requirement, and conclude that none of them (i.e., the normative function of reasons, the abstract structure of reasons, the (...)
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  • The relatively happy fish.Chad Hansen - 2003 - Asian Philosophy 13 (2 & 3):145 – 164.
    Zhuangzi and Hui Shi's discussion about whether Zhuangzi knows 'fish's happiness' is a Daoist staple. The interpretations, however, portray it as humorous miscommunication between a mystic and a logician. I argue for a fine inferential analysis that explains the argument in a way that informs Zhuangzi philosophical lament at Hui Shi's passing. It also reverses the dominant image of the two thinkers. Zhuangzi emerges as the superior dialectician, the clearer, more analytic epistemologist. Hui Shi's arguments betray his tendency (manifest elsewhere) (...)
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  • Evidence, pragmatics, and justification.Jeremy Fantl & Matthew McGrath - 2002 - Philosophical Review 111 (1):67-94.
    Evidentialism is the thesis that epistemic justification for belief supervenes on evidential support. However, we claim there are cases in which, even though two subjects have the same evidential support for a proposition, only one of them is justified. What make the difference are pragmatic factors, factors having to do with our cares and concerns. Our argument against evidentialism is not based on intuitions about particular cases. Rather, we aim to provide a theoretical basis for rejecting evidentialism by defending a (...)
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  • Moral sentiments and reciprocal obligations: The case for pension fund investment in community development.Gordon L. Clark - 2000 - Ethics, Place and Environment 3 (1):7 – 24.
    Squeezed between increasing entitlement expenditures and static or declining real revenues, state-funded urban development is increasingly perceived as an unaffordable luxury. At the same time, the power and significance of the banking sector is giving way to new kinds of financial institutions that have little or no interest in community development. Not surprisingly, it is often argued that pension funds ought to be more sensitive to community needs. However, some analysts argue that pension funds are properly only the agents of (...)
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  • Formal models of coherence and legal epistemology.Amalia Amaya - 2007 - Artificial Intelligence and Law 15 (4):429-447.
    This paper argues that formal models of coherence are useful for constructing a legal epistemology. Two main formal approaches to coherence are examined: coherence-based models of belief revision and the theory of coherence as constraint satisfaction. It is shown that these approaches shed light on central aspects of a coherentist legal epistemology, such as the concept of coherence, the dynamics of coherentist justification in law, and the mechanisms whereby coherence may be built in the course of legal decision-making.
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  • Folk psychology is not a predictive device.Adam Morton - 1996 - Mind 105 (417):119-37.
    I argue that folk psychology does not serve the purpose of facilitating prediction of others' behaviour but if facilitating cooperative action. (See my subsequent book *The Importance of Being Understood*.
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  • Epistemic normativity without epistemic teleology.Benjamin Kiesewetter - 2024 - Philosophical Issues 34 (1):349-370.
    This article is concerned with a puzzle that arises from three initially plausible assumptions that form an inconsistent triad: (i) Epistemic reasons are normative reasons (normativism); (ii) reasons are normative only if conformity with them is good (the reasons/value‐link); (iii) conformity with epistemic reasons need not be good (the nihilist assumption). I start by defending the reasons/value‐link, arguing that normativists need to reject the nihilist assumption. I then argue that the most familiar view that denies the nihilist assumption—epistemic teleology—is untenable. (...)
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  • (1 other version)Epistemic akrasia: No apology required.David Christensen - 2024 - Noûs 58 (1):54-76.
    It is natural to think that rationality imposes some relationship between what a person believes, and what she believes about what she’s rational to believe. Epistemic akrasia—for example, believing P while believing that P is not rational to believe in your situation—is often seen as intrinsically irrational. This paper argues otherwise. In certain cases, akrasia is intuitively rational. Understanding why akratic beliefs in those case are indeed rational provides a deeper explanation how typical akratic beliefs are irrational—an explanation that does (...)
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  • Instrumentalism, Moral Encroachment, and Epistemic Injustice.Asbjørn Steglich-Petersen - forthcoming - Philosophical Topics.
    According to the thesis of pragmatic encroachment, practical circumstances can affect whether someone is in a position to know or rationally believe a proposition. For example, whether it is epistemically rational for a person to believe that the bank will be open on Saturdays, can depend not only on the strength of the person’s evidence, but also on how practically important it is for the person not to be wrong about the bank being open on Saturdays. In recent years, philosophers (...)
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  • Should epistemology take the zetetic turn?Arianna Falbo - 2023 - Philosophical Studies 180 (10-11):2977-3002.
    What is the relationship between inquiry and epistemology? Are epistemic norms the norms that guide us as inquirers—as agents in the pursuit of knowledge and understanding? Recently, there has been growing support for what I, following Friedman (Philosophical Review 129(4):501–536, 2020), will call the zetetic turn in epistemology, the view that all epistemic norms are norms of inquiry. This paper investigates the prospects of an inquiry-centered approach to epistemology and develops several motivations for resisting it. First, I argue that the (...)
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  • The Construction of Epistemic Normativity.Michael Hannon & Elise Woodard - manuscript
    This paper aims to solve a puzzle for instrumental conceptions of epistemic normativity. The puzzle is this: if the usefulness of epistemic norms explains their normative grip on us, why does it seem improper to violate these norms even when doing so would benefit us? To solve this puzzle, we argue that epistemic instrumentalists must adopt a more social approach to normativity. In particular, they should not account for the nature of epistemic normativity by appealing to the goals of individual (...)
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  • The desire machine.Paul Forrester - 2024 - Analysis 84 (2):249-257.
    The experience machine poses the most important problem for hedonist theories of well-being. I argue that desire satisfactionism about well-being faces a similar problem: the desire machine. Upon entering this machine, your desires are altered through some minor neurosurgery. In particular, the machine causes you to desire everything that actually happens. The experience machine constructs a simulated world that matches your preexisting desires. The desire machine reconstructs your conative state to match the preexisting world. Desire satisfactionism recommends entering the desire (...)
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  • (1 other version)Epistemic Akrasia: No Apology Required.David Christensen - 2022 - Noûs 1 (online first):1-22.
    It is natural to think that rationality imposes some relationship between what a person believes, and what she believes about what she’s rational to believe. Epistemic akrasia—for example, believing P while believing that P is not rational to believe in your situation—is often seen as intrinsically irrational. This paper argues otherwise. In certain cases, akrasia is intuitively rational. Understanding why akratic beliefs in those case are indeed rational provides a deeper explanation how typical akratic beliefs are irrational—an explanation that does (...)
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  • (1 other version)A Holistic Understanding of Scientific Methodology: The Cases of the CMS and OPERA Experiments.Shonkholen Mate - 2022 - Kriterion – Journal of Philosophy 36 (3-4):263-289.
    Philosophers of science are divided over the interpretations of scientific normativity. Larry Laudan defends a sort of goal-directed rules for scientific methodology. In contrast, Gerard Doppelt thinks methodological rules are a mixed batch of rules in that some are goal-oriented hypothetical rules and others are goal-independent categorical rules. David Resnik thinks that the debate between them is at a standstill now. He further thinks there are certain rules, such as the rule of consistency which is goal independent. However, he proposes (...)
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  • Unifying Epistemic and Practical Rationality.Mattias Skipper - 2023 - Mind 132 (525):136-157.
    Many theories of rational action are predicated on the idea that what it is rational to do in a given situation depends, in part, on what it is rational to believe in that situation. In short: they treat epistemic rationality as explanatorily prior to practical rationality. If they are right in doing so, it follows, on pain of explanatory circularity, that epistemic rationality cannot itself be a form of practical rationality. Yet, many epistemologists have defended just such a view of (...)
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  • The Ineliminability of Epistemic Rationality.David Christensen - 2020 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 103 (3):501-517.
    Many writers have recently urged that the epistemic rationality of beliefs can depend on broadly pragmatic (as opposed to truth-directed) factors. Taken to an extreme, this line of thought leads to a view on which there is no such thing as a distinctive epistemic form of rationality. A series of papers by Susanna Rinard develops the view that something like our traditional notion of pragmatic rationality is all that is needed to account for the rationality of beliefs. This approach has (...)
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  • Rational Intransitive Preferences.Peter Baumann - 2022 - Politics, Philosophy and Economics 21 (1):3-28.
    According to a widely held view, rationality demands that the preferences of a person be transitive. The transitivity assumption is an axiom in standard theories of rational choice. It is also prima facie very plausible. I argue here that transitivity is not a necessary condition of rationality; it is a constraint only in some cases. The argument presented here is based on the non-linearity of differential utility functions. This paper has four parts. First, I present an argument against the transitivity (...)
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  • Unintentional Trolling: How Subjects Express Their Prejudices Through Made-up Stories.René Baston & Benedict Kenyah-Damptey - 2020 - Philosophy and Technology 34 (4):667-682.
    It is often assumed that trolling is an intentional action. The aim of the paper is to argue for a form of unintentional trolling. Firstly, we outline minimal conditions for intentional actions. Secondly, an unintentional trolling example is introduced. Thirdly, we will show that in some cases, an utterance can be expressive, while it is perceived as descriptive. On the basis of the justification-suppression model, we argue that the introduced trolling example is such a case. In order to bypass social (...)
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  • Autonomous Systems and the Place of Biology Among Sciences. Perspectives for an Epistemology of Complex Systems.Leonardo Bich - 2021 - In Gianfranco Minati (ed.), Multiplicity and Interdisciplinarity. Essays in Honor of Eliano Pessa. Springer. pp. 41-57.
    This paper discusses the epistemic status of biology from the standpoint of the systemic approach to living systems based on the notion of biological autonomy. This approach aims to provide an understanding of the distinctive character of biological systems and this paper analyses its theoretical and epistemological dimensions. The paper argues that, considered from this perspective, biological systems are examples of emergent phenomena, that the biological domain exhibits special features with respect to other domains, and that biology as a discipline (...)
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  • Epistemic utility theory’s difficult future.Chad Marxen - 2021 - Synthese 199 (3-4):7401-7421.
    According to epistemic utility theory, epistemic rationality is teleological: epistemic norms are instrumental norms that have the aim of acquiring accuracy. What’s definitive of these norms is that they can be expected to lead to the acquisition of accuracy when followed. While there’s much to be said in favor of this approach, it turns out that it faces a couple of worrisome extensional problems involving the future. The first problem involves credences about the future, and the second problem involves future (...)
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  • (1 other version)An instrumentalist unification of zetetic and epistemic reasons.Asbjørn Steglich-Petersen - 2021 - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy.
    Inquiry is an aim-directed activity, and as such governed by instrumental normativity. If you have reason to figure out a question, you have reason to take means to figuring it out. Beliefs are governed by epistemic normativity. On a certain pervasive understanding, this means that you are permitted – maybe required – to believe what you have sufficient evidence for. The norms of inquiry and epistemic norms both govern us as agents in pursuit of knowledge and understanding, and, on the (...)
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  • Robert Nozick on Prisoner's Dilemma.S. S. - manuscript
    Robert Nozick, in chapter two of the nature of rationality, proposes two famous problems in decision theory (i.e., Newcomb's problem and Prisoner Dilemma) and two main strategies toward these problems i.e. dominant strategy and dominated or cooperative one. He will try to give a formal principles to calculate the decision values in these situations. In this calculation he goes beyond the standard principle of maximizing expected utility and would try to put forth less ideal and more realistic principles that fit (...)
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  • Epistemic Reasons, Transparency, and Evolutionary Debunking.Nicole Dular & Nikki Fortier - 2021 - Philosophia 49 (4):1455-1473.
    Recently, evidentialists have argued that only they can explain transparency--the psychological phenomena wherein the question of doxastic deliberation of whether to believe p immediately gives way to the question of whether p--and thus that pragmatism about epistemic reasons is false. In this paper, we provide a defense of pragmatism. We depart from previous defenses of pragmatism which argue against the evidentialist explanation of transparency or the fact of transparency itself, by instead arguing that the pragmatist can provide a sound explanation (...)
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  • Akratic (epistemic) modesty.David Christensen - 2020 - Philosophical Studies 178 (7):2191-2214.
    Abstract: Theories of epistemic rationality that take disagreement (or other higher-order evidence) seriously tend to be “modest” in a certain sense: they say that there are circumstances in which it is rational to doubt their correctness. Modest views have been criticized on the grounds that they undermine themselves—they’re self-defeating. The standard Self-Defeat Objections depend on principles forbidding epistemically akratic beliefs; but there are good reasons to doubt these principles—even New Rational Reflection, which was designed to allow for certain special cases (...)
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  • The Evidentialist's Wager.William MacAskill, Aron Vallinder, Caspar Oesterheld, Carl Shulman & Johannes Treutlein - 2021 - Journal of Philosophy 118 (6):320-342.
    Suppose that an altruistic agent who is uncertain between evidential and causal decision theory finds herself in a situation where these theories give conflicting verdicts. We argue that even if she has significantly higher credence in CDT, she should nevertheless act in accordance with EDT. First, we claim that the appropriate response to normative uncertainty is to hedge one's bets. That is, if the stakes are much higher on one theory than another, and the credences you assign to each of (...)
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  • Could our epistemic reasons be collective practical reasons?Michelle M. Dyke - 2021 - Noûs 55 (4):842-862.
    Are epistemic reasons merely a species of instrumental practical reasons, making epistemic rationality a specialized form of instrumental practical rationality? Or are epistemic reasons importantly different in kind? Despite the attractions of the former view, Kelly (2003) argues quite compellingly that epistemic rationality cannot be merely a matter of taking effective means to one’s epistemic ends. I argue here that Kelly’s objections can be sidestepped if we understand epistemic reasons as instrumental reasons that arise in light of the aims held (...)
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  • The Eclipse of Instrumental Rationality.Kurt Sylvan - 2020 - In Ruth Chang & Kurt Sylvan (eds.), The Routledge Handbook of Practical Reason. New York, NY: Routledge.
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  • Assertion and Practical Reasoning, Fallibilism and Pragmatic Skepticism.Christos Kyriacou - 2020 - Acta Analytica 35 (4):543-561.
    Skeptical invariantism does not account for the intuitive connections between knowledge, assertion, and practical reasoning and this constitutes a significant problem for the position because it does not save corresponding epistemic appearances (cf. Hawthorne (2004:131-5)). Moreover, it is an attraction of fallibilist over infallibilist-skeptical views that they can easily account for the epistemic appearances about the connections between knowledge, assertion, and practical reasoning (cf. Williamson (2000:249-255)). Call this argument ‘the argument from the knowledge norm’. I motivate and develop a Humean, (...)
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