37 research outputs found
What is (In)coherence?
Recent work on rationality has been increasingly attentive to âcoherence requirementsâ, with heated debates about both the content of such requirements and their normative status (e.g., whether there is necessarily reason to comply with them). Yet there is little to no work on the metanormative status of coherence requirements. Metaphysically: what is it for two or more mental states to be jointly incoherent, such that they are banned by a coherence requirement? In virtue of what are some putative requirements genuine and others not? Epistemologically: how are we to know which of the requirements are genuine and which arenât? This paper tries to offer an account that answers these questions. On my account, the incoherence of a set of attitudinal mental states is a matter of its being (partially) constitutive of the mental states in question that, for any agent that holds these attitudes jointly, the agent is disposed, when conditions of full transparency are met, to give up at least one of the attitudes
Eliminating Prudential Reasons
I argue, contrary to the consensus of most contemporary work in ethics, that there are no (fundamentally, distinctively) prudential reasons for action. That is to say: there is no class of reasons for action that is distinctively and fundamentally about the promotion of the agentâs own well-being. Considerations to do with the agentâs well-being can supply the agent with reasons only in virtue of her well-being mattering morally or in virtue of her caring about her own well-being. In both of these cases, the way that such prudential considerations supply reasons for action is a way that the well-being of others can supply reasons for action too
What to believe about your belief that you're in the good case
Going about our daily lives in an orderly manner requires us, once we are aware of them, to dismiss many metaphysical possibilities. We take it for granted that we are not brains in vats, or living in the Matrix, or in an extended dream. Call these things that we take for granted âanti-skeptical assumptionsâ. What should a reflective agent who believes these things think of these beliefs? For various reasons, it can seem that we do not have evidence for such anti-skeptical assumptions. Are anti-skeptical assumptions, then, beliefs that one may rationally hold without evidence for them â indeed, even in the face of a positive judgment that one lacks evidence for them? I survey and criticize some prominent answers to this question, and then offer a positive view that blends externalism about evidence with a mild, qualified kind of pragmatism. The view I offer aims to do justice to the sense that anti-skeptical assumptions are evidentially groundless while also maintaining that one cannot rationally believe something that one judges oneself to lack sufficient evidence for
âOughtâ-contextualism beyond the parochial
Despite increasing prominence, âoughtâ-contextualism is regarded with suspicion by most metaethicists. As Iâll argue, however, contextualism is a very weak claim, that every metaethicist can sign up to. The real controversy concerns how contextualism is developed. I then draw an oft-overlooked distinction between âparochialâ contextualismâon which the contextually-relevant standards are those that the speaker, or others in her environment, subscribe toâand âaspirationalâ contextualismâon which the contextually-relevant standards are the objective standards for the relevant domain. However, I argue that neither view is acceptable. I suggest an original compromise: âecumenical contextualismâ, on which some uses of âoughtâ are parochial, others aspirational. Ecumenical contextualism is compatible with realism or antirealism, but either combination yields interesting results. And though itâs a cognitivist view, it is strengthened by incorporating an expressivist insight: for robustly normative usages of âoughtâ, the contextually-relevant standards must be endorsed by the speaker
The Obligation to Diversify One's Sources: Against Epistemic Partisanship in the Consumption of News Media
In this paper, I defend the view that it is wrong for us to consume only, or overwhelmingly, media that broadly aligns with our own political viewpoints: that is, it is wrong to be politically âpartisanâ in our decisions about what media to consume. We are obligated to consume media that aligns with political viewpoints other than our own â to âdiversify our sourcesâ. This is so even if our own views are, as a matter of fact, substantively correct
Contextualism and Knowledge Norms
I provide an opinionated overview of the literature on the relationship of contextualism to knowledge norms for action, assertion, and belief. I point out that contextualists about âknowsâ are precluded from accepting the simplest versions of knowledge norms; they must, if they are to accept knowledge norms at all, accept ârelativizedâ versions of them. I survey arguments from knowledge norms both for and against contextualism, tentatively concluding that commitment to knowledge norms does not conclusively win the day either for contextualism or for its rivals. But I also suggest that an antecedent commitment to contextualism about normative terms may provide grounds for suspicion about knowledge norms, and a debunking explanation of some of the data offered in favor of such norms
Explanatory Indispensability and Deliberative Indispensability: Against Enoch's Analogy
In this note, I discuss David Enoch's influential deliberative indispensability argument for metanormative realism, and contend that the argument fails. In doing so, I uncover an important disanalogy between explanatory indispensability arguments and deliberative indispensability arguments, one that explains how we could accept the former without accepting the latter
Reasons, rationality, reasoning: how much pulling-apart?
At the heart of John Broomeâs research program in the philosophy of normativity is a distinction between reasons, on one hand, and requirements of rationality, on the other. I am a friend of Broomeâs view that this distinction is deep and important, and that neither notion can be analyzed in terms of the other. However, I also think there are major challenges that this view is yet to meet. In the first part of the paper, Iâll raise four such challenges, and programmatically indicate how I think such challenges might be headed off. In the second part of the paper, Iâll discuss a third normative notion that Broome is interested in: that of (rules of) correct reasoning. On Broomeâs view, correct reasoning is closely tied to requirements of rationality. More particularly, every rule of correct reasoning corresponds to a âbasing permissionâ, which states that itâs rationally permissible to base one attitude on one or more other attitudes. Iâll argue that this proposal canât be made to work. If Iâm right, this suggests that the same kind of pulling-apart that Broome has effected so persuasively with respect to reasons and requirements of rationality needs to be effected again to separate rules of correct reasoning from both of those other categories
Isolating Correct Reasoning
This paper tries to do three things. First, it tries to make it plausible that correct rules of reasoning do not always preserve justification: in other words, if you begin with a justified attitude, and reason correctly from that premise, it can nevertheless happen that youâll nevertheless arrive at an unjustified attitude. Attempts to show that such cases in fact involve following an incorrect rule of reasoning cannot be vindicated. Second, it also argues that correct rules of reasoning do not even correspond to permissions of âstructural rationalityâ: it is not always structurally permissible to base an attitude on other attitudes from which it follows by correct reasoning. Third, from these observations it tries to build a somewhat positive account of the correctness of rules of reasoning as a more sui generis notion irreducible to either justification or structural rationality. This account vindicates an important unity of theoretical and practical reasoning as well as a qualified version of the thesis that deductive logic supplies correct rules of reasoning
Possibly false knowledge
Many epistemologists call themselves âfallibilistsâ. But many philosophers of language hold that the meaning of epistemic usages of âpossibleâ ensures a close knowledge- possibility link : a subjectâs utterance of âitâs possible that not-pâ is true only if the subject does not know that p. This seems to suggest that whatever the core insight behind fallibilism is, it canât be that a subject could have knowledge which is, for them, possibly false. I argue that, on the contrary, subjects can have such possibly false knowledge. My ultimate aim, then, is to vindicate a very robust form of fallibilism. Uniquely, however, the account I offer does this while also allowing that concessive knowledge attributions â sentences of the form âI know that p, but itâs possible that not-pâ â are not only infelicitous but actually false whenever uttered. The account predicts this result without conceding KPL. I argue that my account has the resources to explain some related cases for which the KPL account yields the wrong predictions. Taken as a whole, the linguistic data not only do not support the proposal that subjects cannot have possibly false knowledge, but indeed positively favor the proposal that they can