Abstract

While it is commonly accepted that justified beliefs must be strongly supported by evidence and that support comes in degrees, the question of how much evidential support one needs in order to have a justified belief remains. In this paper, I consider how the question about degrees of evidential support connects with recent debates between consequentialist and deontological explanations of epistemic norms. I argue that explaining why strong, but not conclusive, evidential support is required for justification should be one explanandum that such theories seek to explain. Furthermore, I argue that foundational theories that appeal to the promotion of epistemic value (especially consequentialism, but perhaps also some versions of epistemic deontology) are better suited to provide such an explanation.

Highlights

  • Many epistemologists agree that (a) for a belief that p to be justified, p must be supported by one’s evidence and (b) support comes in degrees

  • Perhaps some epistemic Kantians, might agree that epistemic norms do require some kind of explanation but claim that the sort of explanation demanded by Arbitrary Standards Challenge (ASC) falls outside of the scope of what we should expect from a foundational theory of justification

  • This suffices for a successful response to ASC

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Summary

Introduction

Many epistemologists agree that (a) for a belief that p to be justified, p must be supported by one’s evidence and (b) support comes in degrees. One approach would be to evade arbitrariness by endorsing one of the two limiting views, requiring either conclusive support or the mere favoring of p over ~ p by the evidence Another would be to dismiss the problem as a mere annoyance. Even supposing that we could identify some such value, say by testing our intuitions, this value would remain arbitrary in a more important sense, namely in the sense of lacking a normative explanation for why it is this degree of evidential support, rather than some other degree, that is normatively required for justification and for knowledge. In this paper I consider how consequentialist and deontological theories might explain why the evidential bar for justification is set where it is. The conclusion is modest but valuable: there is an important fact about justification that is better explained by appeal to value promotion than by any “pure” deontological account (i.e., one without promotional duties)

Consequentialist and Deontological Explanations of Evidential Norms
The Arbitrary Standards Challenge
The determinacy problem and the explanatory problem
The challenge
A Consequentialist Solution to the Degree Problem
Deontological Explanations of the VP Response
Brute Deontology
Epistemic Kantianism
ASC and the Epistemic Consequentialism Versus Deontology Debate
Alternatives to the VP response
Why ASC matters
Conclusion
Full Text
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