A Remark on the Bank Cases

Since their formulation by Keith DeRose (1992), the so-called bank cases have played a major role in the discussion about whether knowledge depends on practical factors. According to the proponents of pragmatic encroachment, the proper conclusion to be drawn from the bank cases and similar examples is that knowledge of a proposition p does not supervene on one’s evidence for or against p. In my view, this conclusion is ill-founded. The reason is that the bank cases and similar examples suffer from an ambiguity concerning the known proposition — an ambiguity that has so far been overlooked. When this ambiguity is made explicit, it becomes clear that the conclusion does not follow.

On the Epistemic Costs of Friendship: Against the Encroachment View

I defend the thesis that friendship can constitutively require epistemic irrationality against a recent, forceful challenge, raised by proponents of moral and pragmatic encroachment. Defenders of the “encroachment strategy” argue that exemplary friends who are especially slow to believe that their friends have acted wrongly are simply sensitive to the high prudential or moral costs of falsely believing in their friends’ guilt. Drawing on psychological work on epistemic motivation (and in particular on the notion of “need for closure”), I propose a different picture of what friendship requires in the doxastic realm. I argue that contrary to what the encroachment strategy suggests, exemplary friends’ belief formation ought not be guided by a concern with accuracy or error avoidance, but instead by a need to avoid a “specific closure” – namely, a need to avoid concluding in their friends’ guilt. I propose that exemplary friendship often generates a defeasible, doxastic obligation to exemplify such a need, despite its inherent corrupting effects on exemplary friends’ epistemic faculties.

Two Shapes of Pragmatism

The ethics of belief is concerned with the question of what we should believe. According to evidentialism, what one should believe is determined by evidence only. Pragmatism claims that practical considerations too can be relevant. But pragmatism comes in two shapes. According to a more traditional version, practical considerations can provide practical reasons for or against belief. According to a new brand of pragmatism, pragmatic encroachment, practical considerations can affect positive epistemic status, such as epistemic rationality or knowledge. In the literature, the distinction between the two versions of pragmatism is not always made. If it is mentioned, it is quickly put aside. Sometimes, it is simply overlooked. As evidentialists face two distinct pragmatist challenges, they must get clearer on the distinction. But it matters for pragmatists too. As I see it, if one accepts one version of pragmatism, one should reject the other. This paper’s goals are to get clearer on the distinction and argue that both pragmatisms are independent. Accepting one version does not commit one to accept the other. Moreover, even if both pragmatisms tend to be neutral toward one another, I will argue that traditional pragmatism has good reasons to reject pragmatic encroachment and vice versa.

Doxastic Wrongs

Chapter 9 extends the arguments of Chapter 8 by defending the view that we can wrong each other in virtue of what we believe about one another, and arguing that this is best and most conservatively explained by Pragmatic Intellectualism. It is argued that cases from Rima Basu, Simon Keller, Sarah Stroud, Tamar Gendler, and Berislav Marušić all involve doxastic wrongs. Though there are two prominent objections to the idea that beliefs can wrong, it is shown that Pragmatic Intellectualism offers answers to each of these objections. And finally it is argued that we have independent grounds to think that the best cases of doxastic wrongs are also among the very best cases for pragmatic encroachment, because of the way that the wrongs they involve are stable over time.

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.

Believing on eggshells: epistemic injustice through pragmatic encroachment

This paper defends the claim that pragmatic encroachment—the idea that knowledge is sensitive to the practical stakes of believing—can explain a distinctive kind of epistemic injustice: the injustice that occurs when prejudice causes someone to know less than they otherwise would. This encroachment injustice, as we call it, occurs when the threat of being met with prejudice raises the stakes for someone to rely on her belief when acting, by raising the level of evidential support required for knowledge. We explain this notion of encroachment injustice, connect it to the empirical literature on implicit bias, and defend it against important objections.

Epistemic WAMs

This chapter looks into the feasibility of preserving the independence of epistemically proper thought from practical considerations via the second horn of the Shiftiness Dilemma. For people who like Classical Invariantism about knowledge attributions, the jump from variation in assertability with stakes to contextualism or pragmatic encroachment seemed rushed. As such, these authors venture to account for the Shiftiness Intuition under a Classical Invariantist umbrella by arguing for context sensitivity of proper assertability. This chapter argues that the view fails on prior plausibility due to being incompatible with the following highly uncontroversial value-theoretic claim: norms of type X are associated with values of type X.