Switch to: References

Citations of:

How Truth Governs Belief

Philosophical Review 112 (4):447-482 (2003)

Add citations

You must login to add citations.
  1. A Minimalist Threshold for Epistemically Irrational Beliefs.Marianna Bergamaschi Ganapini - forthcoming - In Eric Schwitzgebel & Jonathan Jong (eds.), What is Belief? Oxford University Press.
    This paper aims to shed light on the nature of belief and provide support to the view that I call ‘Minimalism’. It shows that Minimalism is better equipped than the traditional approach to separating belief from imagination and addressing cases of belief’s evidence- resistance. The key claim of the paper is that no matter how epistemically irrational humans’ beliefs are, they always retain a minimal level of rationality.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  • The Self-Reinforcing Nature of Joint Action.Facundo M. Alonso - 2024 - Philosophical Studies (5):1-19.
    Shared intention normally leads to joint action. It does this, it is commonly said, only because it is a characteristically stable phenomenon, a phenomenon that tends to persist from the time it is formed until the time it is fulfilled. However, the issue of what the stability of shared intention comes down to remains largely undertheorized. My aim in this paper is to remedy this shortcoming. I argue that shared intention is a source of moral and epistemic reasons, that responsiveness (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  • Norms of inquiry.David Thorstad - forthcoming - Philosophical Topics.
    Epistemologists have recently proposed a number of norms governing rational inquiry. My aim in this paper is to unify and explain recently proposed norms of inquiry by developing a general account of the conditions under which inquiries are rational, analogous to theories such as evidentialism and reliabilism for rational belief. I begin with a reason-responsiveness conception of rationality as responding correctly to possessed normative reasons. I extend this account with a series of claims about the normative reasons for inquiry that (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   2 citations  
  • How to judge intentionally.Antonia Peacocke - 2023 - Philosophical Perspectives 37 (1):330-339.
    Contrary to popular philosophical belief, judgment can indeed be an intentional action. That's because an intentional judgment, even one with content p, need not be intentional as a judgment that p. It can instead be intentional just as a judgment wh- for some specific wh- question—e.g. a judgment of which x is F or a judgment whether p. This paper explains how this is possible by laying out a means by which you can perform such an intentional action. This model (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  • A Fitting Definition of Epistemic Emotions.Michael Deigan & Juan S. Piñeros Glasscock - 2024 - Philosophical Quarterly 74 (3):777-798.
    Philosophers and psychologists sometimes categorize emotions like surprise and curiosity as specifically epistemic. Is there some reasonably unified and interesting class of emotions here? If so, what unifies it? This paper proposes and defends an evaluative account of epistemic emotions: What it is to be an epistemic emotion is to have fittingness conditions that distinctively involve some epistemic evaluation. We argue that this view has significant advantages over alternative proposals and is a promising way to identify a limited and interesting (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  • The Ethics of Belief (3rd edition).Rima Basu - forthcoming - In Kurt Sylvan, Ernest Sosa, Jonathan Dancy & Matthias Steup (eds.), The Blackwell Companion to Epistemology, 3rd edition. Wiley Blackwell.
    This chapter is a survey of the ethics of belief. It begins with the debate as it first emerges in the foundational dispute between W. K. Clifford and William James. Then it surveys how the disagreements between Clifford and James have shaped the work of contemporary theorists, touching on topics such as pragmatism, whether we should believe against the evidence, pragmatic and moral encroachment, doxastic partiality, and doxastic wronging.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  • Intellectual courage and inquisitive reasons.Will Fleisher - 2023 - Philosophical Studies 180 (4):1343-1371.
    Intellectual courage requires acting to promote epistemic goods despite significant risk of harm. Courage is distinguished from recklessness and cowardice because the expected epistemic benefit of a courageous action outweighs (in some sense) the threatened harm. Sometimes, however, inquirers pursue theories that are not best supported by their current evidence. For these inquirers, the expected epistemic benefit of their actions cannot be explained by appeal to their evidence alone. The probability of pursuing the true theory cannot contribute enough to the (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   2 citations  
  • Accuracy Across Doxastic Attitudes: Recent Work on the Accuracy of Belief.Robert Weston Siscoe - 2022 - American Philosophical Quarterly 59 (2):201-217.
    James Joyce's article “A Nonpragmatic Vindication of Probabilism” introduced an approach to arguing for credal norms by appealing to the epistemic value of accuracy. The central thought was that credences ought to accurately represent the world, a guiding thought that has gone on to generate an entire research paradigm on the rationality of credences. Recently, a number of epistemologists have begun to apply this same thought to full beliefs, attempting to explain and argue for norms of belief in terms of (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   1 citation  
  • There are no epistemic norms of inquiry.David Thorstad - 2022 - Synthese 200 (5):1-24.
    Epistemic nihilism for inquiry is the claim that there are no epistemic norms of inquiry. Epistemic nihilism was once the received stance towards inquiry, and I argue that it should be taken seriously again. My argument is that the same considerations which led us away from epistemic nihilism in the case of belief not only cannot refute epistemic nihilism for inquiry, but in fact may well support it. These include the argument from non-existence that there are no non-epistemic reasons for (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   15 citations  
  • Beliefs, delusions, and dry-functionalism.C. J. Atkinson - 2022 - Asian Journal of Philosophy 1 (2):1-7.
    Kengo Miyazono, in his work Delusions and Beliefs, defends a teleo-functional account of delusions. In my contribution to this symposium, I question one of Miyazono’s motivations for appealing to teleo-functionalism over its main rival, dry-functionalism. Miyazono suggests that teleo-functionalism, unlike dry-functionalism, can account for the compatibility of the theses (i) that delusions are genuine doxastic states (doxasticism about delusions) and (ii) that delusions do not perform the typical causal roles of beliefs (the causal difference thesis). I argue, however, that there (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   1 citation  
  • In Defense of Constitutivism About Epistemic Normativity.David Horst - 2022 - Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 103 (2):232-258.
    Epistemic constitutivism (EC) holds that the nature of believing is such that it gives rise to a standard of correctness and that other epistemic normative notions (e.g., reasons for belief) can be explained in terms of this standard. If defensible, this view promises an attractive and unifying account of epistemic normativity. However, EC faces a forceful objection: that constitutive standards of correctness are never enough for generating normative reasons. This paper aims to defend EC in the face of this objection. (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   4 citations  
  • Debunking Doxastic Transparency.Ema Sullivan-Bissett - 2022 - European Journal of Analytic Philosophy 18 (1):(A3)5-24.
    In this paper I consider the project of offering an evolutionary debunking explanation for transparency in doxastic deliberation. I examine Nicole Dular and Nikki Fortier’s (2021) attempt at such a project. I suggest that their account faces a dilemma. On the one horn, their explanation of transparency involves casting our mechanisms for belief formation as solely concerned with truth. I argue that this is explanatorily inadequate when we take a wider view of our belief formation practices. I show that Dular (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   1 citation  
  • Was William James an Evidentialist?Henry Jackman - 2022 - Southwest Philosophy Review 38 (1):81-90.
    William James has traditionally been seen as a critic of evidentialism, with his claim that “Our passional nature not only lawfully may, but must, decide an option between propositions, whenever it is a genuine option that cannot by its nature be decided on intellectual grounds” being understood as saying that in certain cases we have the right to believe beyond what is certified by the evidence. However, there is an alternate, “expansive”, reading of James (defended most recently by Cheryl Misak, (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  • The Communication Argument and the Pluralist Challenge.Shawn Tinghao Wang - 2021 - Canadian Journal of Philosophy 51 (5):384-399.
    Various theorists have endorsed the “communication argument”: communicative capacities are necessary for morally responsible agency because blame aims at a distinctive kind of moral communication. I contend that existing versions of the argument, including those defended by Gary Watson and Coleen Macnamara, face a pluralist challenge: they do not seem to sit well with the plausible view that blame has multiple aims. I then examine three possible rejoinders to the challenge, suggesting that a context-specific, function-based approach constitutes the most promising (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   4 citations  
  • A Permissivist Defense of Pascal’s Wager.Elizabeth Grace Jackson - 2023 - Erkenntnis 88 (6):2315-2340.
    Epistemic permissivism is the thesis that the evidence can rationally permit more than one attitude toward a proposition. Pascal’s wager is the idea that one ought to believe in God for practical reasons, because of what one can gain if theism is true and what one has to lose if theism is false. In this paper, I argue that if epistemic permissivism is true, then the defender of Pascal’s wager has powerful responses to two prominent objections. First, I argue that (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   7 citations  
  • Inference as a Mental Act.David Hunter - 2009 - In Lucy O'Brien & Matthew Soteriou (eds.), Mental actions. New York: Oxford University Press.
    I will argue that a person is causally responsible for believing what she does. Through inference, she can sustain and change her perspective on the world. When she draws an inference, she causes herself to keep or to change her take on things. In a literal sense, she makes up her own mind as to how things are. And, I will suggest, she can do this voluntarily. It is in part because she is causally responsible for believing what she does (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   1 citation  
  • Inquiry and the epistemic.David Thorstad - 2021 - Philosophical Studies 178 (9):2913-2928.
    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 (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   35 citations  
  • The Point of Political Belief.Michael Hannon & Jeroen de Ridder - 2021 - In Michael Hannon & Jeroen de Ridder (eds.), The Routledge Handbook of Political Epistemology. New York: Routledge.
    An intuitive and widely accepted view is that (a) beliefs aim at truth, (b) many citizens have stable and meaningful political beliefs, and (c) citizens choose to support political candidates or parties on the basis of their political beliefs. We argue that all three claims are false. First, we argue that political beliefs often differ from ordinary world-modelling beliefs because they do not aim at truth. Second, we draw on empirical evidence from political science and psychology to argue that most (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   12 citations  
  • Faith, Hope, and Justification.Elizabeth Jackson - 2022 - In Paul Silva & Luis R. G. Oliveira (eds.), Propositional and Doxastic Justification: New Essays on their Nature and Significance. New York: Routledge. pp. 201–216.
    The distinction between propositional and doxastic justification is normally applied to belief. The goal of this paper is to apply the distinction to faith and hope. Before doing so, I discuss the nature of faith and hope, and how they contrast with belief—belief has no essential conative component, whereas faith and hope essentially involve the conative. I discuss implications this has for evaluating faith and hope, and apply this to the propositional/doxastic distinction. There are two key upshots. One, bringing in (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   1 citation  
  • Epistemically flawless false beliefs.Kate Nolfi - 2020 - Synthese 198 (12):11291-11309.
    A starting point for the sort of alethic epistemological approach that dominates both historical and contemporary western philosophy is that epistemic norms, standards, or ideals are to be characterized by appeal to some kind of substantively normative relationship between belief and truth. Accordingly, the alethic epistemologist maintains that false beliefs are necessarily defective, imperfect, or flawed, at least from the epistemic perspective. In this paper, I develop an action-oriented alternative to the alethic approach, an alternative that is inspired by and (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   3 citations  
  • Reasons and Causes in Psychiatry: Ideas from Donald Davidson’s Work.Elisabetta Lalumera - 2018 - In Annalisa Coliva, Paolo Leonardi & Sebastiano Moruzzi (eds.), Eva Picardi on Language, Analysis and History. Londra, Regno Unito: Palgrave. pp. 281-296.
    Though the divide between reason-based and causal-explanatory approaches in psychiatry and psychopathology is old and deeply rooted, current trends involving multi-factorial explanatory models and evidence-based approaches to interpersonal psychotherapy, show that it has already been implicitly bridged. These trends require a philosophical reconsideration of how reasons can be causes. This paper contributes to that trajectory by arguing that Donald Davidson’s classic paradigm of 1963 is still a valid option.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  • The Aim of Belief and Suspended Belief.C. J. Atkinson - 2021 - Philosophical Psychology 34 (4):581-606.
    In this paper, I discuss whether different interpretations of the ‘aim’ of belief—both the teleological and normative interpretations—have the resources to explain certain descriptive and normative features of suspended belief (suspension). I argue that, despite the recent efforts of theorists to extend these theories to account for suspension, they ultimately fail. The implication is that we must either develop alternative theories of belief that can account for suspension, or we must abandon the assumption that these theories ought to be able (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   1 citation  
  • The Knowledge Norm of Belief.Zachary Mitchell Swindlehurst - 2020 - Thought: A Journal of Philosophy 9 (1):43-50.
    Doxastic normativism is the thesis that norms are constitutive of or essential to belief, such that no mental state not subject to those norms counts as a belief. A common normativist view is that belief is essentially governed by a norm of truth. According to Krister Bykvist and Anandi Hattiangadi, truth norms for belief cannot be formulated without unpalatable consequences: they are either false or they impose unsatisfiable requirements on believers. I propose that we construe the fundamental norm of belief (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   6 citations  
  • Guided by Guided by the Truth: Objectivism and Perspectivism in Ethics and Epistemology.Daniel Whiting - forthcoming - In Baron Reed & A. K. Flowerree (eds.), Towards an Expansive Epistemology: Norms, Action, and the Social Sphere. Routledge.
    According to ethical objectivism, what a person should do depends on the facts, as opposed to their perspective on the facts. A long-standing challenge to this view is that it fails to accommodate the role that norms play in guiding a person’s action. Roughly, if the facts that determine what a person should do lie beyond their ken, they cannot inform a person’s deliberations. This paper explores two recent developments of this line of thought. Both focus on the epistemic counterpart (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  • Transparent Delusion.Vladimir Krstić - 2020 - Review of Philosophy and Psychology 11 (1):183-201.
    In this paper, I examine a kind of delusion in which the patients judge that their occurrent thoughts are false and try to abandon them precisely because they are false, but fail to do so. I call this delusion transparent, since it is transparent to the sufferer that their thought is false. In explaining this phenomenon, I defend a particular two-factor theory of delusion that takes the proper integration of relevant reasoning processes as vital for thought-evaluation. On this proposal, which (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   4 citations  
  • Moral error theory, explanatory dispensability and the limits of guilt.Silvan Wittwer - 2020 - Philosophical Studies 177 (10):2969-2983.
    Recently, companions in guilt strategies have garnered significant philosophical attention as a response to arguments for moral error theory, the view that there are no moral facts and that our moral beliefs are thus systematically mistaken. According to Cuneo (The normative web: an argument for moral realism, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2007), Das (Philos Q 66:152–160, 2016; Australas J Philos 95(1):58–69, 2017), Rowland (J Ethics Soc Philos 7(1):1–24, 2012; Philos Q 66:161–171, 2016) and others, epistemic facts would be just as (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   1 citation  
  • Epistemic Rationality.Harvey Siegel - 2019 - Metaphilosophy 50 (5):608-630.
    Critique of instrumental accounts of epistemic rationality.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   5 citations  
  • Suspension, Higher-Order Evidence, and Defeat.Errol Lord & Kurt Sylvan - 2021 - In Jessica Brown & Mona Simion (eds.), Reasons, Justification, and Defeat. Oxford Oxford: Oxford University Press.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   15 citations  
  • Requirements of intention in light of belief.Carlos Núñez - 2020 - Philosophical Studies 177 (9):2471-2492.
    Much work in the philosophy of action in the last few decades has focused on the elucidation and justification of a series of purported norms of practical rationality that concern the presence or absence of intention in light of belief, and that demand a kind of structural coherence in the psychology of an agent. Examples of such norms include: Intention Detachment, which proscribes intending to do something in case some condition obtains, believing that such condition obtains, and not intending to (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   6 citations  
  • (1 other version)On Behalf of a Bi-Level Account of Trust.J. Adam Carter - 2019 - Philosophical Studies:1-24.
    A bi-level account of trust is developed and defended, one with relevance in ethics as well as epistemology. The proposed account of trust—on which trusting is modelled within a virtue-theoretic framework as a performance-type with an aim—distinguishes between two distinct levels of trust, apt and convictive, that take us beyond previous assessments of its nature, value, and relationship to risk assessment. While Ernest Sosa (2009; 2015; 2017), in particular, has shown how a performance normativity model may be fruitfully applied to (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   4 citations  
  • Epistemic Temperance.Paul Bloomfield - 2019 - American Philosophical Quarterly 56 (2):109-124.
    The idea of epistemic temperance is introduced and explicated through a discussion of Plato's understanding of it. A variety of psychological and epistemic phenomena are presented which arise due to epistemic intemperance, or the inappropriate influence of conations on cognition. Two cases familiar to philosophers, self-deception and racial prejudice, are discussed as the result of epistemic intemperance though they are not typically seen as having a common cause. Finally, epistemic temperance is distinguished from epistemic justice, as these have been conflated.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   3 citations  
  • Do constitutive norms on belief explain Moore’s Paradox?Christopher Cowie - 2020 - Philosophical Studies 177 (6):1685-1702.
    In this article I assess the prospects for a particular kind of resolution to Moore’s Paradox. It is that Moore’s Paradox is explained by the existence of a constitutive norm on belief. I focus on a constitutive norm relates that relates belief to knowledge. I develop this explanation. I then present a challenge to it. Norm-based explanations of Moore’s Paradox must appeal to a ‘linking principle’ that explains what is wrong with violating the constitutive norm. But it is difficult to (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   1 citation  
  • (1 other version)The Epistemic Norm of Inference and Non-Epistemic Reasons for Belief.Patrick Bondy - 2019 - Synthese (2):1-21.
    There is an important disagreement in contemporary epistemology over the possibility of non-epistemic reasons for belief. Many epistemologists argue that non-epistemic reasons cannot be good or normative reasons for holding beliefs: non-epistemic reasons might be good reasons for a subject to bring herself to hold a belief, the argument goes, but they do not offer any normative support for the belief itself. Non-epistemic reasons, as they say, are just the wrong kind of reason for belief. Other epistemologists, however, argue that (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   4 citations  
  • (1 other version)Educating for Intellectual Virtue: a critique from action guidance.Ben Kotzee, J. Adam Carter & Harvey Siegel - 2019 - Episteme:1-23.
    Virtue epistemology is among the dominant influences in mainstream epistemology today. An important commitment of one strand of virtue epistemology – responsibilist virtue epistemology (e.g., Montmarquet 1993; Zagzebski 1996; Battaly 2006; Baehr 2011) – is that it must provide regulative normative guidance for good thinking. Recently, a number of virtue epistemologists (most notably Baehr, 2013) have held that virtue epistemology not only can provide regulative normative guidance, but moreover that we should reconceive the primary epistemic aim of all education as (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   10 citations  
  • Reasons: Wrong, Right, Normative, Fundamental.Kurt Sylvan & Errol Lord - 2019 - Journal of Ethics and Social Philosophy 15 (1).
    Reasons fundamentalists maintain that we can analyze all derivative normative properties in terms of normative reasons. These theorists famously encounter the Wrong Kind of Reasons problem, since not all reasons for reactions seem relevant for reasons-based analyses. Some have argued that this problem is a general one for many theorists, and claim that this lightens the burden for reasons fundamentalists. We argue in this paper that the reverse is true: the generality of the problem makes life harder for reasons fundamentalists. (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   18 citations  
  • Believing in Others.Sarah K. Paul & Jennifer M. Morton - 2018 - Philosophical Topics 46 (1):75-95.
    Suppose some person 'A' sets out to accomplish a difficult, long-term goal such as writing a passable Ph.D. thesis. What should you believe about whether A will succeed? The default answer is that you should believe whatever the total accessible evidence concerning A's abilities, circumstances, capacity for self-discipline, and so forth supports. But could it be that what you should believe depends in part on the relationship you have with A? We argue that it does, in the case where A (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   25 citations  
  • Belief and Difficult Action.Berislav Marušić - 2012 - Philosophers' Imprint 12:1-30.
    Suppose you decide or promise to do something that you have evidence is difficult to do. Should you believe that you will do it? On the one hand, if you believe that you will do it, your belief goes against the evidence—since having evidence that it’s difficult to do it constitutes evidence that it is likely that you won’t do it. On the other hand, if you don’t believe that you will do it but instead believe, as your evidence suggests, (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   20 citations  
  • Dilemmic Epistemology.Nick Hughes - 2019 - Synthese 196 (10):4059-4090.
    This article argues that there can be epistemic dilemmas: situations in which one faces conflicting epistemic requirements with the result that whatever one does, one is doomed to do wrong from the epistemic point of view. Accepting this view, I argue, may enable us to solve several epistemological puzzles.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   48 citations  
  • Epistemic Schmagency?A. K. Flowerree - 2018 - In Christos Kyriacou & Robin McKenna (eds.), Metaepistemology: Realism & Antirealism. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan. pp. 289-310.
    Constructivist approaches in epistemology and ethics offer a promising account of normativity. But constructivism faces a powerful Schmagency Objection, raised by David Enoch. While Enoch’s objection has been widely discussed in the context of practical norms, no one has yet explored how the Schmagency Objection might undermine epistemic constructivism. In this paper, I rectify that gap. First, I develop the objection against a prominent form of epistemic constructivism, Belief Constitutivism. Belief Constitutivism is susceptible to a Schmagency Objection, I argue, because (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   3 citations  
  • On not getting out of bed.Samuel Asarnow - 2019 - Philosophical Studies 176 (6):1639-1666.
    This morning I intended to get out of bed when my alarm went off. Hearing my alarm, I formed the intention to get up now. Yet, for a time, I remained in bed, irrationally lazy. It seems I irrationally failed to execute my intention. Such cases of execution failure pose a challenge for Mentalists about rationality, who believe that facts about rationality supervene on facts about the mind. For, this morning, my mind was in order; it was my action that (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   5 citations  
  • The guise of the good and the problem of partiality.Allan Hazlett - 2019 - Canadian Journal of Philosophy 49 (6):851-872.
    According to the guise of the good thesis, we desire things under the ‘guise of the good.’ Here I sympathetically articulate a generic formulation of the guise of the good thesis, and addre...
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   5 citations  
  • You don't say! Lying, asserting and insincerity.Neri Marsili - 2017 - Dissertation, University of Sheffield
    This thesis addresses philosophical problems concerning improper assertions. The first part considers the issue of defining lying: here, against a standard view, I argue that a lie need not intend to deceive the hearer. I define lying as an insincere assertion, and then resort to speech act theory to develop a detailed account of what an assertion is, and what can make it insincere. Even a sincere assertion, however, can be improper (e.g., it can be false, or unwarranted): in the (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   3 citations  
  • A Spinozist Aesthetics of Affect and Its Political Implications.Christopher Davidson - 2017 - In Gábor Boros, Judit Szalai & Oliver Toth (eds.), The Concept of Affectivity in Early Modern Philosophy. Budapest, Hungary: Eötvös Loránd University Press. pp. 185-206.
    Spinoza rarely refers to art. However, there are extensive resources for a Spinozist aesthetics in his discussion of health in the Ethics and of social affects in his political works. There have been recently been a few essays linking Spinoza and art, but this essay additionally fuses Spinoza’s politics to an affective aesthetics. Spinoza’s statements that art makes us healthier (Ethics 4p54Sch; Emendation section 17) form the foundation of an aesthetics. In Spinoza’s definition, “health” is caused by external objects that (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  • Descartes on Will and Suspension of Judgment: Affectivity of the Reasons for Doubt.Jan Forsman - 2017 - In Gábor Boros, Judit Szalai & Oliver Toth (eds.), The Concept of Affectivity in Early Modern Philosophy. Budapest, Hungary: Eötvös Loránd University Press. pp. 38-58.
    In this paper, I join the so-called voluntarism debate on Descartes’s theory of will and judgment, arguing for an indirect doxastic voluntarism reading of Descartes, as opposed to a classic, or direct doxastic voluntarism. More specifically, I examine the question whether Descartes thinks the will can have a direct and full control over one’s suspension of judgment. Descartes was a doxastic voluntarist, maintaining that the will has some kind of control over one’s doxastic states, such as belief and doubt. According (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  • Fictional persuasion, transparency, and the aim of belief.Ema Sullivan-Bissett & Lisa Bortolotti - 2017 - In Ema Sullivan-Bissett, Helen Bradley & Paul Noordhof (eds.), Art and Belief. Oxford: Oxford University Press. pp. 153-73.
    In this chapter we argue that some beliefs present a problem for the truth-aim teleological account of belief, according to which it is constitutive of belief that it is aimed at truth. We draw on empirical literature which shows that subjects form beliefs about the real world when they read fictional narratives, even when those narratives are presented as fiction, and subjects are warned that the narratives may contain falsehoods. We consider Nishi Shah’s teleologist’s dilemma and a response to it (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   2 citations  
  • (1 other version)Deliberative Indispensability and Epistemic Justification.Tristram McPherson - 2015 - In Russ Shafer-Landau (ed.), Oxford Studies in Metaethics, vol. 10. Oxford University Press. pp. 104-133.
    Many of us care about the existence of ethical facts because such facts appear crucial to making sense of our practical lives. On one tempting line of thought, this idea does more than raise the metaethical stakes: it can also play a central role in justifying our belief in those facts. In recent work, David Enoch has developed this tempting thought into a formidable new proposal in moral epistemology, that aims to explain how the deliberative indispensability of ethical facts gives (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   3 citations  
  • Uniqueness, Rationality, and the Norm of Belief.Nick Hughes - 2019 - Erkenntnis 84 (1):57-75.
    I argue that it is epistemically permissible to believe that P when it is epistemically rational to believe that P. Unlike previous defenses of this claim, this argument is not vulnerable to the claim that permissibility is being confused with excusability.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   6 citations  
  • Believing the best: on doxastic partiality in friendship.Lindsay Crawford - 2017 - Synthese 196 (4):1575-1593.
    Some philosophers argue that friendship can normatively require us to have certain beliefs about our friends that epistemic norms would prohibit. On this view, we ought to exhibit some degree of doxastic partiality toward our friends, by having certain generally favorable beliefs and doxastic dispositions that concern our friends that we would not have concerning relevantly similar non-friends. Can friendship genuinely make these normative demands on our beliefs, in ways that would conflict with what we epistemically ought to believe? On (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   18 citations  
  • The Beliefs and Intentions of Buridan's Ass.Nathaniel Sharadin & Finnur Dellsén - 2017 - Journal of the American Philosophical Association 3 (2):209-226.
    The moral of Buridan's Ass is that it can sometimes be rational to perform one action rather than another even though one lacks stronger reason to do so. Yet it is also commonly believed that it cannot ever be rational to believe one proposition rather than another if one lacks stronger reason to do so. This asymmetry has been taken to indicate a deep difference between epistemic and practical rationality. According to the view articulated here, the asymmetry should instead be (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   4 citations