Intellectual Norms and Epistemic Normativity

Abstract

Intellectual norms are norms which can guide the exercise of indirect doxastic control and govern doxastic responsibility assessments. With the help of intellectual norms we can evaluate whether an agent is blameworthy, praiseworthy or neutrally evaluable for holding a certain doxastic attitude. In the following chapter, I will explain what an intellectual norm is. I am roughly following Peels’ general idea that intellectual obligations regulate belief-influencing actions (2017, p. 100). Moreover, I will investigate the conditions under which an intellectual norm has epistemic significance. I will assume that if a norm has epistemic significance, then an evaluation which is governed by this norm is epistemically significant as well. Moreover, I will introduce an epistemic consequentialist approach to doxastic responsibility assessment and I will argue that the norms which govern these responsibility assessments can be characterized as epistemic norms. This will provide us with reasons to assume that the doxastic responsibility assessment which is modelled in an epistemic consequentialist framework is indeed an epistemically significant evaluation.