Reasons for Reliabilism

2021 ◽  
pp. 146-176
Author(s):  
Bob Beddor
Keyword(s):  
Reasons For Belief

One leading approach to justification comes from the reliabilist tradition, which maintains that a belief is justified provided that it is reliably formed. Another comes from the ‘Reasons First’ tradition, which claims that a belief is justified provided that it is based on reasons that support it. These two approaches are typically developed in isolation from each other; this essay motivates and defends a synthesis. On the view proposed here, justification is understood in terms of an agent’s reasons for belief, which are in turn analysed along reliabilist lines: an agent’s reasons for belief are the states that serve as inputs to their reliable processes. I show that this synthesis allows each tradition to profit from the other’s explanatory resources. In particular, it enables reliabilists to explain epistemic defeat without abandoning their naturalistic ambitions. I go on to compare my proposed synthesis with other hybrid versions of reliabilism that have been proposed in the literature.

Empiricism and Normative Constraint

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hannah Ginsborg
Keyword(s):  
The Other ◽  
Intentional Content ◽  
Empirical Reality ◽  
Reasons For Belief ◽  
Empirical World ◽  
Normative Constraint ◽  
Normative Relation

McDowell holds that our thinking, in order to have intentional content, must stand in a normative relation to empirical reality. He thinks that this condition can be satisfied only if we adopt “minimal empiricism”: the view that beliefs and judgements stand in rational relations to perceptual experiences, conceived as passive. I raise two complementary difficulties for minimal empiricism, one challenging McDowell’s view that experiences, conceived as passive, can be reasons for belief, the other challenging his view of experience as presupposing conceptual capacities. I go on to argue that minimal empiricism is not necessary for satisfying the condition that thinking be normatively related to the empirical world. There is another way of understanding the relation between thought and reality which construes it as normative without being rational: we can understand it as the world’s normative constraint on the activity through which empirical concepts, and hence empirical thinking, become possible.

scholarly journals Epistemic Blame and the Normativity of Evidence

Erkenntnis ◽  
2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sebastian Schmidt
Keyword(s):  
Conclusive Evidence ◽  
Normative Reasons ◽  
Epistemic Reasons ◽  
Epistemic Norms ◽  
Plausible Assumption ◽  
Reasons For Belief ◽  
Normative Force ◽  
Epistemic Trust ◽  
Conceptual Connection ◽  
Epistemic Blame

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.

scholarly journals Even if it might not be true, evidence cannot be false

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Clayton Littlejohn ◽  
Julien Dutant
Keyword(s):  
Reasons For Belief ◽  
Perceptual Error

AbstractWordly internalists claim that while internal duplicates always share the same evidence, our evidence includes non-trivial propositions about our environment. It follows that some evidence is false. Worldly internalism is thought to provide a more satisfying answer to scepticism than classical internalist views that deny that these propositions about our environment might belong to our evidence and to provide a generally more attractive account of rationality and reasons for belief. We argue that worldly internalism faces serious difficulties and that its apparent advantages are illusory. First, it cannot adequately handle some not terribly strange cases of perceptual error. Second, it cannot explain why one should plan to use their evidence to update their beliefs. The second issue allows us to explain why cases of misplaced certainty do not require us to introduce false evidence into our views and that why the alleged advantage of worldly internalism in resisting sceptical pressures is illusory.

Practical Steps and Reasons for Action

1997 ◽  
Vol 27 (1) ◽  
pp. 17-45 ◽  
Author(s):  
Philip Clark
Keyword(s):  
Reasons For Action ◽  
Reasons For Belief ◽  
The Real ◽  
General Characterization ◽  
Practical Inference

There is an idea, going back to Aristotle, that reasons for action can be understood on a parallel with reasons for belief. Not surprisingly, the idea has almost always led to some form of inferentialism about reasons for action. In this paper I argue that reasons for action can be understood on a parallel with reasons for belief, but that this requires abandoning inferentialism about reasons for action. This result will be thought paradoxical. It is generally assumed that if there is to be a useful parallel, there must be some such thing as a practical inference. As we shall see, that assumption tends to block the fruitful exploration of the real parallel. On the view I shall defend, the practical analogue of an ordinary inference is not an inference, but something I shall call a practical step. Nevertheless, the practical step will do, for a theory of reasons for action, what ordinary inference does for an inferentialist theory of reasons for belief. The result is a general characterization of reasons, practical and theoretical, in terms of the correctness conditions of the relevant sorts of step.

Reasoning about Means

2019 ◽  
pp. 76-89
Author(s):  
Ingmar Persson
Keyword(s):  
Opposite Direction ◽  
Sufficient Conditions ◽  
Double Effect ◽  
Practical Case ◽  
Reasons For Action ◽  
Reasons For Belief ◽  
Direction Of Fit ◽  
Standard Formula

An advantage of using conditionals as the standard formula for reasons for action is that the conditional form can also be used to bring out the structure of reasons for belief—thus making possible a close comparison between these kinds of reasons and reasoning. It then becomes apparent that the direction of derivation is the reverse in the practical case when we reason our way to desiring sufficient means to an end from desiring the end to the theoretical case when we derive beliefs from sufficient conditions for their truth. This reversal reflects the opposite direction of fit of beliefs and desires. The implications of this account of reasoning with desires for the moral doctrine of the double effect and for reasoning with respect to emotions are briefly considered.

Conclusion

2019 ◽  
pp. 213-218
Author(s):  
Christopher Cowie
Keyword(s):  
Error Theory ◽  
Reasons For Action ◽  
Reasons For Belief ◽  
Moral Error Theory ◽  
Moral Error ◽  
Epistemic Consequentialism ◽  
Argument From Analogy ◽  
Moral Properties ◽  
Categorical Reasons

The views outlined in earlier chapters are systematically presented. These include: the truth of epistemic institutionalism and falsity of analogous institutionalist views in morality; the challenges facing categorical reasons for action that do not apply to categorial reasons for belief; the reducible nature of epistemic properties and relations—including the defensibility of this view in light of concerns with the normativity of probability and the falsity of both veritism and epistemic consequentialism—in contrast to the irreducible nature of moral properties and relations, and the possibility of ‘the puzzling combination’. It is concluded that the argument from analogy fails and that the moral error theory may yet be true, but that it would be illegitimate to conclude that it is true.

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