This article argues that there are two fundamentally different types of alethic and epistemic progress in philosophy. It is widely assumed that such progress is to be assessed by reference to the quantity or quality of philosophy's product (i.e., a type of output or outcome, such as true answers, coherent views, knowledge, or understanding), rather than to the manner in which philosophy is done-its performance. That assumption is mistaken. Performance progress is not reducible to product progress. This carries implications for debates about peer disagreement, epistemic consequentialism, philosophical methods, and the idea of philosophy as a "spiritual exercise."
Some concepts generate paradoxes by licensing inconsistent beliefs. We can try to revise some of those beliefs by doing some "conceptual engineering," but this leads to a puzzle. However exactly the details of conceptual engineering get filled in, it seems that what happens is we revise our beliefs without gaining any evidence against our old views or in support of our new views. But epistemically rational belief change always requires new evidence-or so it seems.I respond to the puzzle by proposing a view of epistemic rationality on which we are required to hold a belief only if two conditions hold: Our evidence supports the belief, and our attention is directed at the evidence and the supported belief's content. Thus, we can rationally withdraw a belief by withdrawing our attention to its content, even without having any new evidence. Its ability to solve this puzzle for conceptual engineering, in addition to some other important puzzles that I briefly show it also solves, gives us a strong case for this proposed connection between rationality and attention.
This article develops and defends the idea that some of our biases have an externalist character, with particular attention to cases in which the phenomenon arises in political contexts. A person who consistently defers to biased sources can count as biased even while responding impeccably to their total evidence. On the basis of such cases, I argue for three connected theses: Externalism about Bias (a person's biases do not supervene on their internal states and the causal relations among those states); Rationality is Compatible with Bias; and Rationality Requires Bias (in certain environments, full rationality can require being biased, in a pejorative sense of "biased"). These theses are supported by compelling judgments about cases, independently of commitment to any specific theory of bias. They are also naturally accommodated by the norm-theoretic account of bias, on which biases involve systematic departures from genuine norms. I argue that many central attributions of bias to human believers are grounded in departures from the externalist norm of truth. Finally, I draw a further consequence: Because many biases are environmentally constituted, the empirically documented unreliability of introspection as a method for detecting bias is not a contingent fact but holds of necessity.
This article aims to solve a puzzle for instrumental conceptions of epistemic normativity. The puzzle is this: If the usefulness of epistemic norms explains their normative grip on us, why does it seem improper to violate these norms even when doing so would benefit us? To solve this puzzle, we argue that epistemic instrumentalists must adopt a more social approach to normativity. In particular, they should not account for the nature of epistemic norms by appealing to the goals of individual agents. Rather, they should appeal to norms or rules of inquiry that serve our collective goals. We argue that epistemic normativity grows out of our need to promote a deep kind of coordination in our basic epistemic practices. By subscribing to an appropriate system of norms, we can coordinate epistemic rule-following across the community. This makes testimony more trustworthy and reliable. This account not only solves a puzzle about epistemic instrumentalism but also sheds new light on the foundations of normativity and emphasizes the need for a truly social epistemology.
In his recent monograph-Ignorance: A Philosophical Study-Rik Peels offers a critique of the normative account of ignorance that I have developed and defended in recent work. I hereby respond to that critique. I argue that Peels' response, even by its own lights, in fact concedes far more to the idea that there is a normative condition on ignorance than he realizes. Indeed, I conclude that Peels would be wise to embrace the normative condition on ignorance that I propose and try to incorporate it into his own theory of ignorance.
Rik Peels's Ignorance: A Philosophical Study is excellent, bold in scope, and rich with distinctions. It is fastidiously researched and deserves praise for being both an important advance within the field and an accessible introduction to it. Although touching on several threads of Peels's treatment of ignorance, I will pay special attention how Peels's account interacts with the questions one is animated by. In particular, I argue that erotetic ignorance does not reduce to propositional ignorance and that one can be ignorant of insignificant truths.
There is a natural view of the relationship between preference and choice: an option is choiceworthy if and only if no alternative is strictly preferred to it. I argue against this view on two grounds. First, it makes false predictions about which options are choiceworthy in games and in multidimensional choice settings. Second, it conflates two distinct attitudes: choiceworthiness, which is assessed ex ante, and preference, which is assessed ex post. I explore the consequences of rejecting this natural view, including how it simplifies the relationship between game theory and decision theory, and how it complicates debates about what Ruth Chang calls "parity" between options.
Public evidence plays a central role in the justification of scientific theories-but does its importance extend beyond science, for instance, to political or religious belief? To address this question, we first need a clear account of public evidence. This article develops such an account, characterizing public evidence as non-experiential evidence that meets the non-factive epistemic conditions for common knowledge. I argue that public evidence not only underwrites the justification of scientific theories but also constrains how experience can justify belief more generally. The result is a novel account of public evidence with broad applicability across domains of inquiry.
Thomas Kelly and Stuart Cohen argue that intuitions about rationality provide a direct argument against the pragmatist's claim that there are practical reasons for and against belief. Although Susanna Rinard offers an insightful response to their "Rationality Argument" on behalf of robust pragmatism (the view that there are only practical reasons for and against belief), this article offers a response to the argument on behalf of pluralist pragmatism (the view that there are both practical and epistemic reasons for and against belief). I argue that contrary to what Kelly and Cohen claim, the pluralist pragmatist may adopt the very same view of rationality and all the same intuitive verdicts about cases as the anti-pragmatist. So, intuitions about rationality can't be wielded as an argument against pluralist pragmatism. Moreover, I argue that even if the pluralist pragmatist adopts a different view of rationality than the anti-pragmatist, they can still accommodate Kelly and Cohen's intuitions about the sorts of cases they appeal to. So, no matter which view of rationality the pluralist pragmatist accepts, Kelly and Cohen's Rationality Argument fails.
This paper examines a tension between three plausible claims: that violations of formal coherence requirements are paradigmatically irrational; that formal incoherence is best modeled as belief fragmentation; and that fragmentation need not be irrational. I argue that the first claim must be weakened. Some formally incoherent collections of belief are not irrational, because they are not appropriately subject to rational evaluation. Drawing on a Scanlonian notion of judgment-sensitivity, I propose that only incoherence that is remediable through reasoning constitutes irrationality. This view explains why fragmentation in domains such as perception and motor control is epistemically suboptimal without being irrational, while preserving a role for coherence norms in cases where coordination across fragments is possible.
This is a reply to Duncan Pritchard's response to my critique of his normative account of ignorance. Pritchard suggests that I take a Normative Condition on board in my own account of ignorance. Pritchard's suggestion has drastic revisionary and deflationary implications for how we use words like "ignorance" and "ignorant". I explain why I believe this is unnecessary: one can perfectly well be ignorant without displaying any kind of intellectual fault. Pritchard does convincingly show, though, that the Signifcance Condition of my account of ignorance needs revision. I explain that we can revise it by allowing for both subjective and objective significance.
This article examines the rationality of affective responses to virtual phenomena. I argue that at least some such responses can be perfectly rational, but that virtual realism and virtual irrealism-competing views about the metaphysics of the virtual-differ in their verdicts about the possible rationality of certain types of responses. Realism says that virtual objects are real; irrealism says that they're nonexistent fictions. I argue that while both views can accommodate the rationality of certain affective responses to the virtual, irrealism, unlike realism, significantly restricts the range of possibly rational responses. I suggest that this asymmetry may provide a promising path forward in the metaphysical debate, because we can leverage intuitive judgments about which affective responses to the virtual can be rational in assessing the relative plausibility of realism and irrealism.
It has recently been argued that purported evidential and zetetic norms issue contradictory verdicts and that such contradictions best be resolved in favor of zetetic norms. The paper argues that this line of argument proves unsuccessful. First, natural formulations of what one ought to do if inquiring into a given matter resemble anankastic conditionals that don't allow for detachment of normatively significant verdicts. Second, even if suitably reformulated, zetetic norms issue, at best, verdicts with a distinctly practical flavor that contrasts with the epistemic flavor characteristic of evidential norms. While there are conflicts between normative verdicts of different flavors, the phenomenon is familiar and, in the cases in question, doesn't force a zetetic turn, that is, a reorientation of epistemology that gives zetetic norms precedence over evidential norms.
When what justifies you in believing a proposition is some evidence you have, you are doxastically justified only if you believe that proposition on the basis of that evidence. According to causal theories of basing, this basing relation must be a causal relation. In this article, we discuss the role that defeaters play in an account of this kind. We first argue that doxastic justification for believing a certain proposition requires, not just basing the belief on evidence that one has and that is sufficient to propositionally justify the belief, but also being sensitive to the absence of sufficiently weighty defeaters. We then argue that causal theories of basing have the right kinds of resources to incorporate this role played by defeaters (and the relevant role played by disqualifiers) in the concept of doxastic justification. Our argument borrows from action theory in that it is inspired by similar arguments on behalf of causalist accounts of action and freedom. We end with a discussion of the bearing of our view on Pryor's dogmatism.
According to epistemic instrumentalism, epistemic reasons are a species of a familiar and unmysterious type of reason: instrumental or means-end reasons. Believing that p is the means to some relevant cognitive end. If this view is correct, then whether one has an epistemic reason to believe p isn't merely a matter of having evidence for p; one must also have (or have reason to have) the relevant cognitive end. In this article, I raise a challenge for the view, one concerned with its implications concerning basing beliefs on epistemic reasons. We regularly base our beliefs on epistemic reasons. I see the pouring raining and conclude that the planned picnic will be canceled; the realtor checks the client's financial statements and concludes that they won't be able to afford a certain house. In such cases, one doesn't merely have good epistemic reasons to believe a certain proposition; one believes the proposition for those reasons; and this might be part of the explanation of how one comes to have an epistemically justified belief or knowledge. I argue that the instrumentalist does a poor job of accommodating the phenomenon of basing belief on epistemic reasons.
Having evidence does not in itself make a doxastic attitude justified even if the evidence supports the attitude in question. Plausibly, one must also appreciate the support one's evidence provides for the doxastic attitude. Although such appreciation seems central to the picture of justification offered by Evidentialism, its nature has been largely unexplored by Evidentialists. This article seeks to rectify this situation by explaining how Evidentialists should understand appreciation and its role in justification. Additionally, the account of appreciation defended here is put to work in explicating the justification had during the process of deliberation and in clarifying what we should think about cases of epistemic akrasia.
This essay asks a new question: When someone with a firm understanding of basic operations nevertheless remains ignorant of a complex logical or mathematical truth, precisely what kind of information are they missing? I introduce "catenary truths," a significant component of this non-omniscient shortfall. Traditional epistemologies of the a priori don't extend to catenary knowledge, so I offer a novel proposal for how we acquire catenary information. The proposal answers Benacerraf-inspired worries about access to abstracta by showing how processes of reasoning instantiate catenary truths. The proposal also sheds new light on whether logic is ampliative, how a calculation is like an experiment, higher-order doubts about deductive reasoning, the inconceivability of logically impossible worlds, and commonalities between mathematical and moral intuition.
When does an agent possess a proposition P as evidence? According to Timothy Williamson, the answer is when, and only when, they know that P. Call this view E = K. In this article, I point out an unwanted consequence of E = K, which is that people who suffer from anxiety have impoverished empirical evidence due to their anxiety. Although anxiety can manifest in a variety of ways and to different degrees, I take it that in some cases a person's anxiety functions in a way that prevents a person from believing in accordance with their empirical evidence. However, E = K has trouble explaining the descriptive and normative dimensions of a case like this, because the view implies that whenever an agent's anxiety prevents them from outright believing a proposition this ipso facto deprives them of empirical evidence.
Feminists critique acts and practices as victim-blaming. Victim-blaming is a moral phenomenon: to call a communicative act victim blaming is to criticise it. It is also a political phenomenon. As feminists point out, it plays a important role in perpetuating oppression. But what makes a communicative act an act of victim-blaming? I propose that victim-blaming communicative acts attribute responsibility to the victim for the wrong in contexts in which such attributions are morally improper. Attributions of responsibility can be morally imporoper in virtue of what they make salient in a conversation. Making salient the victim's conduct and backgrounding the conduct of the perpetrator can run afoul of the duties we have to the victim: including the duty to listen to the victim, to support her, and to hold the perpetrator responsible.
This article takes issue with two prominent views in the current debate around epistemic partiality in friendship. Strong views of epistemic partiality hold that friendship may require biased beliefs in direct conflict with epistemic norms. Weak views hold that friendship may place normative expectations on belief formation but in a manner that does not violate these norms. It is argued that neither view succeeds in explaining the relationship between epistemic norms and friendship norms. Weak views inadvertently endorse a form of motivated reasoning, failing to resolve the normative clash they seek to avoid. Strong views turn out to be incoherent once we consider the question of whether the requirement to form an epistemically partial belief is independent of whether the belief in question would be true. It is then argued that an epistemology of friendship should recognise the special role that understanding plays in friendship. On this view, friendship normatively requires understanding the truth about our friends. This entails that epistemic partiality, far from being a requirement, is in fact at odds with good friendship.
