The rationality of epistemic akrasia

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Hawthorne ◽  
Yoaav Isaacs ◽  
Maria Lasonen‐Aarnio
Keyword(s):  
Epistemic Akrasia

Higher-Order Evidence

2019 ◽  
pp. 312-344
Author(s):  
Declan Smithies
Keyword(s):  
Higher Order ◽  
Epistemic Rationality ◽  
Total Evidence ◽  
Epistemic Akrasia ◽  
Level Splitting ◽  
Higher Order Evidence

Chapter 10 explores a puzzle about epistemic akrasia: if you can have misleading higher-order evidence about what your evidence supports, then your total evidence can make it rationally permissible to be epistemically akratic. Section 10.1 presents the puzzle and three options for solving it: Level Splitting, Downward Push, and Upward Push. Section 10.2 argues that we should opt for Upward Push: you cannot have misleading higher-order evidence about what your evidence is or what it supports. Sections 10.3 and 10.4 defend Upward Push against David Christensen’s objection that it licenses irrational forms of dogmatism in ideal and nonideal agents alike. Section 10.5 responds to his argument that misleading higher-order evidence generates rational dilemmas in which you’re guaranteed to violate one of the ideals of epistemic rationality. Section 10.6 concludes with some general reflections on the nature of epistemic rationality and the role of epistemic idealization.

scholarly journals DISAGREEMENT AND EASY BOOTSTRAPPING

Episteme ◽  
2019 ◽  
pp. 1-20
Author(s):  
Eyal Tal
Keyword(s):  
Irrational Belief ◽  
Rational Belief ◽  
Central Question ◽  
Rational Beliefs ◽  
Rational Agents ◽  
Epistemic Akrasia ◽  
First Response ◽  
The One

ABSTRACTShould conciliating with disagreeing peers be considered sufficient for reaching rational beliefs? Thomas Kelly argues that when taken this way, Conciliationism lets those who enter into a disagreement with an irrational belief reach a rational belief all too easily. Three kinds of responses defending Conciliationism are found in the literature. One response has it that conciliation is required only of agents who have a rational belief as they enter into a disagreement. This response yields a requirement that no one should follow. If the need to conciliate applies only to already rational agents, then an agent must conciliate only when her peer is the one irrational. A second response views conciliation as merely necessary for having a rational belief. This alone does little to address the central question of what is rational to believe when facing a disagreeing peer. Attempts to develop the response either reduce to the first response, or deem necessary an unnecessary doxastic revision, or imply that rational dilemmas obtain in cases where intuitively there are none. A third response tells us to weigh what our pre-disagreement evidence supports against the evidence from the disagreement itself. This invites epistemic akrasia.

scholarly journals Sobre a akrasia e o vínculo entre epistemologia e ética

2020 ◽  
pp. 82-102
Author(s):  
Ian Salles Botti
Keyword(s):  
Epistemic Virtue ◽  
Epistemic Akrasia

Este artigo aborda a incontinência, ou akrasia, sob a perspectiva da epistemologia da virtude de Christopher Hookway a fim de estabelecer uma relação entre epistemologia e ética. A tese é que o fenômeno em questão possui uma contraparte epistêmica, que permite a aproximação entre as disciplinas e promove o debate acerca da validade da distinção entre áreas teóricas e práticas, descritivas e normativas. Pretende-se com isso enfatizar a centralidade do aspecto normativo da epistemologia. Os textos usados são a Ética a Nicômaco, de Aristóteles, no qual a incontinência comum é exposta no contexto de uma ética da virtude; e o artigo “Epistemic akrasia and epistemic virtue”, de Hookway, no qual é defendida a possibilidade da incontinência epistêmica e de uma epistemologia da virtude.

Epistemic akrasia and higher-order beliefs

2019 ◽  
Vol 177 (9) ◽  
pp. 2501-2515
Author(s):  
Timothy Kearl
Keyword(s):  
Higher Order ◽  
Epistemic Akrasia

Epistemic Akrasia

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Owens
Keyword(s):  
Higher Order ◽  
Epistemic Akrasia ◽  
First Order

In a case of practical akrasia, we freely do something even though we judge that we ought not to do it. This chapter discusses the possibility of epistemic akrasia. Epistemic akrasia is possible only if (a) a person’s (first-order) beliefs can diverge from their higher-order judgements about what it would be reasonable for them to believe, and (b) these divergent (first-order) beliefs are freely and deliberately formed. Several recent authors deny the possibility of epistemic akrasia because they doubt that (a) can be true. I argue that though (a) can indeed be true, (b) cannot. On this point, believing is contrasted with guessing.

Akrasia

2019 ◽  
pp. 170-185
Author(s):  
Brian Weatherson
Keyword(s):  
Epistemic Akrasia ◽  
Expected Values

This chapter argues that epistemic akrasia is rationally permissible. The first task is to describe just what akrasia comes to. Loosely speaking, it is having a belief and thinking one should not have this belief, but there are three importantly different ways to make this precise. Unlike in the previous chapter, there is a systematic reason why none of these will pose a problem to normative externalism. There is no kind of akrasia that is licensed by normative externalism that is not made independently plausible by the failure of evidence to be, in Timothy Williamson’s sense, luminous. All of the arguments against akrasia work equally well, or perhaps we should say equally poorly, as arguments against the luminosity of evidence. The chapter ends with a discussion of the desire as belief arguments, and in particular with an argument that luminosity failures threaten the idea that expected values can be in any way guiding.

Agency, Akrasia, and the Normative Environment

2019 ◽  
Vol 5 (3) ◽  
pp. 321-338
Author(s):  
GREGORY ANTILL
Keyword(s):  
Normative Reasons ◽  
Epistemic Agency ◽  
Epistemic Akrasia ◽  
Important Evidence

AbstractJust as the existence of practical akrasia has been treated as important evidence for the existence of our practical agency, the alleged absence of epistemic akrasia—cases in which a believer believes some proposition contrary to her considered judgments about what she has most reason to believe—has recently been marshaled as grounds for skepticism about the existence of similar forms of epistemic agency. In this paper, I defend the existence of epistemic agency against such objections. Rather than argue against the impossibility of epistemic akrasia, I argue that the impossibility of epistemic akrasia is actually compatible with the existence of epistemic agency. The crucial mistake, I argue, is that skeptics about epistemic agency are failing to distinguish carefully between differences in the structure of believing and acting and differences in the structure of normative reasons to believe and normative reasons to act. I show that once these ‘environmental’ differences are properly distinguished, we can see that absence of epistemic akrasia provides no reason to doubt that practical and epistemic agency are on a par with one another.

Epistemic Akrasia

2011 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 18-25 ◽  
Author(s):  
Brian Ribeiro
Keyword(s):  
Epistemic Akrasia

scholarly journals Suspension, Higher-Order Evidence, and Defeat

2021 ◽  
pp. 116-145
Author(s):  
Errol Lord ◽  
Kurt Sylvan
Keyword(s):  
Higher Order ◽  
Functional Profile ◽  
Reasons For Belief ◽  
Epistemic Akrasia ◽  
First Order ◽  
Evidential Support ◽  
Support Relations ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Suspension Of Judgment ◽  
Higher Order Evidence

This paper has two main goals. The first and most central goal is to develop a framework for understanding higher-order defeat. The framework rests on the idea that higher-order evidence provides direct reasons for suspending judgment which leave evidential support relations on the first order intact. Equally importantly, we also seek to explain how this sort of defeat is possible by showing how direct reasons for suspension of judgment flow from the functional profile of suspension of judgment. As a result, our framework is embedded within an account of the nature of suspension of judgment that shows how new insights about its nature lead to a different picture of its rational profile. A second and subsidiary goal of the paper is to show how our framework provides a compelling basis for more moderate positions about disagreement and epistemic akrasia. We show that the puzzles about these topics rest on more fundamental mistakes about suspension and the relationship between reasons for suspension, reasons for belief, and evidence.

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