Epistemic authority: preemption through source sensitive defeat

Modern societies are characterized by a division of epistemic labor between laypeople and epistemic authorities. Authorities are often far more competent than laypeople and can thus, ideally, inform their beliefs. But how should laypeople rationally respond to an authority’s beliefs if they already have beliefs and reasons of their own concerning some subject matter? According to the standard view, the beliefs of epistemic authorities are just further, albeit weighty, pieces of evidence. In contrast, the Preemption View claims that, when one discovers what an authority believes, it is not permissible to rely on any of one’s own reasons concerning the subject matter. The original version of this view, as proposed by Linda Zagzebski, has recently been severely criticized for recommending blind trust and for abandoning even minimal standards for critical thinking. In our paper, we defend a new version of the Preemption View—Defeatist Preemptionism—in a way that differs radically from Zagzebski’s. We argue that our view can be derived from certain widely accepted general epistemic principles. In particular, we claim that preemption can be identified as a special case of source sensitive defeat. Moreover, we argue that Defeatist Preemptionism does not lead to the undesirable consequences that critics ascribe to the Preemption View. The paper thus articulates the foundations and refinements of the Preemption View, such that it adequately captures the phenomenon of epistemic authority and the rational requirements related to it.

     

Disbelief as the Dual of Belief

The duality of truth and falsity in a Boolean algebra of propositions is used to generate a duality of belief and disbelief. To each additive probability measure that represents belief there corresponds a dual additive measure that represents disbelief. The dual measure has its own peculiar calculus, in which, for example, measures are added when propositions are combined under conjunction. A Venn diagram of the measure has the contradiction as its total space. While additive measures are not self‐dual, the epistemic state of complete ignorance is represented by the unique, monotonic, non‐additive measure that is self‐dual in its contingent propositions. Convex sets of additive measures fail to represent complete ignorance since they are not self‐dual.     

Virtue Epistemology and Epistemic Twin Earth

A popular form of virtue epistemology—defended by such figures as Ernest Sosa, Linda Zagzebski and John Greco—holds that knowledge can be exclusively understood in virtue‐theoretic terms. In particular, it holds that there isn't any need for an additional epistemic condition to deal with the problem posed by knowledge‐undermining epistemic luck. It is argued that the sustainability of such a proposal is called into question by the possibility of epistemic twin earth cases. In particular, it is argued that such cases demonstrate the need for virtue‐theoretic accounts of knowledge to appeal to an independent epistemic condition which excludes knowledge‐undermining epistemic luck.     

Epistemic Ought is a Commensurable Ought

I argue that the claim that epistemic ought is incommensurable is self‐defeating. My argument, however, depends on the truth of the premise that there can be not only epistemic reasons for belief, but also non‐epistemic (e.g., moral) reasons for belief. So I also provide some support for that claim.     

Getting it right

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 a genus with several species. Believing truly is a prominent species, but it is not the only one. Finally, it is argued that accuracy monism is equally good or better than both traditional truth monism and its main dialectical rival, value pluralism, when it comes to satisfying three important axiological desiderata.     

Repugnant Accuracy

Accuracy‐first epistemology is an approach to formal epistemology which takes accuracy to be a measure of epistemic utility and attempts to vindicate norms of epistemic rationality by showing how conformity with them is beneficial. If accuracy‐first epistemology can actually vindicate any epistemic norms, it must adopt a plausible account of epistemic value. Any such account must avoid the epistemic version of Derek Parfit's “repugnant conclusion.” I argue that the only plausible way of doing so is to say that accurate credences in certain propositions have no, or almost no, epistemic value. I prove that this is incompatible with standard accuracy‐first arguments for probabilism, and argue that there is no way for accuracy‐first epistemology to show that all credences of all agents should be coherent.     

When Fluency Signals Truth: Prior Successful Reliance on Fluency Moderates the Impact of Fluency on Truth Judgments

Repeated statements are more frequently judged to be true. One position relates this so‐called “truth effect” to metacognitive experiences of fluency, suggesting that repeated statements are more frequently judged to be true because they are processed more fluently. Although most prior research focused on why repetition influences truth judgments, considerably less is known about when fluency is used as information. The present research addresses this question and investigates whether reliance on fluency is moderated by learning experiences. Specifically, we focus on changes in the reliance on fluency over the course of time. A series of experiments reveals that fluency is more likely to be used in truth judgments when previous reliance on fluency has resulted in valid judgments, compared with when previous reliance on fluency was misleading. These findings suggest that reliance on fluency in judgments is a finely tuned process that takes prior experiences with fluency‐based judgments into account. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The I That Buys: Narcissists as Consumers

Which people are most swayed by self‐image motives and hence most likely to make consumer choices in line with those motives? This article contends that the answer is narcissists—individuals who see themselves, and who want others to see them, as special, superior, and entitled and who are prone to exhibitionism and vanity. This work hypothesizes that narcissists will, to validate their excessively positive self‐views, strive to purchase the high‐prestige products (i.e., expensive, exclusive, new, and flashy). In so doing, they will regulate their own esteem by increasing their apparent status and consequently earning others’ admiration and envy. This article also hypothesizes that narcissists will show greater interest in the symbolic than utilitarian value of products and will exhibit, even controlling for self‐esteem, more pronounced self‐enhancement phenomena such as endowment and self‐signaling effects.     

Challenging the ability intuition: From personal to extended to distributed belief-forming processes

Much of what we know results from information sources on which we epistemically rely. This fact about epistemic reliance, however, stands in tension with a very powerful intuition governing knowledge, an intuition that Pritchard (e.g., 2010) has termed the “ability intuition,” the idea that a believer's “reliable cognitive faculties are the most salient part of the total set of causal factors that give rise to [their] believing the truth” (Vaesen, 2011, p. 518; compare Greco, 2003; 2009; 2010). In this paper I suggest that this tension may indeed be ineliminable. I proceed by canvassing some representative attempts to reconcile epistemic reliance and the ability intuition. In doing so, I suggest that all of these attempts founder on one or the other of two elements of what I've previously described (Shieber, 2013, 2015) as a “personalist presumption” in discussions of social epistemology: an excessive focus on (i) reliability filters within the persons who are the recipients of information or (ii) on reliable truth-tracking and -conveying abilities in the persons who are the transmitters of information. In conclusion, I suggest how best to resolve the tension: by abandoning the ability intuition.     

EMOTIONAL SELF-AWARENESS AND ETHICAL DELIBERATION

How are we to distinguish between appropriate emotional responses that reveal morally salient reasons and inappropriate emotional responses that reflect our prejudices? It is often assumed that reason – considered as distinct from emotion – will make the distinction. I argue that this view is false, and that the process by which emotional responses are vetted involves ‘emotional self‐awareness’. By this, I mean feeling an emotion, being aware of so doing, and feeling some usually subtle emotional response, often of calm or anxiety, to it, together with a general readiness to feel and acknowledge what emotions one has. Registering and exploring feelings of anxiety that arise in emotional self‐awareness helps enable us to detect when emotions and thoughts are inappropriate. Deliberation that is not emotionally open in this way is therefore at an epistemic disadvantage. Furthermore, the attempt to remain unemotional when evaluating one's emotions can be produced or co‐opted by anxiety about one's feelings of precisely the kind that indicates one's emotional responses and thoughts are being distorted.     

Truth,Ramsification, and the Pluralist's Revenge

Functionalists about truth employ Ramsification to produce an implicit definition of the theoretical term true, but doing so requires determining that the theory introducing that term is itself true. A variety of putative dissolutions to this problem of epistemic circularity are shown to be unsatisfactory. One solution is offered on functionalists' behalf, though it has the upshot that they must tread on their anti-pluralist commitments.     

A NEO‐STOIC APPROACH TO EPISTEMIC AGENCY

What is the best model of epistemic agency for virtue epistemology? Insofar as the intellectual and moral virtues are similar, it is desirable to develop models of agency that are similar across the two realms. Unlike Aristotle, the Stoics present a model of the virtues on which the moral and intellectual virtues are unified. The Stoics’ materialism and determinism also help to explain how we can be responsible for our beliefs even when we cannot believe otherwise. In this paper I show how a neo‐Stoic model of epistemic agency can address common objections to treating epistemic and moral agency similarly and allow a robust explanatory role for character in determining our actions and beliefs. The picture of epistemic responsibility that flows from this model also explains why we often deserve credit for our knowledge, while demonstrating that the truth of our beliefs is not something for which we are epistemically responsible.     

Why Should a Knower Care?

This paper argues that the concept of care is significant not only for ethics, but for epistemology as well. After elucidating caring as a five‐step dyadic relation, I go on to show its epistemic significance within the general framework of virtue epistemology as developed by Ernest Sosa, Alvin Goldman, and Linda Zagzebski. The notions of “care‐knowing” and “care‐based epistemology” emerge from construing caring (respectively) as a reliabilist and responsibilist virtue.     

Epistemic Value and the New Evil Demon

In this article I argue that the value of epistemic justification cannot be adequately explained as being instrumental to truth. I intend to show that false belief, which is no means to truth, can nevertheless still be of epistemic value. This in turn will make a good prima facie case that justification is valuable for its own sake. If this is right, we will have also found reason to think that truth value monism is false: assuming that true belief does have value, there is more of final epistemic value than mere true belief.     

WARRANTED ASSERTIBILITY AND THE NORMS OF ASSERTORIC PRACTICE: WHY TRUTH AND WARRANTED ASSERTIBILITY ARE NOT COINCIDENT NORMS

Crispin Wright has argued that truth and warranted assertibility are coincident but non‐co‐extensive norms of assertoric practice and that this fact inflates deflationary theories of truth. Wright's inflationary argument has generated much discussion in the literature. By contrast, relatively little has been said about the coincidence claim that is the focus of this paper. Wright's argument for the claim that truth and warranted assertibility are coincident norms is first presented. It is then suggested that the argument trades on an ambiguity in ‘justified’ and ‘warrantedly assertible’. Finally, it is argued that, once the ambiguity is removed, there is reason to reject the claim that truth and epistemic warrant are coincident norms of assertoric practice. One important result is that no epistemic theory of truth can satisfy what Wright takes to be a key platitude about assertion.     

The Search for the Source of Epistemic Good

Knowledge has almost always been treated as good, better than mere true belief, but it is remarkably difficult to explain what it is about knowledge that makes it better. I call this "the value problem." I have previously argued that most forms of reliabilism cannot handle the value problem. In this article I argue that the value problem is more general than a problem for reliabilism, infecting a host of different theories, including some that are internalist. An additional problem is that not all instances of true belief seem to be good on balance, so even if a given instance of knowing p is better than merely truly believing p , not all instances of knowing will be good enough to explain why knowledge has received so much attention in the history of philosophy. The article aims to answer two questions: (1) What makes knowing p better than merely truly believing p ? The answer involves an exploration of the connection between believing and the agency of the knower. Knowing is an act in which the knower gets credit for achieving truth. (2) What makes some instances of knowing good enough to make the investigation of knowledge worthy of so much attention? The answer involves the connection between the good of believing truths of certain kinds and a good life. In the best kinds of knowing, the knower not only gets credit for getting the truth but also gets credit for getting a desirable truth. The kind of value that makes knowledge a fitting object of extensive philosophical inquiry is not independent of moral value and the wider values of a good life.     

The Search for the Source of Epistemic Good

Knowledge has almost always been treated as good, better than mere true belief, but it is remarkably difficult to explain what it is about knowledge that makes it better. I call this "the value problem." I have previously argued that most forms of reliabilism cannot handle the value problem. In this article I argue that the value problem is more general than a problem for reliabilism, infecting a host of different theories, including some that are internalist. An additional problem is that not all instances of true belief seem to be good on balance, so even if a given instance of knowing p is better than merely truly believing p , not all instances of knowing will be good enough to explain why knowledge has received so much attention in the history of philosophy. The article aims to answer two questions: (1) What makes knowing p better than merely truly believing p ? The answer involves an exploration of the connection between believing and the agency of the knower. Knowing is an act in which the knower gets credit for achieving truth. (2) What makes some instances of knowing good enough to make the investigation of knowledge worthy of so much attention? The answer involves the connection between the good of believing truths of certain kinds and a good life. In the best kinds of knowing, the knower not only gets credit for getting the truth but also gets credit for getting a desirable truth. The kind of value that makes knowledge a fitting object of extensive philosophical inquiry is not independent of moral value and the wider values of a good life.     

Belief and Self‐consciousness

Abstract

This paper is about what is distinctive about first‐person beliefs. I discuss several sets of puzzling cases of first‐person belief. The first focus on the relation between belief and action, while the second focus on the relation of belief to subjectivity. I argue that in the absence of an explanation of the dispositional difference, individuating such beliefs more finely than truth conditions merely marks the difference. I argue that the puzzles reveal a difference in the ways that I am disposed to revise my beliefs about myself. This point develops the insight that Anscombe and others had that those of an agent’s beliefs about himself that manifest that special self‐consciousness are not based on observation, testimony or inference. The puzzles show that this kind of self‐consciousness involves, not a special kind of belief or even a special kind of self‐reference, but a special kind of belief revision policy.     

From Standpoint Epistemology to Epistemic Oppression

Standpoint epistemology is committed to a cluster of views that pays special attention to the role of social identity in knowledge‐acquisition. Of particular interest here is the situated knowledge thesis. This thesis holds that for certain propositions p, whether an epistemic agent is in a position to know that p depends on some nonepistemic facts related to the epistemic agent's social identity. In this article, I examine two possible ways to interpret this thesis. My first goal here is to clarify existing interpretations of this thesis that appear in the literature but that are undeveloped and often mistakenly conflated. In so doing, I aim to make clear the different versions of standpoint epistemology that one might accept and defend. This project is of significance, I argue, because standpoint epistemology provides helpful tools for understanding a phenomenon of recent interest: epistemic oppression. My second goal is to provide an analysis that makes clear how each of the readings I put forth can be used to illuminate forms of epistemic oppression.     

Deutscher's problem is not Popper's problem

The so-called knowability paradox results from Fitch's argument that if there are any unknown truths, then there are unknowable truths. This threatens recent versions of semantical antirealism, the central thesis of which is that truth is epistemic. When this is taken to mean that all truths are knowable, antirealism is thus committed to the conclusion that no truths are unknown. The correct antirealistic response to the paradox should be to deny that the fundamental thesis of the epistemic nature of truth entails the knowability of all truths. Correctly understood, the antirealistic conditions on a proposition's truth do not require that the proposition possess a verification-procedure which, when executed under the given conditions, issues in an agent's recognition of truth, but merely that there be a verification-procedure which, under these conditions, takes the value true. The knowability paradox and the related idealism problem (that antirealism seems, but is not, committed to the necessary existence of an epistemic agent) draw attention to the fact that certain propositions, those that are about verification-procedures themselves, may under certain conditions take the value true despite their unperformability under these circumstances. Thus these propositions' procedures can only be performed when the propositions are false, and they gain the appearance of antirealistic impossibility (e.g., that there is an unknown truth). This differs from the unperformability that antirealists object to, pertaining merely to matters of execution rather than to the logical structure of the procedures themselves. The force of antirealism's notion of epistemic truth is piecemeal, rather than consisting in a blanket characterization of truth as knowable.