5 research outputs found
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Arbitrary switching and concern for truth
This essay is about a special kind of transformative choice that plays a key role in
debates about permissivism, the view that some bodies of evidence permit more than
one rational response. A prominent objection to this view contends that its defender
cannot vindicate our aversion to arbitrarily switching between belief states in the
absence of any new evidence. A prominent response to that objection tries to provide
the desired vindication by appealing to the idea that arbitrary switching would involve a
special kind of transformative choice: the choice to change one's epistemic standards,
i.e., one's commitments regarding the relative importance of achieving true belief and
avoiding false belief. My first aims here are to argue that this response is unsuccessful
and propose an alternative. My secondary aim is to consider how this discussion might
bear on more general debates about transformative choice
Recommended from our members
Arbitrary switching and concern for truth
AbstractThis essay is about a special kind of transformative choice that plays a key role in debates about permissivism, the view that some bodies of evidence permit more than one rational response. A prominent objection to this view contends that its defender cannot vindicate our aversion to arbitrarily switching between belief states in the absence of any new evidence. A prominent response to that objection tries to provide the desired vindication by appealing to the idea that arbitrary switching would involve a special kind of transformative choice: the choice to change one’s epistemic standards, i.e., one’s commitments regarding the relative importance of achieving true belief and avoiding false belief. My first aims here are to argue that this response is unsuccessful and propose an alternative. My secondary aim is to consider how this discussion might bear on more general debates about transformative choice.</jats:p
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Making Up Our Minds: Ethical Norms in Epistemic Inquiry
From our limited perspectives, there are many ways the world could be. We could all be brains in vats, and the "zebra" at the local zoo could be no zebra at all but a mule cleverly disguised to look like one. Much more troublingly, at least for the average person and for philosophers outside of their studies, your unfavorable opinion of a colleague's work could be the product of your own biases, and your memory of a disagreement with a friend could be distorted by a self-serving lens. When presented with a possibility that you cannot rule out, there are two reactions you might have. You could dismiss the possibility, assuming that it does not obtain. Or, you could take the possibility seriously, treating it as a threat to your claims of knowledge. Which possibilities a person takes seriously is a matter of ethical as well as epistemic importance. In certain circumstances, for instance, cleaving to an unfavorable opinion of a colleague, despite not being able to rule out the possibility that it is biased, is not only unreasonable but also mean-spirited and self-indulgent. What is it to take a possibility seriously, and how should we decide when to do it? The few existing philosophical treatments of this question largely ignore the ethical dimensions of the phenomenon. My dissertation offers a fresh approach to the question of which possibilities to take seriously, one that is fully attentive to the interactions between the ethical and epistemic norms that guide us as we construct our pictures of reality. On my view, our decisions about which possibilities to take seriously are not first-order epistemic decisions about what to believe, but second-order epistemic decisions about how to decide what to believe, and they are properly based upon pragmatic and ethical considerations. As epistemic inquirers, then, we are not just faced with the question of what to believe given our evidence. We also face the prior, second-order question of what standards to use as we answer first-order questions of what to believe. I show how this view refreshes longstanding philosophical debates over evidentialism, the view that only evidence can be a reason for belief. I also explain how it can be used to give satisfying accounts of several important and puzzling phenomena concerning assessment of one's own epistemic achievements, including self-gaslighting. This last topic has recently received considerable attention in popular discussions of gendered injustice, but it has not yet been explored in the philosophical literature. Self-gaslighting is a form of self-doubt that is often identified as one of the harms that women face under sexism. But it is difficult to say what the harm could consist in, especially since self-gaslighting seems like a perfectly rational exercise of epistemic self-regulation. I argue that the harm of self-gaslighting is not rooted in any epistemic mistake, but rather in the fact that it involves a coerced change in the way that the subject structures inquiry concerning her own beliefs. Thus, my project not only addresses traditional topics in epistemology and the ethics of belief, but can also be fruitfully applied to new questions in feminist philosophy
Recommended from our members
Arbitrary switching and concern for truth
This essay is about a special kind of transformative choice that plays a key role in
debates about permissivism, the view that some bodies of evidence permit more than
one rational response. A prominent objection to this view contends that its defender
cannot vindicate our aversion to arbitrarily switching between belief states in the
absence of any new evidence. A prominent response to that objection tries to provide
the desired vindication by appealing to the idea that arbitrary switching would involve a
special kind of transformative choice: the choice to change one's epistemic standards,
i.e., one's commitments regarding the relative importance of achieving true belief and
avoiding false belief. My first aims here are to argue that this response is unsuccessful
and propose an alternative. My secondary aim is to consider how this discussion might
bear on more general debates about transformative choice
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Epistemic rationality and the value of truth
Veritism is the idea that what makes a belief epistemically rational is that it is a fitting response to the value of truth. This idea promises to serve as the foundation for an elegant and systematic treatment of epistemic rationality, one that illuminates the importance of distinctively epistemic normative standards without sacrificing extensional adequacy. But I do not think that veritism can fulfill this promise. In what follows, I explain why not, in part by showing that three radically different developments of veritism---one consequentialist, one deontological, and one virtue-theoretic---face eerily similar problems. I also attempt a general explanation of why any version of veritism is doomed to fail. If my arguments are successful, their upshot is that we must look beyond the value of truth if we want to understand the nature and significance of epistemic rationality