Epistemic Duties Research Articles

Reconciling Epistemic Duty with Non-voluntary Belief

Reconciling Epistemic Duty with Non-voluntary Belief

Trusting others. The epistemological authority of testimony

I propose to consider the interpersonal character of testimony as a kind of social bond created by the mutual intention of sharing knowledge. The paper explores the social mechanism that supports this mutual intention starting from an initial situation of modelling the other's epistemic perspective. Accepting testimony as a joint action creates epistemic duties and responsibilities and the eventual success can be considered as a genuine achievement at the social level of epistemology. Trust is presented here as the symptom that both parties are involved in such a social bond.

DEONTOLOGY IN ETHICS AND EPISTEMOLOGY

Abstract: In this article, I consider some of the similarities and differences between deontologism in ethics and epistemology. In particular, I highlight two salient differences between them. I aim to show that by highlighting these differences we can see that epistemic deontologism does not imply epistemic internalism and that it is not a thesis primarily about epistemic permissibility. These differences are: (1) deontologism in epistemology has a quasi‐teleological feature (not shared with moral deontologism) in that it does not require that one abide by epistemic duties for the sake of (and not merely in accordance with) those very duties; and (2) in ethics, the relevant options we speak of are whether someone acts or does not act; in epistemology, we have an analogous further option: we can speak of whether someone believes that p, fails to believe that p, or withholds judgment about that p.

Why There Are No Epistemic Duties

ABSTRACTEpistemic duties would be duties to believe, disbelieve, or withhold judgement from propositions, and they would be grounded in purely evidential considerations. I offer a new argument for the claim that there are no epistemic duties. Though people may have duties to believe, disbelieve, or withhold judgement from propositions, those duties are never grounded in purely epistemic considerations. Rather, allegedly epistemic duties are a species of moral duty.

Comments on the Will to Believe

Kasher and Nishi interpret James as holding an expressivist theory about epistemic duties, as well as other normative sentences. On this interpretation, James’s claim that we have a will‐to‐believe type option to believe an epistemic duty winds up being inconsistent. For one can believe only that which is either true or false; but, for the expressivist, normative claims are neither. It is argued that Feldman’s essay is not only a wildly anachronistic account of Clifford and James but also is of no philosophical merit in its own right.

A Contextualist Solution to the Gettier Problem

According to the deontological view on justification, being justified in believing some proposition is a matter of having done one's epistemic duty with respect to that proposition. The present paper argues that, given a proper articulation of the deontological view, it is defensible that knowledge is justified true belief, virtually all epistemologists since Gettier. One important claim to be argued for is that once it is appreciated that it depends on contextual factors whether a person has done her epistemic duty with respect to a given proposition, many so-called Gettier cases, which are supposed to be cases of justified true belief that are not cases of knowledge, will be seen to be not really cases of justified belief after all. A second important claim is that the remaining alleged Gettier cases can be qualified as cases of knowledge. This requires that we countenance a notion of epistemic luck, but the requisite kind of luck is of a quite benign nature.

Epistemic Virtue and Epistemic Responsibility

Virtue epistemology construes intellectual virtue as a reliable ability to form true beliefs. Responsibilist versions seek to substitute for the passive, reliabilist model of the knower, that of an active subject who deliberately and purposefully exercises traits of character which tend to result in true beliefs. On these views, the disposition to exercise these epistemic virtues gives rise to notions of epistemic duty. In this paper, I propose a principle of doxastic rationality based on Bernard Williams’argument against doxastic voluntarism. This principle, I go on to show, undermines a number of notions of epistemic duty which have been put forth within the framework of virtue theory. I then suggest an alternative formulation which remains within the bounds of rationality allowed for by my principle. In the end, I suggest that the failure of the earlier formulations and the adoption of the latter tend to vindicate the initial grounding of virtue epistemology in reliabilist intuitions.

Entitlement: Epistemic Rights without Epistemic Duties?

The debate between externalists and internalists in epistemology can be viewed as a disagreement about whether there are epistemic rights (to believe) without corresponding duties or obligations (to justify what is believed). Taking an epistemic right to believe P as an authorization to not only accept P as true but to use P as a positive reason for accepting other propositions, the debate is about whether there are unjustified justifiers. It is about whether there are propositions that provide for others what nothing need provide for them-viz., for thinking them true. I take externalists to be people who believe there are such unjustified justifiers and internalists to be those who deny it. Externalists hold that we are entitled to believe some things for which we have no justification. Some externalists-I happen to be one of them-go farther and say we are not only entitled to believe things we have no to believe, we often, in fact, know things we have no reason to believe. Knowledge, the supreme form of entitlement, requires no justification. This is not to say that it doesn't sometimes have it. Talk of justification and reasons may not be the right way to characterize this disagreement since parties to the dispute tend to use these words in

Counter-evidence and the Duty to Critically Reflect

The intuitive appeal of the deontological approach to epistemic justification has diminished of late, as objection has grown to the assumption of doxastic voluntarism which this approach is said to entail. (For a classic statement of the problem see Alston 1989.) With a view to defending the deontological view, Kiheyon Kim (1994) distinguishes two kinds of duties which might serve as a basis for epistemic justification: (1) the duty to form one's beliefs in a prescribed manner (2) the duty to reflect critically on the beliefs one holds. The former kind of duty would indeed require that one have direct voluntary control over one's beliefs, which is the assumption that the critics reject. Epistemic deontologists have in mind, however, according to Kim, the latter kind of duty, and the assumption of voluntarism entailed by that duty, he asserts, does not seem to be problematic. It is this last claim that I wish to call into question. That we do have the ability to critically reflect at will upon our beliefs certainly seems to be the case, in the way that our having the ability to voluntarily choose our beliefs does not. When we find ourselves troubled about a belief we often make efforts to confirm or correct it. Is it ever our duty to do so, however? Clearly, we cannot have a duty to reflect on all our beliefs. As Paul Tidman (1996) points out, so long as the duty to critically reflect on one's beliefs is formulated in utterly general terms, it is far too demanding. We do not even notice most of our ordinary, everyday beliefs, much less critically reflect upon them, yet no one would think to hold us in violation of our epistemic duty on that account. Such an unrestricted duty, moreover, would be ruled out by the principle of 'ought' implies 'can', Tidman adds, for in the course of critically reflecting on any one belief one typically forms additional beliefs. These latter beliefs would in turn call for critical reflection, so that one's duty with respect to the initial belief could never be discharged. Although Tidman argues that there is no version of epistemic duty adequate to provide for a deontological notion of epistemic justification, he considers the possibility that in some cases we may have an epistemic duty to reflect on our beliefs. Whatever other problems he sees with this duty, he seems to concur with Kim and others that it is not subject to problems of doxastic voluntarism (e.g. Steup 1988 and 1996). If the duty is to be viable, then, and it does not apply to all our beliefs, by what criteria do we pick out those beliefs to which it does apply?

Epistemic and Ethical Duties in Clinical Decision-making

AbstractIn the course of psychotherapy, psychologists need to make important clinical decisions regarding treatment goal selection, measurement procedures, and treatment methods. These decisions can be made without regard to the epistemic and ethical responsibilities that accompany professional status. Epistemic duties are obligations to obtain and have knowledge, while ethical duties are obligations to apply this knowledge accurately. We argue that these epistemic and ethical responsibilities are invoked and can be adequately addressed in the informed consent process. When the informed consent process is violated or done poorly, our epistemic and ethical responsibilities are not met and the client may be harmed. We argue that what the public assumes it is buying from us (and what we purport to sell) are specialised knowledge and skills; when psychologists are not meeting their epistemic duties, what our clients are receiving instead is intuition and performance art. We discuss errors that occur in the course of psychotherapy, as well as how we as professionals must seek to reduce or eliminate them.

DEONTIC VS. NONDEONTIC CONCEPTIONS OF EPISTEMIC JUSTIFICATION

Theories of epistemic justification are usually described as belonging to either deontological or nondeontological categories of justification with the former construing the concept of justification as involving the fulfillment of epistemic duty. Despite being the dominant view among traditional epistemologists, the deontological conception has been subjected to severe criticisms in the current literature for failing, among others, to do justice to the (alleged) truth-conducive character of epistemic justification. In this paper I set out to show that there is something deeply unsatisfying about the way these different conceptions of justification are usually introduced and contrasted with each other leaving it unclear just what it is that renders a particular conception deontological. In particular I look at Alston's treatment of the issue, and show that his reasons for rejecting the deontological conception involve question-begging assumptions demonstrating, at best, the possibility of its divergence from truth-conductive justification. Far from being able to settle the issue one way or another, the arguments, I shall suggest actually seem to show some sort of tolerant pluralism in justification theory to be a live option.

Critical reflection: an alleged epistemic duty

Kihyeon Kim (1994) has attempted to rescue the deontological conception of epistemic justification from a line of criticism advanced by William Alston. According to this conception justification is understood as a matter of being epistemically responsible; of believing what one ought to believe. Alston (1986) argues that the deontological conception is implausible because it entails doxastic voluntarism (the view that one can exercise direct voluntary control over what one believes at any given moment). Alston notes that we rarely, if ever, can exercise such control. For example, upon seeing a truck coming down the street, one is not at liberty to either believe or refrain from believing that the truck is coming down the street. Kim summarizes Alston's argument as follows:

Critical reflection: an alleged epistemic duty

Critical reflection: an alleged epistemic duty

Precis of Warrant: The Current Debate and Warrant and Proper Function

In Warrant: the Current Debate I noted first that 20th century British and American Epistemology has been dominated by internalist notions, the most important of which is justification. I also noted that contemporary epistemology presents a vast, confused, and confusing welter of views, and that in two crucial respects. First, there is a great deal of confusion as to what the connection is between justification, on the one hand, and rationality, knowledge, evidence, and internalist constraints on the other. Second, there is confusion as to the relation between warrant (that property or quantity that distinguishes knowledge from mere true belief) and justification. And thirdly, there is the same confused and confusing welter of opinion as to what justification itself is. (Among some of the more popular candidates: justification is taken as a matter of epistemic responsibility or aptness for epistemic duty fulfillment, as an evaluation of how well you have fulfilled your epistemic goals, as being believed or accepted on the basis of an adequate truth-conducive ground, as being produced by a reliable beliefproducing mechanism, as being supported by or fitting the evidence, and as a matter of everything's going right, for the knowing subject, with respect to cognitive processes 'downstream from experience'.) I argued that order can be introduced into this chaos by tracing the notion of justification back to its source in the classical deontologism of Descartes and especially Locke, both of whom speak of epistemic duty or obligation. Locke sees our main epistemic duty as that of proportioning belief to the evidence afforded by what is certain: my duty is to believe a proposition that isn't certain for me to the degree to which it is probable with respect to what is certain for me. Now some contemporaries (BonJour, the classical Chisholm) explicitly explain justification as epistemic responsibility or aptness for epistemic duty fulfillment, thus following the deontological lead of

Premise Acceptability, Deontology, Internalism, Justification

Acceptability is a thoroughly normative epistemic notion. If a statement is acceptable, i.e. it is proper to take it as a premise, then one is justified in accepting it. We also hold that a statement is acceptable just in case there is a presumption of warrant in its favor. We thus see acceptability connected to epistemic normativity on the one hand and to warrant on the other. But there is a distinct tension in this dual connection. The dominant tradition in modern epistemology sees epistemic justification as an internalist notion. We are justified in holding a belief just in case certain conditions are fulfilled of which we have privileged access. Warrant is an externalist notion. We have no privileged access to the conditions of warrant. Is our understanding of acceptability as both normative and definable in terms of presumption of warrant philosophically coherent? We shall argue that it is a philosophically coherent notion. Presumption of warrant, unlike warrant, is an internalist notion. Our position can be characterized as an externalist internal ism. It avoids the charge brought against externalism of allowing one to be justified in accepting some claim even if one has no evidence for it. We meet the classical internalist challenge that acceptance is normatively proper only if one has done one's epistemic duty and thus one is aware of the normative propriety of the acceptance by providing a non-deontological definition of epistemic justification, and arguing that this is still a sufficiently normative notion for acceptability.

Plantinga, Pluralism and Justified Religious Belief

According to Alvin Plantinga, it has been widely held since the Enlightenment that if theistic beliefs are to be considered rational, they be based on propositional evidence. It is not enough for the theist just to refute objections. The theist must also have something like an argument for [such a] belief, or some positive reason to think that the belief is true. But this is incorrect, Plantinga argues. Basic beliefs are beliefs not based on propositional evidence; such beliefs are basic in a set of if they can be so affirmed in those circumstances either violating an epistemic duty or displaying some kind of noetic defect. And , according to Plantinga, theistic beliefs can be properly basic. For example, he argues that under widely realized conditions it is perfectly rational, reasonable, intellectually respectable and acceptable to believe there is such a person as God without believing it on the basis of evidence -propositional evidence vs. the kind instanced by 'the evidence of the senses'. But can a properly basic belief such as this have any epistemic credibility (warrant) if it is not conferred by other propositions whose epistemic status is not in question? Yes, Plantinga replies. There are two significantly different ways in which a proposition can acquire warrant. There is propositional warrant -warrant conferred by an evidential line of reasoning from other beliefs. However, there is also nonpropositional warrant.

Properly unargued belief in God

The content of this doctrine requires some explanation. Let us agree that a person is epistemically justified in holding a certain belief if and only if the person in virtue of holding the belief does not violate any epistemic duty or manifest any epistemic defect. The notion of a good argument I will take for granted. But what is it to have a good argument, in the sense involved in (1)? Surely a person who merely believes truly that there is a good argument for a certain conclusion on such-and-such a page of a textbook should not be said to have thereby the argument stated on that page. Furthermore the mere ability to construct an argument seems insufficient. Let us say that a person S has a good argument for a certain conclusion if and only if S knows some statement of the argument and truly believes that the argument so stated is a good argument for the conclusion. I shan't pause to say more about the nature of the knowledge and belief involved here, except to remark that they may be dispositional rather than occurrent. For yesterday I had a good argument for "394 is an even number" viz. "any number ending in an even number is an even number; 394 ends in an even number"; therefore 394 is an even number" even though before this morning I had never entertained that proposition. On the other hand S may have forgotten an argument, and so not have it, even though S can with a bit of effort reconstruct it.