scholarly journals Misleading Higher-Order Evidence, Conflicting Ideals, and Defeasible Logic

2021 ◽  
Vol 8 (0) ◽  
Author(s):  
Aleks Knoks
Keyword(s):  
Higher Order ◽  
Epistemic Rationality ◽  
Total Evidence ◽  
Defeasible Logic ◽  
Epistemological Position ◽  
Higher Order Evidence

Thinking about misleading higher-order evidence naturally leads to a puzzle about epistemic rationality: If one’s total evidence can be radically misleading regarding itself, then two widely-accepted requirements of rationality come into conflict, suggesting that there are rational dilemmas. This paper focuses on an often misunderstood and underexplored response to this (and similar) puzzles, the so-called conflicting-ideals view. Drawing on work from defeasible logic, I propose understanding this view as a move away from the default meta-epistemological position according to which rationality requirements are strict and governed by a strong, but never explicitly stated logic, toward the more unconventional view, according to which requirements are defeasible and governed by a comparatively weak logic. When understood this way, the response is not committed to dilemmas.

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.

Predictably Misleading Evidence

2019 ◽  
pp. 105-123
Author(s):  
Sophie Horowitz
Keyword(s):  
Higher Order ◽  
False Belief ◽  
Epistemic Rationality ◽  
Total Evidence ◽  
Rational Agent ◽  
Epistemic Norms ◽  
Misleading Evidence ◽  
Do So ◽  
Higher Order Evidence

Evidence can be misleading: it can rationalize raising one’s confidence in false propositions, and lowering one’s confidence in the truth. But can a rational agent know that her total evidence supports a (particular) falsehood? It seems not: if we could see ahead of time that our evidence supported a false belief, then we could avoid believing what our evidence supported, and hence avoid being misled. So, it seems, evidence cannot be predictably misleading. This chapter develops a new problem for higher-order evidence: it is predictably misleading. It then examines a radical strategy for explaining higher-order evidence, according to which there are two distinct epistemic norms at work in the relevant cases. Finally, the chapter suggests that mainstream accounts of higher-order evidence may be able to answer the challenge after all. But to do so, they must deny that epistemic rationality requires believing what is likely given one’s evidence.

Can Your Total Evidence Mislead About Itself?

2019 ◽  
pp. 298-316
Author(s):  
Alex Worsnip
Keyword(s):  
Mathematical Model ◽  
Higher Order ◽  
Total Evidence ◽  
Simple Mathematical Model ◽  
First Order ◽  
Higher Order Evidence

It’s fairly uncontroversial that you can sometimes get misleading higher-order evidence about what your first-order evidence supports. What is more controversial is whether this can result in a situation where your total evidence is misleading about what your total evidence supports: that is, where your total evidence is misleading about itself. It’s hard to arbitrate on purely intuitive grounds whether any particular example of misleading higher-order evidence is an example of misleading total evidence. This chapter tries to make progress by offering a simple mathematical model that suggests that higher-order evidence will tend to bear more strongly on higher-order propositions about what one’s evidence supports than it does on the corresponding first-order propositions; and then by arguing that given this, it is plausible that there will be some cases of misleading total evidence.

scholarly journals Higher-Order Defeat and the Impossibility of Self-Misleading Evidence

2019 ◽  
pp. 189-208
Author(s):  
Mattias Skipper
Keyword(s):  
Higher Order ◽  
Epistemic Rationality ◽  
False Beliefs ◽  
Misleading Evidence ◽  
Normative Significance ◽  
Rule Out ◽  
Higher Order Evidence

Two attractive theses about epistemic rationality—evidentialism and the enkratic principle—jointly imply that a certain sort of self-misleading evidence is impossible. That is to say, if evidentialism and the enkratic principle are both true, one’s evidence cannot support certain false beliefs about what one’s evidence supports. Recently, some epistemologists have argued that self-misleading evidence is possible, since misleading higher-order evidence doesn’t have the strong defeating force needed to rule out this possibility. The goal of this chapter is to offer an account of higher-order defeat that does indeed render self-misleading evidence impossible. Central to the account is the idea that higher-order evidence acquires its normative significance by influencing which conditional beliefs it’s rational to have. What emerges is an independently plausible view of higher-order evidence that allows us to reconcile evidentialism and the enkratic principle.

ON THE EPISTEMIC SIGNIFICANCE OF EVIDENCE YOU SHOULD HAVE HAD

Episteme ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 13 (4) ◽  
pp. 449-470 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sanford C. Goldberg
Keyword(s):  
Strict Liability ◽  
Full Range ◽  
Higher Order ◽  
The Other ◽  
Total Evidence ◽  
Knowing How ◽  
The One ◽  
Additional Support ◽  
Higher Order Evidence

ABSTRACTElsewhere I and others have argued that evidence one should have had can bear on the justification of one's belief, in the form of defeating one's justification. In this paper, I am interested in knowing how evidence one should have had (on the one hand) and one's higher-order evidence (on the other) interact in determinations of the justification of belief. In doing so I aim to address two types of scenario that previous discussions have left open. In one type of scenario, there is a clash between a subject's higher-order evidence and the evidence she should have had: S's higher-order evidence is misleading as to the existence or likely epistemic bearing of further evidence she should have. In the other, while there is further evidence S should have had, this evidence would only have offered additional support for S's belief that p. The picture I offer derives from two “epistemic ceiling” principles linking evidence to justification: one's justification for the belief that p can be no higher than it is on one's total evidence, nor can it be higher than what it would have been had one had all of the evidence one should have had. Together, these two principles entail what I call the doctrine of Epistemic Strict Liability: insofar as one fails to have evidence one should have had, one is epistemically answerable to that evidence whatever reasons one happened to have regarding the likely epistemic bearing of that evidence. I suggest that such a position can account for the battery of intuitions elicited in the full range of cases I will be considering.

scholarly journals Anti-Exceptionalism About Requirements of Epistemic Rationality

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Claire Field
Keyword(s):  
Fixed Points ◽  
Special Property ◽  
Phenomenological Research ◽  
Prima Facie ◽  
False Belief ◽  
Epistemic Rationality ◽  
Total Evidence ◽  
False Beliefs

Abstract I argue for the unexceptionality of evidence about what rationality requires. Specifically, I argue that, as for other topics, one’s total evidence can sometimes support false beliefs about this. Despite being prima facie innocuous, a number of philosophers have recently denied this. Some have argued that the facts about what rationality requires are highly dependent on the agent’s situation and change depending on what that situation is like (Bradley, Philosophers’ Imprint, 19(3). 2019). Others have argued that a particular subset of normative truths, those concerning what epistemic rationality requires, have the special property of being ‘fixed points’—it is impossible to have total evidence that supports false belief about them (Smithies, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 85(2). 2012; Titelbaum 2015). Each of these kinds of exceptionality permits a solution to downstream theoretical problems that arise from the possibility of evidence supporting false belief about requirements of rationality. However, as I argue here, they incur heavy explanatory burdens that we should avoid.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document