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.

Concluding Thoughts

This brief concluding chapter draws the threads of the previous chapters together. Previous work on human decision-making has tended to conclude that rationality is a scarce resource and most cognition is arational or irrational. Pushback against this view has come from proponents of ecological rationality. They concede, in effect, that our decision-making is irrational, inasmuch as it fails to respond to good information, but argue that it is rational in a broader sense: we better achieve our epistemic goals by believing arationally. This chapter argues that the evidence surveyed in the previous chapters shows that this is false: we respond rationally to the higher-order evidence we’re presented with, and there’s therefore no need to appeal to ecological rationality to defend our self-image as rational agents. Once we recognize the pervasiveness of higher-order evidence, we can vindicate something very like the Enlightenment picture of ourselves as rational animals.

Nudging Well

Cleaning up the epistemic environment, in the way advocated in the last chapter, is or entails nudging beliefs, and nudging is very controversial. A central reason why nudging is controversial is that nudges are believed to bypass rational cognition. This chapter describes this concern, and argues it’s misplaced. Typically (at least) nudges provide higher-order evidence in favor of the options nudged. Nudges recommend options, and agents respond to nudges as recommendations. Our responses to nudges are (usually, at least) rational responses to evidence. Once we see how nudges work through the provision of higher-order evidence, we are in a position to recognize that the cues to expertise and to reliability we examined in previous chapters work in precisely the same way: they provide genuine evidence and we respond to them in virtue of that fact.

Bad Beliefs

Why do people come to reject climate science or the safety and efficacy of vaccines, in defiance of the scientific consensus? A popular view explains bad beliefs like these as resulting from a range of biases that together ensure that human beings fall short of being genuinely rational animals. This book presents an alternative account. It argues that bad beliefs arise from genuinely rational processes. We’ve missed the rationality of bad beliefs because we’ve failed to recognize the ubiquity of the higher-order evidence that shapes beliefs, and the rationality of being guided by this evidence. The book argues that attention to higher-order evidence should lead us to rethink both how minds are best changed and the ethics of changing them: we should come to see that nudging—at least usually—changes belief (and behavior) by presenting rational agents with genuine evidence, and is therefore fully respectful of intellectual agency. We needn’t rethink Enlightenment ideals of intellectual autonomy and rationality, but we should reshape them to take account of our deeply social epistemic agency.

Disagreement and Religion: Problems and Prospects

Chapter 1 covers contemporary work on disagreement, detailing both the conceptual and normative issues in play in the debates in mainstream analytic epistemology, and how these relate to religious diversity and disagreement. Section 1 examines several sorts of disagreement, and considers several epistemological issues: in particular, what range of attitudes a body of evidence can support, how to understand higher-order evidence, and who counts as an epistemic “peer.” Section 2 considers how these questions surface when considering disagreements over religion, including debates over the nature of evidence and truth in religion, epistemic humility, concerns about irrelevant influences and about divine hiddenness, and arguments over exclusivism, inclusivism, and pluralism. Finally, section 3 summarizes the contributors’ essays in this volume.

Upshots for Other Debates

This chapter explores and draws out the consequences of both the dualist view of rationality defended in Part I and the theory of structural rationality defended in Part II for a series of standing debates in (meta)ethics and epistemology—including debates about moral rationalism, rational choice theory, higher-order evidence, the normativity of logic, epistemic permissivism, and conditionalization. It also considers and criticizes some popular ways of trying to account for the existence and force of coherence requirements in the formally inclined philosophical literature—namely, Dutch book and money pump arguments and accuracy dominance arguments.

Eliminations and Reductions I

This chapter examines and argues against attempts to eliminate the category of structural rationality or reduce it to substantive rationality. Together with the following chapter—which argues against eliminations and reductions of the converse kind—it thereby provides a positive case for dualism about rationality, according to which both kinds of rationality are genuine and neither is reducible to the other. On the way, it also argues that there are cases where being substantively rational does not suffice for being structurally rational, and examines the preface paradox and cases of misleading higher-order evidence.