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.
