Epistemic Normativity and Cognitive Agency

On the assumption that genuinely normative demands concern things connected in some way to our agency, i.e. what we exercise in doing things with or for reasons, epistemologists face an important question: are there genuine epistemic norms governing belief, and if so where in the vicinity of belief are we to find the requisite cognitive agency? Extant accounts of cognitive agency tend to focus on belief itself or the event of belief‐formation to answer this question, to the exclusion of the activity of maintaining a system of beliefs. This paper argues that a full account of epistemic normativity will need to make sense of this activity as a core locus of cognitive agency. This idea is used to motivate the conclusion that one important and often overlooked kind of epistemic norms is the kind of norms governing the various cognitive activities by which we check, sustain, and adjust our belief systems.     

Epistemic Normativity, Argumentation, and Fallacies

In Biro and Siegel (1992) we argued that a theory of argumentation mustfully engage the normativity of judgments about arguments, and we developedsuch a theory. In this paper we further develop and defend our theory.     

The Sources of Political Normativity: the Case for Instrumental and Epistemic Normativity in Political Realism

Ethical Theory and Moral Practice - This article argues that political realists have at least two strategies to provide distinctively political normative judgements that have nothing to do with...     

Property Dualism,Epistemic Normativity and the Limits of Naturalism*

This paper examines some consequences of the (quasi‐)epiphenomenalism implied by a property dualistic view of phenomenal consciousness. The focus is upon the variation of phenomenal content over time. A thought‐experiment is constructed to support two claims. The weaker claim exhibits an incompatibility which arises in certain logically possible situations between a conscious subject’s epistemic norms and the requirement that one be aware of one’s conscious experience. This could be interpreted as providing some epistemic grounds for the postulation of bridging laws between the physical/functional and phenomenal domains. The stronger claim has it that the ontology of property dualism is not properly able to account for the certainty I have of being phenomenally conscious. The problem is viewed as resulting from the neglect of the intensional context involved in a proper representation of the argument for property dualism. It is argued that only a transcendental move can do justice to this certainty I have.     

Correction to: The Sources of Political Normativity: the Case for Instrumental and Epistemic Normativity in Political Realism

Ethical Theory and Moral Practice -     

The Epistemic Basic Structure

The epistemic basic structure of a society consists of those institutions that have the greatest impact on individuals’ opportunity to obtain knowledge on questions they have an interest in as citizens, individuals, and public officials. It plays a central role in the production and dissemination of knowledge and in ensuring that people have the capability to assimilate this knowledge. It includes institutions of science and education, the media, search engines, libraries, museums, think tanks, and various government agencies. This article identifies two demands of justice that apply specifically to the institutions that belong to it. First, the epistemic basic structure should serve all citizens fairly and reliably. It should provide them with the opportunity to acquire knowledge they need for their deliberations about the common good, their individual good, and how to pursue them. Second, the epistemic basic structure should produce and disseminate the knowledge that various experts and public officials need to successfully pursue justice and citizens need to effectively exercise their rights. After arguing for these duties, I discuss what policies follow from them and respond to the worry that these duties have illiberal implications.     

Naturalism and Normativity

Synthetic naturalism is a form of moral realism which holds that we can discover a posteriori that moral properties exist and are natural properties. On this view moral discourse earns the right to be construed realistically because it meets the conditions that license realism about any discourse, that properties it represents as existing pull their weight in empirical explanations of our observations of the world. I argue that naturalism is an inadequate metaphysics of moral value, because parallel arguments to those used by the naturalist to establish the reality of 'moral' properties and their normativity for persons of sympathetic temperament can be constructed, which would equally demonstrate the reality of normatively antagonistic value properties, and their normativity for differently psychologically constituted agents. Since moral discourse implicitly denies that there are such diverse and competing normative truths the strategy fails to establish moral realism.     

Expressivism and the Normativity of Attitudes

Many philosophers believe that judgments about propositional attitudes, or about which mental states are expressed by which sentences, are normative judgments. If this is so, then metanormative expressivism must be given expressivist treatment. This might seem to make expressivism self‐defeating or worrisomely circular, or to frustrate the explanatory ambitions central to the view. I argue that recent objections along these lines to giving an expressivist account of expressivism are not successful. I shall also suggest that in order to deal with these worries, Dreier's influential response to the so‐called ‘problem of creeping minimalism’ must be slightly revised.     

Inferentialism and the Normativity of Meaning

There may be various reasons for claiming that meaning is normative, and additionally, very different senses attached to the claim. However, all such claims have faced fierce resistance from those philosophers who insist that meaning is not normative in any nontrivial sense of the word. In this paper I sketch one particular approach to meaning claiming its normativity and defend it against the anti-normativist critique: namely the approach of Brandomian inferentialism. However, my defense is not restricted to inferentialism in any narrow sense for it encompasses a much broader spectrum of approaches to meaning, connected with the Wittgensteinian and especially Sellarsian view of language as an essentially rule-governed enterprise; and indeed I refrain from claiming that the version of inferentialism I present here is in every detail the version developed by Brandom.     

Epistemic Uniqueness and the Practical Relevance of Epistemic Practices

Philosophia - By taking the practical relevance of coordinated epistemic standards into account, Dogramaci and Horowitz (Philosophical Issues, 26(1), 130–147, 2016) as well as Greco and...