33 research outputs found
Reasons to Not Believe (and Reasons to Act)
In âReasons to Believe and Reasons to Act,â Stewart Cohen argues that balance of reasons accounts of rational action get the wrong results when applied to doxastic attitudes, and that there are therefore important differences between reasons to believe and reasons to act. In this paper, I argue that balance of reasons accounts of rational action get the right results when applied to the cases that Cohen considers, and that these results highlight interesting similarities between reasons to believe and reasons to act. I also consider an argument for Cohen's conclusion based on the principle that Adler, Moran, Shah, Velleman and others call âtransparency.â I resist this argument by explaining why transparency is itself doubtful
Minimalism And The Limits Of Warranted Assertability Maneuvers
Contextualists and pragmatists agree that knowledge-denying sentences are contextually variable, in the sense that a knowledge-denying sentence might semantically express a false proposition in one context and a true proposition in another context, without any change in the properties traditionally viewed as necessary for knowledge. Minimalists deny both pragmatism and contextualism, and maintain that knowledge-denying sentences are not contextually variable. To defend their view from cases like DeRose and Stanley's high stakes bank case, minimalists like Patrick Rysiew, Jessica Brown, and Wayne Davis forward âwarranted assertability maneuvers.â The basic idea is that some knowledge-denying sentence seems contextually variable because we mistake what a speaker pragmatically conveys by uttering that sentence for what she literally says by uttering that sentence. In this paper, I raise problems for the warranted assertability maneuvers of Rysiew, Brown, and Davis, and then present a warranted assertability maneuver that should succeed if any warranted assertability maneuver will succeed. I then show how my warranted assertability maneuver fails, and how the problem with my warranted assertability maneuver generalizes to pragmatic responses in general. The upshot of my argument is that, in order to defend their view from cases like DeRose and Stanley's high stakes bank case, minimalists must prioritize the epistemological question whether the subjects in those cases know over linguistic questions about the pragmatics of various knowledge-denying sentences
Are Intellectual Virtues Truth-Relevant?
According to attributor virtue epistemology (the view defended by Ernest Sosa, John Greco, and others), S knows that p only if her true belief that p is attributable to some intellectual virtue, competence, or ability that she possesses. Attributor virtue epistemology captures a wide range of our intuitions about the nature and value of knowledge, and it has many able defenders. Unfortunately, it has an unrecognized consequence that many epistemologists will think is sufficient for rejecting it: namely, it makes knowledge depend on factors that aren't truth-relevant, even in the broadest sense of this term, and it also makes knowledge depend in counterintuitive ways on factors that are truth-relevant in the more common narrow sense of this term. As I show in this paper, the primary objection to interest-relative views in the pragmatic encroachment debate can be raised even more effectively against attributor virtue epistemology
How to Argue for Pragmatic Encroachment
Purists think that changes in our practical interests canât affect what we know unless those changes are truth-relevant with respect to the propositions in question. Impurists disagree. They think changes in our practical interests can affect what we know even if those changes arenât truth-relevant with respect to the propositions in question. I argue that impurists are right, but for the wrong reasons, since they havenât appreciated the best argument for their own view. Together with âMinimalism and the Limits of Warranted Assertability Maneuvers,â âThe Pragmatic Encroachment Debate,â and âAnti-Intellectualismâ (below), this paper constitutes my attempt to refute the entire pragmatic encroachment debate. As I show in this paper, there is an argument for impurism sitting in plain sight that is considerably more plausible than any extant argument for pragmatism
Being More Realistic About Reasons: On Rationality and Reasons Perspectivism
This paper looks at whether it is possible to unify the
requirements of rationality with the demands of normative
reasons. It might seem impossible to do because one depends
upon the agentâs perspective and the other upon features of
the situation. Enter Reasons Perspectivism. Reasons
perspectivists think they can show that rationality does consist
in responding correctly to reasons by placing epistemic
constraints on these reasons. They think that if normative
reasons are subject to the right epistemic constraints, rational
requirements will correspond to the demands generated by
normative reasons. While this proposal is prima facie plausible,
it cannot ultimately unify reasons and rationality. There is no
epistemic constraint that can do what reasons perspectivists
would need it to do. Some constraints are too strict. The rest
are too slack. This points to a general problem with the
reasons-first program. Once we recognize that the agentâs
epistemic position helps determine what she should do, we
have to reject the idea that the features of the agentâs situation
can help determine what we should do. Either rationality
crowds out reasons and their demands or the reasons will make
unreasonable demands