Sandford C. Goldberg puts forward a theory of epistemic normativity that is grounded in the things we properly expect of one another as epistemic subjects. This theory has far-reaching implications not only for the theory of epistemic normativity, but also for the nature of epistemic assessment itself.

This paper defends direct activism-the view that it is possible to form beliefs in a causally direct way. In particular, it addresses the charge that direct activism entails voluntarism-the thesis that we can form beliefs at will. It distinguishes weak and strong varieties of voluntarism and argues that, although direct activism may entail the weak variety, it does not entail the strong one. The paper goes on to argue that strong voluntarism is non-contingently false, sketching a new argument for that (...) conclusion. This argument does not tell against the weak form of voluntarism, however, and the final part of the paper argues that weak voluntarism, and consequently direct activism, remains a coherent and defensible position. (shrink)

Evidentialism is a view about the conditions under which a person is epistemically justified in having a particular doxastic attitude toward a proposition. Evidentialism holds that the justified attitudes are determined entirely by the person's evidence. This is the traditional view of justification. It is now widely opposed. The essays included in this volume develop and defend the tradition.Evidentialism has many assets. In addition to providing an intuitively plausible account of epistemic justification, it helps to resolve the problem of the (...) criterion, helps to disentangle epistemic and ethical evaluations, and illuminates the relationship between epistemic evaluations of beliefs and the evaluation of the methods used to form beliefs. These issues are all addressed in the essays presented here. External world skepticism poses the classic problem for an epistemological theory. The final essay in this volume argues that evidentialism is uniquely well qualified to make sense of skepticism and to respond to its challenge.Evidentialism is a version of epistemic internalism. Recent epistemology has included many attacks on internalism and has seen the development of numerous externalist theories. The essays included here respond to those attacks and raise objections to externalist theories, especially the principal rival, reliabilism. Internalism generally has been criticized for having unacceptable deontological implications, for failing to connect epistemic justification to truth, and for failing to provide an adequate account of what makes basic beliefs justified. Each of these charges is answered in these essays. The collection includes two previously unpublished essays and new afterwords to five of the reprinted essays; it will be the definitive resource on evidentialism for all epistemologists. (shrink)

Truth is standardly considered a requirement on epistemic acceptability. But science and philosophy deploy models, idealizations and thought experiments that prescind from truth to achieve other cognitive ends. I argue that such felicitous falsehoods function as cognitively useful fictions. They are cognitively useful because they exemplify and afford epistemic access to features they share with the relevant facts. They are falsehoods in that they diverge from the facts. Nonetheless, they are true enough to serve their epistemic purposes. Theories that contain (...) them have testable consequences, hence are factually defeasible. (shrink)

Some of the most well-known arguments against epistemic externalism come in the form of thought experiments involving subjects who acquire beliefs through anomolous means such as clairvoyance. These thought experiments purport to provide counterexamples to the reliabilist conception of justification: their subjects are intuitively epistemically unjustified, yet meet reliabilist externalist criteria for justification. In this article, I address a recent defence of externalism due to Daniel Breyer, who argues that externalists need not consider such subjects justified, since they fail to (...) own those beliefs in a way required for epistemic evaluability. I argue that the concept of belief ownership Breyer adopts leaves his account open to related counterexamples, and suggest a modification, drawing on analogies between these cases and cases of delusions, such as thought insertion. I will argue that a concept of authorship developed in the literature on delusions better grounds the sense of attribution required for epistemic evaluability. (shrink)

The Fallibility Norm—the claim that we ought to take our fallibility into account when managing our beliefs—appears to conflict with several other compelling epistemic norms. To shed light on these apparent conflicts, I distinguish two kinds of norms: norms of perfection and norms of compensation. Roughly, norms of perfection tell us how agents ought to behave if they’re to be perfect; norms of compensation tell us how imperfect agents ought to behave in order to compensate for their imperfections. I argue (...) that the Fallibility Norm is a norm of compensation, and that thinking of it like this helps us make progress in debates surrounding disagreement, higher-order evidence, and coherence. (shrink)

Justification, or at least ‘justification’, bulks large in recent epistemology. The view that knowledge consists of true-justified-belief has been prominent in this century, and the justification of belief has attracted considerable attention in its own right. But it is usually not at all clear just what an epistemologist means by ‘justified’, just what concept the term is used to express. An enormous amount of energy has gone into the attempt to specify conditions under which beliefs of one or another sort (...) are justified; but relatively little has been done to explain what it is for a belief to be justified, what that is for which conditions are being sought. The most common procedure has been to proceed on the basis of a number of obvious cases of justified belief, without pausing to determine what property it is of which these cases are instances. Now even if there were some single determinate concept that all these theoriests have implicitly in mind, this procedure would be less than wholly satisfactory. For in the absence of an explicit account of the concept being applied, we lack the most fundamental basis for deciding between supposed intuitions and for evaluating proposed conditions of justification. And in any event, as philosophers we do not seek merely to speak the truth, but also to gain an explicit, reflective understanding of the matters with which we deal. We want to know not only when our beliefs are justified, but also what it is to enjoy that status. True, not every fundamental concept can be explicated, but we shall find that much can be done with this one. (shrink)

According to epistemic instrumentalism, epistemic normativity arises from and depends on facts about our ends. On that view, a consideration C is an epistemic reason for a subject S to Φ only if Φ-ing would promote an end that S has. However, according to the Too Few Epistemic Reasons objection, this cannot be correct since there are cases in which, intuitively, C is an epistemic reason for S to Φ even though Φ-ing would not promote any of S’s ends. After (...) clarifying both EI and the Too Few Epistemic Reasons objection, I examine three major instrumentalist replies and argue that none of them is satisfactory. I end by briefly sketching a fourth possible response, which is, I suggest, more promising than the other three. (shrink)

In virtue of what is something a reason for action? That is, what makes a consideration a reason to act? This is a metaphysical or meta-normative question about the grounding of reasons for action. The answer to the grounding question has been traditionally given in ‘pure’, univocal terms. This paper argues that there is good reason to understand the ground of practical normativity as a hybrid of traditional ‘pure’ views. The paper 1) surveys the three leading ‘pure’ answers to the (...) question of a normative ground, 2) examines one or two of the most difficult problems for each, proposing along the way a new objection to one, and 3) argues that a particular hybrid view about normative grounds –‘hybrid voluntarism’ – avoids each of the main problems faced by the three leading ‘pure’ views. (shrink)

This chapter argues that there is a particular kind of ‘internal’ commitment typically made in the context of romantic love relationships that has striking meta-normative implications for how we understand the role of the will in practical normativity. Internal commitments cannot plausibly explain the reasons we have in committed relationships on the usual model—as triggering reasons that are already there, in the way that making a promise triggers a reason via a pre-existing norm of the form ‘If you make a (...) promise to x, then you have a reason to x’. Instead, internal commitments are that in virtue of which one has the special reasons of committed relationships; they are the grounds of such reasons. In this way, the will is a source of practical normativity. (shrink)

Subjectivist permissivism is aprima facieattractive view. That is, it's plausible to think that what's rational for people to believe on the basis of their evidence can vary if they have different frameworks or sets of epistemic standards. In this paper, I introduce an epistemic existentialist form of subjectivist permissivism, which I argue can better address “the arbitrariness objection” to subjectivist permissivism in general. According to the epistemic existentialist, it's not just that what's rational to believe on the basis of evidence (...) can vary according to agents’ frameworks, understood as passive aspects of individuals’ psychologies. Rather, what's rational to believe on the basis of evidence is sensitive to agents’ choices and active commitments (as are frameworks themselves). Here I draw on Chang's work on commitment and voluntarist reasons. The epistemic existentialist maintains that what's rational for us to believe on the basis of evidence is, at least in part,up to us. It can vary not only across individuals but for a single individual, over time, as she makes differing epistemic commitments. (shrink)

When subjects violate epistemic standards or norms, we sometimes judge them blameworthy rather than blameless. For instance, we might judge a subject blameworthy for dogmatically continuing to believe a claim even after receiving evidence which undermines it. Indeed, the idea that one may be blameworthy for belief is appealed to throughout the contemporary epistemic literature. In some cases, a subject seems blameworthy for believing as she does even though it seems prima facie implausible that she is morally blameworthy or professionally (...) blameworthy. Such cases raise the question of whether one can be blameworthy for a belief in a specifically epistemic sense rather than in some already recognised sense, such as being morally or professionally blameworthy. A number of authors have recently argued that there is a moral or social sense in which one ought to conform one’s beliefs to the evidence. In this paper, I argue that even while accepting that there are moral and social norms governing belief, there are cases in which a subject is blameworthy for a belief but isn’t plausibly morally or socially blameworthy. If this latter view is correct, then we may need to develop a new account of blame which can be applied to beliefs which are not morally or socially blameworthy. (shrink)

A belief is reflectively lucky if it is a matter of luck that the belief is true, given what a subject is aware of on reflection alone. Various epistemologists have argued that any adequate theory of knowledge should eliminate reflective luck, but doing so has proven difficult. This article distinguishes between two kinds of reflective luck arguments in the literature: local arguments and global arguments. It argues that local arguments are best interpreted as demanding, not that one be reflectively aware (...) of the reliability of the sources of one’s beliefs, but that one’s beliefs be attributable to one as one’s own. The article then argues that global arguments make illegitimate demands, because they require that we be ultimately answerable for our beliefs. In the end, the article argues that epistemologists should shift their focus away from reflective luck and toward the conditions under which beliefs are attributable to cognitive agents. (shrink)

This paper responds to Sven Bernecker’s argument that agent reliabilism cannot accommodate internalist intuitions about clarvoyance cases. In section 1 we clarify a version of agent reliabilism and Bernecker’s objections against it. In section 2 we say more about how the notion of cognitive integration helps to adjudicate clairvoyance cases and other proposed counterexamples to reliabilism. The central idea is that cognitive integration underwrites a kind of belief ownership, which in turn underwrites the sort of responsibility for belief required for (...) subjective justification. In section 3 we say more about what cognitive integration amounts to, drawing on some recent accounts of desire ownership from the literature on autonomy and moral responsibility. (shrink)

What would something unlike us--a chimpanzee, say, or a computer--have to be able to do to qualify as a possible knower, like us? To answer this question at the very heart of our sense of ourselves, philosophers have long focused on intentionality and have looked to language as a key to this condition. Making It Explicit is an investigation into the nature of language--the social practices that distinguish us as rational, logical creatures--that revises the very terms of this inquiry. Where (...) accounts of the relation between language and mind have traditionally rested on the concept of representation, this book sets out an alternate approach based on inference, and on a conception of certain kinds of implicit assessment that become explicit in language. Making It Explicit is the first attempt to work out in detail a theory that renders linguistic meaning in terms of use--in short, to explain how semantic content can be conferred on expressions and attitudes that are suitably caught up in social practices. -/- At the center of this enterprise is a notion of discursive commitment. Being able to talk--and so in the fullest sense being able to think--is a matter of mastering the practices that govern such commitments, being able to keep track of one’s own commitments and those of others. Assessing the pragmatic significance of speech acts is a matter of explaining the explicit in terms of the implicit. As he traces the inferential structure of the social practices within which things can be made conceptually explicit, the author defines the distinctively expressive role of logical vocabulary. This expressive account of language, mind, and logic is, finally, an account of who we are. (shrink)

This paper will present a negative result—an account of my failure to explain why belief is involuntary. When I announced my question a year or so ahead of time, I had a vague idea of how it might be answered, but I cannot make it work out. Necessity, this time, has not given birth to invention. Still, my tussle with the question may contribute either towards getting it answered or showing that it cannot be answered because belief can be voluntary (...) after all. Most of the paper was written while I expected to get the question answered, and I have chosen not to hide that fact by revising the tone. I offer the paper as an essay in the ‘analytic’ manner in Descartes’s sense of that term. It is the manner of the Meditations—a presentation in the order of discovery or, in my case, of non-discovery. (shrink)

This collection of papers (including three completely new ones) by one of the foremost philosophers in epistemology transcends two of the most widely misunderstood positions in philosophy--foundationalism and coherentism. Audi proposes a distinctively moderate, internalist foundationalism that incorporates some of the virtues of both coherentism and reliabilism. He develops important distinctions between positive and negative epistemic dependence, substantively and conceptually naturalistic theories, dispositional beliefs and dispositions to believe, episodically and structurally inferential beliefs, first and second order internalism, and rebutting as (...) opposed to refuting skepticism. These contrasts are applied not only to rational belief, but to rational action and the rationality of desires and intentions. The overall position is a pluralist, moderately rationalistic, internalist theory of justification and a partly externalist conception of knowledge. However, by virtue of offering a theory of rationality as well as an account of knowledge and justified belief, it will interest philosophers of ethics, science, and the social sciences and teachers and students of epistemology. (shrink)

" In a book that seeks to shift the ground of debate within theory of knowledge, William P. Alston finds that the century-lo.

This paper defends a conception of epistemic value that I call the “Simpliciter Conception.” On it, epistemic value is a kind of value simpliciter and being of epistemic value implies being of value simpliciter. I defend this conception by criticizing two others, what I call the Formal Conception and the Hybrid Conception. While those conceptions may be popular among epistemologists, I argue that they fail to explain why anyone should care that things are of epistemic value and naturally undercuts disputes (...) about what is of epistemic value. I end by sketching and locating my conception within some increasingly popular views in meta-normativity. (shrink)

As George Boole saw it, the laws of logic are the laws of thought, and by this he meant, not that human thought is actually governed by the laws of logic, but, rather, that it should be. Boole’s view that the laws of logic have normative implications for how we ought to think is anything but an outlier. The idea that violating the laws of logic involves epistemic impropriety has seemed to many to be just obvious. It has seemed especially (...) obvious to those who see propositional justification as more fundamental than doxastic justification. Whatever other principles are required for defining propositional justification, the laws of logic seem indispensable. The idea that violation of the laws of logic involves some sort of epistemic impropriety—whatever the peculiarities of our psychology may be—has served as a fixed point around which defenders of the fundamentality of propositional justification are united, whatever their other differences. This paper challenges that common thread in defenses of the fundamentality of propositional justification. It is argued that the laws of logic have no bearing whatever on epistemic justification. Once we see why this should be so, the way is paved for seeing why it is that doxastic justification is more fundamental than propositional justification. (shrink)

What I call the Doxastic Puzzle, is the impression that while each of these claims seems true, at least one of them must be false: (a) Claims of the form ‘S ought to have doxastic attitude D towards p at t’ are sometimes true at t, (b) If Φ-ing at t is not within S’s effective control at t, then it is false, at t, that ‘S ought to Φ at t’, (c) For all S, p, and t, having doxastic (...) attitude D towards p at t is not within S’s effective control at t. All three natural replies to the puzzle have been pursued. Some have claimed that doxastic attitudes like believing that p are, in fact, within our effective control, or sufficiently so. Others have claimed that doxastic ought-claims, strictly speaking, are always false. And some have denied that effective control is required for the adequacy of doxastic ought-claims in general. I here pursue and examine a different strategy. In the first part of this paper, I argue that these claims are not only each true but actually not in tension with each other in the first place. Instead of attempting to dispel the puzzle, this solution proposes to evade it instead: to solve it by properly understanding, and by thereby accepting without contradiction, all of its constitutive claims. In the second part of the paper, I argue that the evasive strategy forces us to re-think our understanding of the place of normative reasons in epistemology. More exactly, it seems to come at the cost of one central way of thinking about our reasons for having doxastic attitudes, one where such reasons are good-standing exemplars of normative reasons in general. The evasive strategy, that is, threatens to lead us very quickly to a deflationary picture of epistemic normativity: it rescues normative talk, but sacrifices normative substance. I conclude by explaining why I think this is more consequential than some have made it out to be, and by suggesting that these consequences are welcome nonetheless. (shrink)

The basing demand on doxastic justification is a widely held and highly intuitive dogma of contemporary epistemology. In Silva [2015, AJP], I argued that the dialectical significance of this dogma is severely limited by our lack of independent grounds for endorsing it. Oliveira [2015, AJP] sought to defend the basing demand on doxastic justification. Here I explain why Oliveira’s attempted defense of the basing demand misses its mark. I also briefly suggest that there is an alternative way of defending the (...) basing demand. The alternative way is reconciliatory: it shows that most epistemologists may have been right to insist on such a demand, but perhaps still wrong to treat it as a dialectically powerful tool in the assessment of certain substantive epistemological theories. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThe contemporary debate over responsibility for belief is divided over the issue of whether such responsibility requires doxastic control, and whether this control must be voluntary in nature. It has recently become popular to hold that responsibility for belief does not require voluntary doxastic control, or perhaps even any form of doxastic ‘control’ at all. However, Miriam McCormick has recently argued that doxastic responsibility does in fact require quasi-voluntary doxastic control: “guidance control,” a complex, compatibilist form of control. In this (...) paper, I pursue a negative and a positive task. First, I argue that grounding doxastic responsibility in guidance control requires too much for agents to be the proper targets for attributions of doxastic responsibility. I will focus my criticisms on three cases in which McCormick's account gives the intuitively wrong verdict. Second, I develop a modified conception of McCormick's notion of “ownership of belief,” which I call Weak Doxastic Ownership. I employ this conception to argue that responsibility for belief is possible even in the absence of guidance control. In doing so, I argue that the notion of doxastic ownership can do important normative work in grounding responsibility for belief without being subsumed under or analyzed in terms of the notion of doxastic control. (shrink)

The state is often ascribed a special sort of authority, one that obliges citizens to obey its commands and entitles the state to enforce those commands through threats of violence. This book argues that this notion is a moral illusion: no one has ever possessed that sort of authority.

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 (...) it locates the source of normativity in the belief rather than the agent. In the final section, I propose a version of epistemic constructivism that locates epistemic normativity as constitutive of agency. I argue that this version has the resources to respond to the Schmagency Objection. (shrink)

Righting Epistemology defends an unrecognized Humean conception of epistemic justification, showing that he is no skeptic, and an argument of his that refutes all extant alternative conceptions. It goes on to trace the development of his thought in Sir Karl Popper, Nelson Goodman, W. V. Quine and Ludwig Wittgenstein.

In my remarks, I discuss Sosa's attempt to deal with the sceptical threat posed by dreaming. Sosa explores two replies to the problem of dreaming scepticism. First, he argues that, on the imagination model of dreaming, dreaming does not threaten the safety of our beliefs. Second, he argues that knowledge does not require safety, but a weaker condition which is not threatened by dreaming skepticism. I raise questions about both elements of his reply.

Deontological evidentialism is the claim that we ought to form and maintain our beliefs in accordance with our evidence. In this paper, I criticize two arguments in its defense. I begin by discussing Berit Broogard’s use of the distinction between narrow-scope and wide-scope requirements against W.K. Clifford’s moral defense of. I then use this very distinction against a defense of inspired by Stephen Grimm’s more recent claims about the moral source of epistemic normativity. I use this distinction once again to (...) argue that Hilary Kornblith’s criticism of Richard Feldman’s defense of is incomplete. Finally, I argue that Feldman’s defense is insensitive to the relation between normative requirements and privileged values: values that have normative authority over us. (shrink)

Deontological internalism is the family of views where justification is a positive deontological appraisal of someone's epistemic agency: S is justified, that is, when S is blameless, praiseworthy, or responsible in believing that p. Brian Weatherson discusses very briefly how a plausible principle of ampliative transmission reveals a worry for versions of deontological internalism formulated in terms of epistemic blame. Weatherson denies, however, that similar principles reveal similar worries for other versions. I disagree. In this article, I argue that plausible (...) principles of ampliative transmission reveal a worry for deontological internalism in general. (shrink)

This book provides a comprehensive, systematic theory of moral responsibility. The authors explore the conditions under which individuals are morally responsible for actions, omissions, consequences, and emotions. The leading idea in the book is that moral responsibility is based on 'guidance control'. This control has two components: the mechanism that issues in the relevant behavior must be the agent's own mechanism, and it must be appropriately responsive to reasons. The book develops an account of both components. The authors go on (...) to offer a sustained defense of the thesis that moral responsibility is compatible with causal determinism. (shrink)

A wide-ranging study of the central concepts in epistemology - belief, truth and knowledge. Professor Armstrong offers a dispositional account of general beliefs and of knowledge of general propositions. Belief about particular matters of fact are described as structures in the mind of the believer which represent or 'map' reality, while general beliefs are dispositions to extend the 'map' or introduce casual relations between portions of the map according to general rules. 'Knowledge' denotes the reliability of such beliefs as representations (...) of reality. Within this framework Professor Armstrong offers a distinctive account of many of the main questions in general epistemology - the relations between beliefs and language, the notions of proposition, concept and idea, the analysis of truth, the varieties of knowledge, and the way in which beleifs and knowledge are supported by reasons. The book as a whole if offered as a contribution to a naturalistic account of man. (shrink)

Paul Silva has recently argued that doxastic justification does not have a basing requirement. An important part of his argument depends on the assumption that doxastic and moral permissibility have a parallel structure. I here reply to Silva's argument by challenging this assumption. I claim that moral permissibility is an agential notion, while doxastic permissibility is not. I then briefly explore the nature of these notions and briefly consider their implications for praise and blame.

This is a survey of recent debates concerning the normativity of belief. We explain what the thesis that belief is normative involves, consider arguments for and against that thesis, and explore its bearing on debates in metaethics.

The distinction between propositional and doxastic justification is the distinction between having justification to believe P (= propositional justification) versus having a justified belief in P (= doxastic justification). The focus of this paper is on doxastic justification and on what conditions are necessary for having it. In particular, I challenge the basing demand on doxastic justification, i.e., the idea that one can have a doxastically justified belief only if one’s belief is based on an epistemically appropriate reason. This demand (...) has been used to refute versions of coherentism and conservatism about perceptual justification as well as to defend phenomenal “conservatism” and other views besides. In what follows I argue that there is virtually no reason to think there is a basing demand on doxastic justification. I also argue that even if the basing demand were true, it would still fail to serve the dialectical purposes for which it has been employed in arguments concerning coherentism, conservatism, and phenomenal “conservatism”. I conclude by discussing the fact that knowledge has a basing demand and show why this needn’t raise the same sort of problems for coherentism and conservatism that doxastic justification’s basing demand seemed to. (shrink)

Creatures inveterately wrong in their inductions have a pathetic but praiseworthy tendency to die before reproducing their kind.- Quine (1969)We think that some facts - for example, the fact that someone is suffering, or the fact that all previously encountered tigers were carnivorous – supply us with normative reasons for action and belief. The former fact, we think, is a reason to help the suffering person; the latter fact is a reason to believe that the next tiger we see will (...) also be carnivorous. But how is the reason-giving status of such facts best understood? In particular, is it best understood as ultimately “conferred” upon these facts by our own evaluative attitudes, or do at least some facts possess normative reason-giving status in a way that is robustly independent of our attitudes? This is the modern, secular version of Plato's “Euthyphro question” - couched here in the philosophically useful, though not essential, language of normative reasons. (shrink)

In this book Zagzebski gives an extended argument that the self-reflective person is committed to belief on authority. Epistemic authority is compatible with autonomy, but epistemic self-reliance is incoherent. She argues that epistemic and emotional self-trust are rational and inescapable, that consistent self-trust commits us to trust in others, and that among those we are committed to trusting are some whom we ought to treat as epistemic authorities, modeled on the well-known principles of authority of Joseph Raz. These principles apply (...) to authority in the moral and religious domains. (shrink)

Hilary Kornblith presents a new account of mental reflection, and its importance for knowledge, reasoning, freedom, and normativity. He argues that reflection cannot solve the philosophical problems it has traditionally been thought to, and offers a more realistic, demystified view of its nature which draws on dual process approaches to cognition.

This book continues and revises the ideas of justice as fairness that John Rawls presented in _A Theory of Justice_ but changes its philosophical interpretation in a fundamental way. That previous work assumed what Rawls calls a "well-ordered society," one that is stable and relatively homogenous in its basic moral beliefs and in which there is broad agreement about what constitutes the good life. Yet in modern democratic society a plurality of incompatible and irreconcilable doctrines--religious, philosophical, and moral--coexist within the (...) framework of democratic institutions. Recognizing this as a permanent condition of democracy, Rawls asks how a stable and just society of free and equal citizens can live in concord when divided by reasonable but incompatible doctrines? This edition includes the essay "The Idea of Public Reason Revisited," which outlines Rawls ' plans to revise _Political Liberalism,_ which were cut short by his death. "An extraordinary well-reasoned commentary on _A Theory of Justice_...a decisive turn towards political philosophy." --_Times Literary Supplement_. (shrink)

How is it possible for David Hume to be both withering skeptic and constructive theorist? I recommend an answer like the Pyrrhonian answer to the question how it is possible to suspend all judgment yet engage in active daily life. Sextus Empiricus distinguishes two kinds of assent: one suspended across the board and one involved with daily living. The first is an act of will based on appreciation of reasons; the second is a causal effect of appearances. Hume makes the (...) same distinction, only he extends the sort of assent involved in daily life to theoretical matters as well. He is a skeptic both in finding no reason to grant the first sort of assent and in being subject to the second. (shrink)

I investigate what we mean when we hold people responsible for beliefs. I begin by outlining a puzzle concerning our ordinary judgments about beliefs and briefly survey and critique some common responses to the puzzle. I then present my response where I argue a sense needs to be articulated in which we do have a kind of control over our beliefs if our practice of attributing responsibility for beliefs is appropriate. In developing this notion of doxastic control, I draw from (...) John Fischer's discussions of “guidance control”. A central feature of this kind of control is the idea of “ownership”. I argue that we can own our beliefs and that we expect each other to do so. We take responsibility for our beliefs and taking responsibility includes taking control of them. I end by considering objections to my view as well as some implications of it. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to sketch a theory of justified belief. What I have in mind is an explanatory theory, one that explains in a general way why certain beliefs are counted as justified and others as unjustified. Unlike some traditional approaches, I do not try to prescribe standards for justification that differ from, or improve upon, our ordinary standards. I merely try to explicate the ordinary standards, which are, I believe, quite different from those of many classical, (...) e. g., ‘Cartesian’, accounts. (shrink)

Abstract In this paper I argue that to understand the ethics of belief we need to put it in a context of what we care about. Epistemic values always arise from something we care about and they arise only from something we care about. It is caring that gives rise to the demand to be epistemically conscientious. The reason morality puts epistemic demands on us is that we care about morality. But there may be a (small) class of beliefs which (...) it is not wrong to hold unconscientiously. I also argue that epistemic values enjoy a privileged place in the panorama of what we care about because they are entailed by anything we care about. That means that when there is a conflict between caring about knowledge or true belief and caring about something else, that conflict cannot be resolved simply by following the one we care about the most because caring about knowledge in any domain is entailed by caring about that domain. Finally, I argue that whereas caring demands different degrees of conscientiousness in different contexts, contextualism about knowledge is less plausible. (shrink)