Truth

This chapter generalizes the modal theory of reasons to the epistemic domain and combines it with an independently motivated and substantive commitment, namely, that truth and truth alone makes for right belief. The result is a novel theory of epistemic reasons, according to which a reason for believing a proposition is a fact which stands in a modally robust relation to the truth of that proposition, hence, a reliable indicator of its truth. The chapter then explores and defends a consequence of this, namely, that a person may believe all and any truths. It asks whether reflection on Moorean beliefs counts for or against the view.

The Range of Reasons

This book contributes to two debates and it does so by bringing them together. The first is a debate in metaethics concerning normative reasons, the considerations that serve to justify a person’s actions and attitudes. The second is a debate in epistemology concerning the norms for belief, the standards that govern a person’s beliefs and by reference to which they are assessed. The book starts by developing and defending a new theory of reasons for action, that is, of practical reasons. The theory belongs to a family that analyses reasons by appeal to the normative notion of rightness (fittingness, correctness); it is distinctive in making central appeal to modal notions, specifically, that of a nearby possible world. The result is a comprehensive framework that captures what is common to and distinctive of reasons of various kinds: justifying and demanding; for and against, possessed and unpossessed; objective and subjective. The framework is then generalized to reasons for belief, that is, to epistemic reasons, and combined with a substantive, first-order commitment, namely, that truth is the sole right-maker for belief. The upshot is an account of the various norms governing belief, including knowledge and rationality, and the relations among them. According to it, the standards to which belief is subject are various, but they are unified by an underlying principle.

Should Have Known

This chapter argues that there are cases in which a subject, S, should have known that p, even though, given her state of evidence at the time, she was in no position to know it. In particular, S should have known that p when (i) another person has, or would have, legitimate expectations regarding S’s epistemic condition, (ii) the satisfaction of these expectations would require that S knows that p, and (iii) S fails to know that p. I argue that these three conditions are sometimes jointly satisfied. There are (at least) two main sources of legitimate expectations regarding another’s epistemic condition: participation in a legitimate social practice; and moral and epistemic expectations more generally. In developing my position on this score, I will have an opportunity (i) to contrast practice-generated entitlements to expect with epistemic reasons to believe; (ii) to compare the “should have known” phenomenon with the phenomenon of culpable ignorance; and finally (iii) to suggest the bearing of the “should have known” phenomenon to epistemology itself.

Epistemic Reasons as Right-Kind Reasons

Chapter 7 takes up the question of how we can determine whether some putative reasons for or against belief count as epistemic or not. It is argued that this is a special case of a much broader question as to how we can determine whether some putative reasons for or against any attitude count as bearing on the distinctive rationality of that kind of attitude, and that answers to the narrower question about belief should be informed by answers to the broader question about attitudes in general. The object-given/state-given theory is introduced as a prominent candidate to answer the general question, but shown to be inadequate. The alternative idea that the right-kind/wrong-kind distinction for each attitude derives from the nature of that attitude is defended and illustrated with representative cases. Finally, the implications of this account of the right-kind/wrong-kind distinction are drawn out for the case of belief by showing how different plausible theories of the nature of belief can result in different plausible answers to which of the reasons against belief identified in Chapter 6 are genuinely epistemic.

Pragmatic Intellectualism

Chapter 8 introduces and defends the default reliance account of the nature of binary belief and the resulting package of views about epistemic reasons—Pragmatic Intellectualism. According to the default reliance account, binary beliefs play the role of giving us something to rely on in reasoning by default—without need to engage in further reasoning about what to rely on. It is argued that the default reliance account predicts and explains the rational inertia of beliefs, and explains why both the risks of error and the availability of further evidence will count as epistemic reasons against belief. The resulting view, Pragmatic Intellectualism, is contrasted with other defenses of pragmatic encroachment in epistemology with respect to the role it grants to knowledge-action principles, the rational stability of belief, the principle of reflection, and pragmatic encroachment on confidence or degreed belief.

Balance in Epistemology

Chapter 6 takes up the problem of sufficiency for the idea that reasons come first among normative concepts in epistemology. Seven puzzles about the sufficiency of evidence are presented, each of which lays out difficulties in accounting for what amount or strength of evidence is enough in order to render a belief rational. The two-stage strategy is introduced as a way of treating several of these puzzles, by showing that what they affect is not which beliefs are rational qua belief, but instead the prior question of whether to deliberate about what to believe. But the two-stage strategy is argued to be limited, and not to solve several of the remaining puzzles. In contrast, the simple idea that there are non-evidential epistemic reasons against belief is introduced as an alternative solution to most of the remaining puzzles.

Epistemic Blame and the Normativity of Evidence

The 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.