This paper examines the possibility of unjustified defeaters and the explanatory role of incoherence in epistemic defeat. I reconstruct Peter Graham and Jack Lyons’s objections to Jennifer Lackey’s psychological defeaters, paying special attention to their rejection of unjustified defeaters and to their claim that incoherence plays no indispensable explanatory role in defeat. First, I argue that denying the possibility of unjustified defeaters leads to implausible verdicts about rationality in cases involving incoherent belief sets. Second, I argue that incoherence is essential for explaining the epistemic damage generated by such defeaters, even when a subject’s total evidence remains unchanged. Finally, I examine different ways of accommodating this phenomenon and argue that, regardless of whether it is understood in terms of full loss of justification, structural irrationality, or some combination of the two, incoherence remains an indispensable component of its explanation. I conclude that, although evidentialist accounts plausibly explain many ordinary cases of defeat, they cannot fully account for defeat involving unjustified defeaters, where incoherence itself becomes the source of the epistemic downgrade.
Common knowledge requires that everyone knows a proposition, knows that everyone knows it, and so on. Lederman’s Sailboat Argument claims that ideal agents may fail to attain common knowledge. The argument appeals to small differences in how a mast may appear to two agents. Its key premise says that an agent who sees the mast as having a certain height cannot rule out its appearing slightly shorter to the other agent. This paper rejects that premise. Perceptual closeness between two apparent heights does not establish that the lower appearance remains epistemically possible for that agent. Such a possibility must be tied to the epistemic state produced by the agent’s own observation. A revised premise that makes this connection may apply to an apparent height delivered by an agent’s observation, but not to lower apparent heights generated by reasoning rather than observation. The argument therefore fails.
To complete his theory of free will, Harry Frankfurt introduces the condition of wholeheartedness. Specifically, he asserts that one’s will is free if and only if their second-order volition endorses their first-order desire to pursue that will wholeheartedly. However, many critics argue that Frankfurt’s requirement of wholeheartedness is excessively demanding, as individuals can act freely even in the absence of wholeheartedness. To address this concern, this paper proposes a redefinition of Frankfurtian wholeheartedness by dividing it into two sub-concepts: wholehearted care and wholehearted decision. A wholehearted decision can logically exist independently of wholehearted care. This reason-based decision can be viewed as a form of conceptual engineering that refines our conventional understanding of wholeheartedness. By redefining the Frankfurtian notion of wholehearted decision, we can effectively tackle two major challenges to Frankfurt’s condition: the challenge to his resolution argument and the challenge to his argument from self-defeat.
Gareth Evans infers the absoluteness of truth and reality from the absoluteness of the correctness of assertion: since the correctness of assertion does not vary with time, he concludes that truth and reality cannot vary with time either. In this paper, I argue that Evans’s argument fails and diagnose why it fails. In doing so, I aim to shed some new light on the relationship between the temporality of judgment and that of reality. To understand this relationship fully, we must attend not only to the temporality of the correctness of judgment but also to the temporality of the act of judgment itself.
Debates on the rationality of endorsing conspiracy theories often focus on the primary evidence conspiracy theorists have: errant data, eyewitnesses, revealed documentation, and the kind of facts typical investigators would use. Once we focus on the appreciation of this primary evidence, a significant portion of conspiracy theorists (most Flat Earthers, for example), turn out not to appreciate their primary evidence. They use evidence that, in fact, does not support their beliefs at all. Thus, if we only focus on primary evidence, we would be forced to posit a deep kind of irrationality in order to explain how these conspiracy theorists arrive at their beliefs. We propose a more palatable alternative on which (the appreciation of) secondary evidence plays a crucial role in the formation of conspiratorial beliefs: conspiracy theorists often don’t (just) rely on primary evidence; they also rely on testimonies that point out to them what such evidence (supposedly) supports. While there often still is something irrational to accepting poorly supported conspiracy theories, that irrationality is no longer blatant. We compare our approach to other social epistemological alternatives in the literature and argue that it is descriptively more accurate and normatively more satisfying.
