Imprecise Epistemic Values and Imprecise Credences

A number of recent arguments purport to show that imprecise credences are incompatible with accuracy-first epistemology. If correct, this conclusion suggests a conflict between evidential and alethic epistemic norms. In the first part of the paper, I claim that these arguments fail if we understand imprecise credences as indeterminate credences. In the second part, I explore why agents with entirely alethic epistemic values can end up in an indeterminate credal state. Following William James, I argue that there are many distinct alethic values that a rational agent can have. Furthermore, such an agent is rationally permitted not to have settled on one fully precise value function. This indeterminacy in value will sometimes result in indeterminacy in epistemic behaviour—that is, because the agent’s values aren’t settled, what she believes might not be.     

The Accuracy and Rationality of Imprecise Credences

It has been claimed that, in response to certain kinds of evidence (“incomplete” or “non‐specific” evidence), agents ought to adopt imprecise credences: doxastic states that are represented by sets of credence functions rather than single ones. In this paper I argue that, given some plausible constraints on accuracy measures, accuracy‐centered epistemologists must reject the requirement to adopt imprecise credences. I then show that even the claim that imprecise credences are permitted is problematic for accuracy‐centered epistemology. It follows that if imprecise credal states are permitted or required in the cases that their defenders appeal to, then the requirements of rationality can outstrip what would be warranted by an interest in accuracy.     

Agreement and Updating For Self-Locating Belief

In this paper, I argue that some plausible principles concerning which credences are rationally permissible for agents given information about one another’s epistemic and credal states have some surprising consequences for which credences an agent ought to have in light of self-locating information. I provide a framework that allows us to state these constraints and draw out these consequences precisely. I then consider and assess the prospects for rejecting these prima facie plausible principles.     

From the clarity of ideas to the validity of judgments: Kant's farewell to epistemic perfectionism

Against the standard interpretation of Kant's ‘Copernican revolution’ as the prioritization of epistemology over ontology, I argue in this paper that his critique of traditional metaphysics must be seen as a farewell to the perfectionism on which early modern rationalist ontology and epistemology are built. However, Kant does not simply replace ‘perfection’ with another fundamental concept of normativity. More radically, Kant realizes that it is not simply ideas but only the relation of ideas that can be subject to norms, and thus he shifts the focus from the reality of ideas to the validity of judgments. Section 1 of this paper clarifies the pre-Kantian role of the concept of perfection and examines Kant's critical response to that concept. Section 2 identifies Kant's point of departure from the Cartesian ‘way of ideas.’ Section 3 explains the key problem of his novel account of epistemic normativity. I conclude that Kant's anti-perfectionism must be seen as the driving force behind his ‘Copernican revolution’ in order to fully appreciate his mature account of epistemic normativity.     

Felix Culpa: Luck In Ethics And Epistemology

Luck threatens in similar ways our conceptions of both moral and epistemic evaluation. This essay examines the problem of luck as a metaphilosophical problem spanning the division between subfields in philosophy. I first explore the analogies between ethical and epistemic luck by comparing influential attempts to expunge luck from our conceptions of agency in these two subfields. I then focus upon Duncan Pritchard's challenge to the motivations underlying virtue epistemology, based specifically on its handling of the problem of epistemic luck. I argue that (1) consideration of the multifold nature of the problem of epistemic luck to an adequate account of human knowledge drives us to a mixed externalist epistemology; and (2) the virtue‐theoretical approach presents a particularly advantageous way of framing and developing a mixed externalist epistemology.     

The Persistent Interlocutor

A Persistent Interlocutor (PI) is someone who, in argumentative contexts, does not cease to question her opponent’s premises. The epistemic relevance of the PI has been debated throughout the history of philosophy. Pyrrhonians famously claim that our inability to dialectically vindicate our claims against a PI implies scepticism. Adam Leite disagrees (2005). Michael Resorla argues that the debate is based on a false premise (2009). In this paper, I argue that these views all fail to accurately account for the epistemic relevance of the PI. I then briefly present an account that aims to do better in this regard, based on the modal notion of safety. On the account proposed, the PI does not violate epistemic or dialectical norms. Rather, her behaviour tends to be epistemically perverse in the sense that it wastes cognitive resources. Perhaps surprisingly, this defect turns out not to be unique to the PI.

     

Epistemic and non‐Epistemic Theories of Remembering

Contemporary memory sciences describe processes that are dynamic and constructive. This has led some philosophers to weaken the relationship between memory and epistemology; though remembering can give rise to epistemic success, it is not itself an epistemic success state. I argue that non‐epistemic (causal) theories will not do; they provide neither necessary nor sufficient conditions for remembering that p. I also argue that the shortcomings of the causal theory are epistemic in nature. Consequently, a theory of remembering must account for both its fundamentally epistemic nature and for its constructive and dynamic processes.     

The epistemic limits of shared reasons

Accounts of public reason disagree as to the conditions a reason must meet in order to qualify as public. On one prominent account, a reason is public if, and only if, it is shareable between citizens. The shareability account, I argue, relies on an implausibly demanding assumption regarding the epistemic capabilities of citizens. When more plausible, limited, epistemic capabilities are taken into consideration, the shareability account becomes self‐defeating. Under more limited epistemic conditions, few, if any, reasons will be shareable between all reasonable citizens, making the shareability account so demanding that it precludes public reasoning altogether.     

Internalism and Externalism in Meliorative Epistemology

This paper addresses the meta-epistemological dispute over the basis of epistemic evaluation from the standpoint of meliorative epistemology. Meliorative epistemology aims at guiding our epistemic practice to better results, and it comprises two levels of epistemic evaluation. At the social level (meliorative social epistemology) appropriate experts conduct evaluation for the community, so that epistemic evaluation is externalist since each epistemic subject in the community need not have access to the basis of the experts’ evaluation. While at the personal level (meliorative personal epistemology) epistemic evaluation is internalist since each member of the community must evaluate the reliability of the (apparent) experts from the first-person perspective. I argue that evaluation at the social level should be the primary focus of meliorative epistemology since meliorative personal epistemology does not provide informative epistemic norms. It is then pointed out that epistemic evaluation at the social level can be considered internalist in the extended sense (social internalism) in that every component of the evaluation needs to be recognized by some members of the community at some points. As a result, some familiar problems of internalist epistemology, such as regress and circularity of epistemic support, carry over to meliorative social epistemology.     

INTERPERSONAL EPISTEMIC ENTITLEMENTS

In this paper I argue that the nature of our epistemic entitlement to rely on certain belief‐forming processes—perception, memory, reasoning, and perhaps others—is not restricted to one's own belief‐forming processes. I argue as well that we can have access to the outputs of others’ processes, in the form of their assertions. These two points support the conclusion that epistemic entitlements are “interpersonal.” I then proceed to argue that this opens the way for a non‐standard version of anti‐reductionism in the epistemology of testimony, and a more “extended” epistemology—one that calls into question the epistemic significance that has traditionally been ascribed to the boundaries separating individual subjects.     

Stop Making Sense? On a Puzzle about Rationality

In this paper, I present a puzzle about epistemic rationality. It seems plausible that it should be rational to believe a proposition if you have sufficient evidential support for it. It seems plausible that it rationality requires you to conform to the categorical requirements of rationality. It also seems plausible that our first‐order attitudes ought to mesh with our higher‐order attitudes. It seems unfortunate that we cannot accept all three claims about rationality. I will present three ways of trying to resolve this tension and argue that the best way to do this is to reject the idea that strong evidential support is the stuff rationality is made of. In the course of doing this, I shall argue that there is a special class of propositions about the requirements of rationality that we cannot make rational mistakes about and explain how this can be.     

Knowledge and Other Norms for Assertion,Action, and Belief: A Teleological Account

Here I advance a unified account of the structure of the epistemic normativity of assertion, action, and belief. According to my Teleological Account , all of these are epistemically successful just in case they fulfill the primary aim of knowledgeability, an aim which in turn generates a host of secondary epistemic norms. The central features of the Teleological Account are these: it is compact in its reliance on a single central explanatory posit, knowledge‐centered in its insistence that knowledge sets the fundamental epistemic norm, and yet fiercely pluralistic in its acknowledgment of the legitimacy and value of a rich range of epistemic norms distinct from knowledge. Largely in virtue of this pluralist character, I argue, the Teleological Account is far superior to extant knowledge‐centered accounts.     

What Is Bayesian Confirmation for?

Peter Brössel and Franz Huber in 2015 argued that the Bayesian concept of confirmation had no use. I will argue that it has both the uses they discussed—it can be used for making claims about how worthy of belief various hypotheses are, and it can be used to measure the epistemic value of experiments. Furthermore, it can be useful in explanations. More generally, I will argue that more coarse-grained concepts (like confirmation) can be useful, even when we have more fine-grained concepts (like credences).     

What Chance‐Credence Norms Should Not Be

A chance‐credence norm states how an agent's credences in propositions concerning objective chances ought to relate to her credences in other propositions. The most famous such norm is the Principal Principle (PP), due to David Lewis. However, Lewis noticed that PP is too strong when combined with many accounts of chance that attempt to reduce chance facts to non‐modal facts. Those who defend such accounts of chance have offered two alternative chance‐credence norms: the first is Hall's and Thau's New Principle (NP); the second is Ismael's General Recipe (IP). Thus, the question arises: Should we adopt NP or IP or both? In this paper, I argue that IP has unacceptable consequences when coupled with reductionism, so we must accept NP alone.     

How Norms (Might) Guide Belief

Abstract

Belief normativism is roughly the view that judgments about beliefs are normative judgments. Kathrin Glüer and Åsa Wikforss (G&W) suggest that there are two ways one could defend this view: by appeal to what might be called ‘truth-norms’, or by appeal to what might be called ‘norms of rationality’ or ‘epistemic norms’. According to G&W, whichever way the normativist takes, she ends up being unable to account for the idea that the norms in question would guide belief formation. Plausibly, if belief normativism were true, the relevant norms would have to offer such guidance. I argue that G&W’s case against belief normativism is not successful. In section 1, I defend the idea that truth-norms can guide belief formation indirectly via epistemic norms. In section 2, I outline an account of how the epistemic norms might guide belief. Interestingly, this account may involve a commitment to a certain kind of expressivist view concerning judgments about epistemic norms.     

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.     

Intellectual Humility as Attitude

Intellectual humility, I argue in this paper, is a cluster of strong attitudes (as these are understood in social psychology) directed toward one's cognitive make‐up and its components, together with the cognitive and affective states that constitute their contents or bases, which serve knowledge and value‐expressive functions. In order to defend this new account of humility I first examine two simpler traits: intellectual self‐acceptance of epistemic limitations and intellectual modesty about epistemic successes. The position defended here addresses the shortcomings of both ignorance and accuracy based accounts of humility.     

Morally Respectful Listening and its Epistemic Consequences

This paper focuses on the phenomenon of morally respectful listening. I defend a specific requirement for respectful listening in the context of disagreement. According to it, when listening occurs in the context of disagreement, the morally respectful listener must be open to the possibility that the speaker will surprise the listener with her positive epistemic qualities. That is, the listener must be open to what I call “epistemic surprise.” I also argue for a specific interpretation of this openness: to be open to epistemic surprise is to be open to unexpected changes in confidence levels concerning the proposition in question. I close by arguing that respectful listening is incompatible with a listener's being certain, and I apply this conclusion to three recent debates in epistemology to show that the phenomenon of listening has potentially far-reaching consequences for epistemology.