Abstract

Epistemologists often appeal to the idea that a normative theory must provide useful, usable, guidance to argue for one normative epistemology over another. I argue that this is a mistake. Guidance considerations have no role to play in theory choice in epistemology. I show how this has implications for debates about the possibility and scope of epistemic dilemmas, the legitimacy of idealisation in Bayesian epistemology, uniqueness versus permissivism, sharp versus mushy credences, and internalism versus externalism.

Highlights

  • Many epistemologists think that reflecting on the connection between normativity and guidance can help us to decide between competing views about the most general, fundamental, epistemic norms of belief—norms like: be rational; believe only truths; believe what your evidence supports, and; believe only what you know

  • Its role here is only to serve as a test case for the idea that guidance considerations can help us decide between competing views about the fundamental norms of belief, and this outline will suffice for it to serve that role

  • I can’t perform thousands of actions in an instant. This observation might be used to argue that guidance failures are less commonplace for moral and prudential norms than they are for epistemic norms, and that this difference means that we can use guidance considerations to choose between competing moral and prudential theories, even if we can’t use them to choose between competing epistemologies

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Summary

Introduction

Many epistemologists think that reflecting on the connection between normativity and guidance can help us to decide between competing views about the most general, fundamental, epistemic norms of belief—norms like: be rational; believe only truths; believe what your evidence supports, and; believe only what you know. The idea is that these norms must be capable of giving us adequate I’ll argue, it follows that guidance considerations have a much smaller role (at best) to play in deciding between competing views about these norms than it is widely assumed. The demanding conceptions cannot help us to decide between competing views because they are too demanding—if we accept them we will have to admit that no normative epistemology is adequately guiding. Section discusses a variety of ways in which the point generalises to other debates about the norms of belief, including uniqueness versus permissivism; sharp versus mushy credences; conflicts between substantive and structural norms of rational belief; and the demands of Bayesian probabilistic coherence.

Conflicting norms: a puzzle
Dilemmism
Ignorance and inability
Motivating norms
Perfect guides
On TRANSPARENCY
On ABILITY
Degrees of guidance
Ubiquitous irrationality
Blame-and-control epistemology
Overgeneralisation?
Specific ability versus general ability
Guidance without factualism
Propositionalism
Propositionalism plus truth
Psychologism
10 Guidance without MOTIVATING NORMS
10.1 Guiding dispositions
10.2 Constitutive and procedural norms
10.3 Guiding ideals
10.4 Guiding reasons
11 Generalising
11.1 The nature of the fundamental norms
11.2 Evidence and coherence
11.3 Uniqueness and permissivism
11.4 Bayesian epistemology
11.5 Sharp and mushy credences
11.6 What’s going on?
12 Conclusion
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