scholarly journals Collateral Conflicts and Epistemic Norms

2021 ◽  
pp. 38-57
Author(s):  
J. Adam Carter
Keyword(s):  
Author(s):  
David Owens

Two models of assertion are described and their epistemological implications considered. The assurance model draws a parallel between the ethical norms surrounding speech acts like promising and the epistemic norms that govern the transmission of testimonial knowledge. This model is rejected in favour of the view that assertion transmits knowledge by (intentionally) expressing belief. The expression of belief is distinguished from the communication of belief. The chapter goes on to compare the epistemology of testimony with the epistemology of memory, arguing that memory and testimony are mechanisms that can preserve the rationality of the belief they transmit without preserving the evidence on which the belief was originally based.


Author(s):  
Mikkel Gerken

Chapter 6 concerns the normative relationship between action and knowledge ascriptions. Arguments are provided against a Knowledge Norm of Action (KNAC) and in favor of the Warrant-Action norm (WA). According to WA, S must be adequately warranted in believing that p relative to her deliberative context to meet the epistemic requirements for acting on p. WA is developed by specifying the deliberative context and by arguing that its explanatory power exceeds that of knowledge norms. A general conclusion is that the knowledge norm is an important example of a folk epistemological principle that does not pass muster as an epistemological principle. More generally, Chapter 6 introduces the debates about epistemic normativity and develops a specific epistemic norm of action.


Erkenntnis ◽  
2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sebastian Schmidt

AbstractThe normative force of evidence can seem puzzling. It seems that having conclusive evidence for a proposition does not, by itself, make it true that one ought to believe the proposition. But spelling out the condition that evidence must meet in order to provide us with genuine normative reasons for belief seems to lead us into a dilemma: the condition either fails to explain the normative significance of epistemic reasons or it renders the content of epistemic norms practical. The first aim of this paper is to spell out this challenge for the normativity of evidence. I argue that the challenge rests on a plausible assumption about the conceptual connection between normative reasons and blameworthiness. The second aim of the paper is to show how we can meet the challenge by spelling out a concept of epistemic blameworthiness. Drawing on recent accounts of doxastic responsibility and epistemic blame, I suggest that the normativity of evidence is revealed in our practice of suspending epistemic trust in response to impaired epistemic relationships. Recognizing suspension of trust as a form of epistemic blame allows us to make sense of a purely epistemic kind of normativity the existence of which has recently been called into doubt by certain versions of pragmatism and instrumentalism.


Author(s):  
Christopher J. G. Meacham

Meacham takes aim at the epistemic utility theory picture of epistemic norms where epistemic utility functions measure the value of degrees of belief and where the norms encode ways of adopting non-dominated degrees of belief. He focuses on a particularly popular subclass of such views where epistemic utility is determined solely by the accuracy of degrees of belief. Meacham argues that these types of epistemic utility arguments for norms are (i) not compatible with each other (so not all can be correct), (ii) do not solely rely on accuracy considerations, and (iii) are not able to capture intuitive norms about how we ought to respond to evidence.


2021 ◽  
pp. 135050762110616
Author(s):  
Helena Liu

In management studies, whiteness is learnt through the discipline’s epistemic norms and conventions, received intellectual history, conceptual canon, driving logics and institutional frameworks. The foundational white epistemology of management produces and secures racial inequality while insisting that race is irrelevant and racism is obsolete in a post-racial imaginary. In this conceptual piece, I explore how scholars of colour and our knowledge experience a phenomenon of seen invisibility. This dialectical condition is reproduced through mechanisms and practices by which our discipline is disciplined within the prevailing racial order. After analysing examples of these normalised mechanisms and practices through the testimonies of scholars of colour who research, review, teach and edit management theorising in the Global North, I discuss how we might unlearn whiteness in our discipline through epistemic resistance.


Author(s):  
Christopher Cowie

It is argued that the first version of the parity premise—internalism-parity—is false. It is false because epistemic judgements are committed to the existence of ‘merely institutional’ reasons. Moral judgements, by contrast, are committed to the existence of genuinely normative reasons. This claim is defended by appeal to the basic rationale that epistemic judgements are normative or evaluative only in the sense of normative or evaluative judgements within ‘institutions’ such as sports and games, etiquette, fashion, and the law, but moral judgements are not. It is argued that this does not render epistemic norms merely conventional in an objectionable sense.


2019 ◽  
pp. 12-33
Author(s):  
Julia Staffel

Chapter 2 is concerned with the question of how we should develop a comprehensive normative theory of the epistemic rationality of credences. Its aim is twofold: (i) to familiarize readers with the basics of the Bayesian framework that are essential for understanding the arguments in subsequent chapters, and (ii) to offer an interpretation of the goals and methods of the Bayesian framework that reveals its shortcomings when applied to non-ideal thinkers. It is argued that the Bayesian view of ideal norms that is currently being developed lacks the capacity to distinguish between better and worse ways of being imperfectly epistemically rational. Moreover, it lacks the resources to substantiate a central Bayesian claim, namely that ideal epistemic norms apply to the beliefs of non-ideal thinkers as aims that should be approximated.


Synthese ◽  
2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Cathy Mason

Abstract Many recent philosophers have been tempted by epistemic partialism. They hold that epistemic norms and those of friendship constitutively conflict. In this paper, I suggest that underpinning this claim is the assumption that friendship is not an epistemically rich state, an assumption that even opponents of epistemic partiality have not questioned. I argue that there is good reason to question this assumption, and instead regard friendship as essentially involving knowledge of the other. If we accept this account of friendship, the possibility of epistemic partialism does not arise.


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