No Epistemic Norm or Aim Needed

Episteme ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 1-16
Author(s):  
Marianna Bergamaschi Ganapini

Abstract Many agree that one cannot consciously form a belief just because one wants to. And many also agree this is a puzzling component of our conscious belief-forming processes. I will look at three views on how to make sense of this puzzle and show that they all fail in some way. I then offer a simpler explanation that avoids all the pitfalls of those views, which is based instead on an analysis of our conscious reasoning combined with a commonly accepted account of the concept of belief. I conclude that no epistemic norm or aim is actually needed to explain why we cannot deliberatively believe whatever we want.

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.


2021 ◽  
pp. 053331642098473
Author(s):  
Dick Blackwell

Institutional racism is a social unconscious process. It is the collective operation of shared unconscious assumptions and values that exist in groupings and cultures such as group analytic institutions where individuals may consciously believe they are not racist. In such cultures this conscious belief is protected by unconscious processes of denial, avoidance and negation. Attempts to address the issue within group analysis reveal some of its problematic dynamics.


2021 ◽  
pp. 174702182110657
Author(s):  
Federica Scarpina ◽  
Carlotta Fossataro ◽  
Alice Rossi Sebastiano ◽  
Francesca Bruni ◽  
Massimo Scacchi ◽  
...  

Body ownership (i.e., the conscious belief of owning a body) and sense of agency (i.e., being the agent of one’s own movements) are part of a pre-reflective experience of bodily self, which grounds on low-level complex sensory–motor processes. While previous literature had already investigated body ownership in obesity, sense of agency was never explored. Here, we exploited the sensory attenuation effect (i.e., an implicit marker of the sense of agency; SA effect) to investigate whether the sense of agency was altered in a sample of eighteen individuals affected by obesity as compared with eighteen healthy-weight individuals. In our experiment, participants were asked to rate the perceived intensity of self-generated and other-generated tactile stimuli. Healthy-weight individuals showed a significantly greater SA effect than participants affected by obesity. Indeed, while healthy-weight participants perceived self-generated stimuli as significantly less intense as compared to externally generated ones, this difference between stimuli was not reported by affected participants. Our results relative to the SA effect pinpointed an altered sense of agency in obesity. We discussed this finding within the motor control framework with reference to obesity. We encouraged future research to further explore such effect and its role in shaping the clinical features of obesity.


1999 ◽  
pp. 31-49
Author(s):  
Anthony O'Hear
Keyword(s):  

Author(s):  
Jonathan Way

Abstract Enkratic reasoning—reasoning from believing that you ought to do something to an intention to do that thing—seems good. But there is a puzzle about how it could be. Good reasoning preserves correctness, other things equal. But enkratic reasoning does not preserve correctness. This is because what you ought to do depends on your epistemic position, but what it is correct to intend does not. In this paper, I motivate these claims and thus show that there is a puzzle. I then argue that the best solution is to deny that correctness is always independent of your epistemic position. As I explain, a notable upshot is that a central epistemic norm directs us to believe, not simply what is true, but what we are in a position to know.


2017 ◽  
Vol 114 (7) ◽  
pp. 381-391
Author(s):  
Adam Green ◽  
Keyword(s):  

Author(s):  
Louise Antony

This chapter offers an account of central issues and themes in feminist philosophical reflections on bias and objectivity. Some feminists have argued that objectivity is an unachievable and thus inappropriate epistemic norm for human beings. But at the same time, these feminists have criticized philosophy for displaying masculinist bias. This complex critique faces a problem I’ve called the “Bias Paradox” and that Helen Longino calls an “Essential Tension:” how we can criticize partiality at the same time we acknowledge its ubiquity. I explain Longino’s proposed “social empiricist” solution, and contrast it with my own. I argue for a re-conception of “bias” as a normatively neutral epistemic inclination. Biases, in this sense, play a crucial constructive role in the development of human knowledge by solving the problem of underdetermination of theory by evidence. The biases we (correctly) regard as morally bad, such as social prejudice, involve the operation of neutral biases in unpropitious natural or social environments.


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