scholarly journals Ethics of Belief, Trust and Epistemic Value: The Case of the Scientific Controversy Surrounding the Measles Vaccine

2012 ◽  
Vol 15 (1) ◽  
pp. 387-399
Author(s):  
Jonathan Adler

James’ The Will to Believe is the most influential writing in the ethics of belief. In it, James defends the right and rationality to believe on non-evidential grounds. James’ argument is directed against Clifford’s “Evidentialism” presented in The Ethics of Belief in which Clifford concludes that “[i]t is wrong always, everywhere, and for anyone, to believe anything upon insufficient evidence”. After an overview of the James-Clifford exchange and James’ argument, I reconstruct his argument in detail. Subsequently, I examine four steps in James’ argument, and try to show that these amount to fallacies – enticing to reason, but not cogent.


Author(s):  
Richard Pettigrew

Pettigrew focuses on trade-off objections to epistemic consequentialism. Such objections are similar to familiar objections from ethics where an intuitively wrong action (e.g., killing a healthy patient) leads to a net gain in value (e.g., saving five other patients). The objection to the epistemic consequentialist concerns cases where adopting an intuitively wrong belief leads to a net gain in epistemic value. Pettigrew defends the epistemic consequentialist against such objections by accepting that the unintuitive verdicts of consequentialism are unintuitive, but offering an error theory for why these intuitions do not show the view to be false.


Oxford Studies in Epistemology is a biennial publication offering a regular snapshot of state-of-the-art work in this important field. Under the guidance of a distinguished editorial board composed of leading epistemologists in North America, Europe and Australasia, it publishes exemplary papers in epistemology, broadly construed. Topics within its purview include: (a) traditional epistemological questions concerning the nature of belief, justification, and knowledge, the status of skepticism, the nature of the a priori, etc.; (b) new developments in epistemology, including movements such as naturalized epistemology, feminist epistemology, social epistemology, and virtue epistemology, and approaches such as contextualism; (c) foundational questions in decision-theory; (d) confirmation theory and other branches of philosophy of science that bear on traditional issues in epistemology; (e) topics in the philosophy of perception relevant to epistemology; (f) topics in cognitive science, computer science, developmental, cognitive, and social psychology that bear directly on traditional epistemological questions; and (g) work that examines connections between epistemology and other branches of philosophy, including work on testimony, the ethics of belief, etc. Topics addressed in volume 6 include the nature of perceptual justification, intentionality, modal knowledge, credences, epistemic supererogation, epistemic and rational norms, expressivism, skepticism, and pragmatic encroachment. The various writers make use of a variety of different tools and insights, including those of formal epistemology and decision theory, as well as traditional philosophical analysis and argumentation.


Ethics ◽  
1974 ◽  
Vol 84 (2) ◽  
pp. 151-166
Author(s):  
Peter Kauber
Keyword(s):  

2002 ◽  
Vol 185 (11) ◽  
pp. 1545-1549 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jennifer L. St. Sauver ◽  
Inna G. Ovsyannikova ◽  
Robert M. Jacobson ◽  
Steven J. Jacobsen ◽  
Robert A. Vierkant ◽  
...  

Author(s):  
Francesco Paolo Bianchi ◽  
Simona Mascipinto ◽  
Pasquale Stefanizzi ◽  
Sara De Nitto ◽  
Cinzia Germinario ◽  
...  

2016 ◽  
Vol 35 (11) ◽  
pp. 1232-1241 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter Aaby ◽  
Henrik Ravn ◽  
Christine S. Benn ◽  
Amabelia Rodrigues ◽  
Badara Samb ◽  
...  

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