Epistemic Rationality in Political Theory

The paper presents a brief analysis of the procedural approach towards constructing liberal political conceptions of justice and democracy. Treatment of J. Rawls’s evolution shows the negative consequences of abandoning external substantive criteria for theory evaluation, including efficiency, justification, truth. It also offers justification for the “epistemic turn” in contemporary political theory. The return of classical epistemological set of tools will help to strengthen the justification and legitimation of philosophical and political conceptions of justice and democracy by overcoming the key limitations of the procedural approach.

EPISTEMIC RATIONALITY IN ISLAMIC EDUCATION: The Significance for Religious Moderation in Contemporary Indonesian Islam

This article discusses the concept of epistemic rationality in Islamic education and its significance for strengthening religious moderation in contemporary Indonesian Islam. The questions are: (1) How is the conception of epistemic rationality? (2) To what extent is the role of epistemic rationality in Islamic education? (3) How do classical Islamic treasures view the epistemic rationality and its significance for strengthening religious moderation in Indonesian Islam? Afterwards, the theoretical assumption underlying this article is that the strengthening of religious moderation without being supported by epistemic rationality is null and void. This article finds that the passion of reading in Islam processed through epistemic rationality has provided huge contribution for Islamic civilization so that it reaches its golden age. Hence, in Indonesian Islamic education context, strengthening religious moderation must be delivered through epistemic rationality as basic reasoning in understanding religious text and digging the diversity phenomenon in order to avoid radicalism and blind fanaticism. Epistemic rationality must be considered as starting point to build curriculum structure and learning contents that emphasize more on the competency of ‘know-how’ and ‘know-why’ rather than ‘know-what’.

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

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.

Embodied Irrationality? Knowledge Avoidance, Willful Ignorance, and the Paradox of Autonomy

In the current philosophical and psychological literature, knowledge avoidance and willful ignorance seem to be almost identical conditions involved in irrational patterns of reasoning. In this paper, we will argue that not only these two phenomena should be distinguished, but that they also fall into different parts of the epistemic rationality-irrationality spectrum. We will adopt an epistemological and embodied perspective to propose a definition for both terms. Then, we will maintain that, while willful ignorance is involved in irrational patterns of reasoning and beliefs, knowledge avoidance should be considered epistemically rational under particular circumstances. We will begin our analysis by considering which of the two phenomena is involved in patterns of reasoning that are still amply recognized as irrational—as wishful thinking, self-deception, and akrasia. We will then discuss the impact of epistemic feelings—which are emotional events that depend on epistemic states—on agents' decision-making. Then, we will consider the impact of willful ignorance and knowledge avoidance on agents' autonomy. By considering these issues, we will argue that when agents are aware that they are avoiding certain information (and aware of what kind of feelings acquiring the information would trigger), knowledge avoidance should be considered a rational, autonomy-increasing, hope-depended selection of information.

Rational Belief

This chapter generalizes the modal theory of subjective reasons to the epistemic domain and combines it with the first-order commitment that truth is the sole right-maker for belief. The result is a modal account of epistemic rationality, according to which there is a safety condition on rational belief distinct from but mirroring the more familiar safety condition on knowledge. The chapter shows that the account delivers plausible closure principles on rational belief and offers a straightforward resolution of the lottery paradox. It also explores the implications of the view for whether it is rational to believe necessary propositions, preface propositions, and Moorean propositions.

Conclusion

In this Conclusion, the author summarizes the main features of his theory of epistemic rationality and explains how his theory avoids commitment to any of the five presuppositions of the Proof Paradigm. He explains his new solution to the epistemological version of Berkeley’s puzzle. He recaps the real-world epistemological issues addressed by his theory. He concludes with some final thoughts, including a call to philosophers to reject both the presuppositions of the Proof Paradigm and the narrow scientism that characterizes so much of contemporary American philosophy. He urges us to replace that narrow scientism with a more expansive understanding of the human mind that can make sense of its “unreasonable effectiveness” in scientific and other inquiry.

Two Crises for the Proof Paradigm in the Enlightenment

In Chapter 2, the author critically discusses the epistemologies of David Hume and Immanuel Kant. The author distinguishes the skeptical Hume from the naturalist Hume. The author presents the skeptical Hume’s philosophy as a response to what he calls Berkeley’s puzzle. He argues that Hume’s skeptical arguments are self-refuting and self-undermining and that Hume’s analysis of cause is an example of an explanation-impairing framework substitution. Hume’s solution to his skeptical arguments was a new kind of epistemology, a naturalistic epistemology. The author presents Kant’s epistemology as a response to the state of rationalist metaphysics at the time of Kant’s first Critique. Kant’s epistemology was similar to Hume’s in one important respect. Just as Hume had psychologized the idea of causal necessity, Kant psychologized the idea of metaphysical necessity. The author argues that both solutions were a form of relativism. This chapter primarily serves to motivate a search for a non-skeptical, non-relativist, non-Platonist theory of epistemic rationality.

Introduction

In the Introduction, the author defines epistemic rationality by contrasting it with practical rationality: epistemic rationality is aimed at truth, while practical rationality is aimed at other goals. To more clearly explain this definition, the author uses a science fiction dialogue with a philosophical anthropologist from a planet orbiting one of the Alpha Centauri stars to dramatize Western epistemology’s susceptibility to intellectual pathologies. The author resolves to recapitulate the history of Western epistemology to try to diagnose its susceptibility to these pathologies and to find a cure. His stated goal for this book is not to refute other approaches to epistemology, but to articulate a new vision and a new pathway for addressing issues in epistemology. The Introduction ends with an overview of the book.

An Alternative to the Proof Paradigm for Ground-Level Rationality

In Chapter 5, the author uses the clues from previous chapters to begin the construction of a theory of epistemic rationality in which mistake-correcting reasoning is the paradigm for reasoning. On his account, cognitive models are composed of scenarios, which are themselves sets of propositions that have expectations for experience. Models are tested not by propositions describing experience but by experiences themselves because scenarios holistically generate expectations for experience which the agent’s actual experience can either satisfy or fail to satisfy. On the author’s theory, only scenarios with full or partial necessitation hypotheses can earn rational confidence. He identifies two main conceptual frameworks, the ordinary object framework and the person framework, both of which are causal frameworks. The imagination plays a crucial role in rationality in the author’s theory. He ends with informal statements of two principles of epistemic rationality, of which the formal versions are stated in Appendix A.

Two More Principles of Epistemic Rationality

In Chapter 6, the author focuses on two main topics: the essential role of partial or full necessitation hypotheses in scenarios that generate expectations for experience and the social dimension of epistemic rationality. He contrasts partial or full necessitation hypotheses with neo-Humean regularity hypotheses. He argues that memory is a causal notion and contrasts it with non-causal apparent memories. He contrasts the causal physical object framework with a non-causal phenomenalist framework. And he explains why there is no syntactic solution to Goodman’s New Riddle of induction. He explains why Goodman’s own solution to the puzzle is an example of a parasitic hypothesis. He discusses parasitic hypotheses more fully and explains why most conspiracy theories are parasitic. He proposes a Third and Fourth Principle of Epistemic Rationality. Finally, he credits feminist epistemologists with drawing attention to the social dimension of epistemic rationality in contrast to the usual individualist approach in Western epistemology. He ends the chapter with a deep challenge for his own theory.