Maria Lasonen

Does ‘higher-order evidence’ that one’s belief is rationally flawed defeat its status as rational (as justified, as knowledge)? Such a view is committed to two claims. First, it is possible to acquire misleading evidence about the normative status of one’s doxastic states. Second, such evidence has defeating force with respect to the belief. My aim is to do two things. First, I outline a view I call _normative evincibility_, according to which one always has a kind of epistemic access to the normative status of one’s doxastic states (intentions, actions, etc.). I show how commitment to higher-order defeat incurs a commitment to a form of normative evincibility. Second, I argue that the idea that it is possible to acquire misleading evidence about the normative status of one’s doxastic states is in tension with evincibility. Hence, there is a deep tension inherent in views committed to defeat by higher-order evidence.

Numerous authors have defended the rough idea that it is irrational to fail to conform to one’s judgments about what it would be rational to do, or what doxastic states it would be rational to be in. This chapter examines _rational reflection_ principles as an attempt to implement this idea in contexts of uncertainty about what credence distributions are rational. After outlining some problems with Old Rational Reflection, the chapter discusses what seems like a well-motivated fix, New Rational Reflection. It is argued that an intuitive way of trying to motivate the principle fails, and that it faces counterexamples. To say the least, the principle imposes substantial and controversial constraints on the kinds of epistemic situations it is possible to be in. A more general problem is that rational reflection principles seem doomed to take seriously certain kinds of uncertainty about what is rational, but not others.

The book develops and defends a general normative framework called feasibilism. Feasibilist norms urge manifesting the best feasible dispositions—ways of forming and retaining doxastic states, as well as choosing and acting, that are available to beings like us. The first half of the book presents case studies showing how epistemological implementations of feasibilism can advance long-standing debates in epistemology, including the New Evil Demon Problem, puzzles involving higher-order evidence and defeat, and challenges facing broadly consequentialist approaches. The feasibilist norm defended urges manifesting the most knowledge-conducive feasible dispositions. This knowledge-centric implementation, I argue, provides the most promising normative theory in epistemology: simple, elegant, metaphysically respectable, and explanatorily powerful. The second half of the book moves from epistemology to a more systematic defence of the feasibilist normative framework. In the moral domain, too, we are confronted with problems of luck and limitation. Given any plausible standard of moral rightness, in some situations it is only possible to do the right thing by luck. Again, we need a normative standards more attuned to our limitations. Applying the feasibilist framework to the moral domain yields interesting and surprising results—for instance, that one can sometimes be blameworthy for morally right action. Feasibilism thus unifies different normative domains within a single, non-ideal framework, offering standards attuned to human limitations but tied to valuable normative successes.

A knowledge-first starting point in epistemology has much to recommend it. However, a full picture of epistemic normativity cannot get by with just a knowledge norm. I have argued that the missing normative standard can be found by looking at the knowledge-conduciveness of the dispositions manifested by subjects when forming and retaining doxastic states. A doxastic state that falls short of knowledge can nevertheless be reasonable in virtue of being formed and retained by manifesting dispositions that are among the most knowledge-conducive feasible ones. Given a rather broad way of understanding consequentialism, my view is consequentialist, for reasonable belief is understood in terms of a kind of conduciveness to knowledge. However, several authors have argued that any form of consequentialism in epistemology faces an array of insurmountable objections. I consider three prominent objections: the problem of tradeoffs, the challenge of generalising a consequentialist norm to suspension of judgment, and variants of the so-called swamping problem. I argue that none have bite against my view.

My aim in this paper is to introduce and motivate a general normative framework, which I call feasibilism, and to sketch a view of the relationship between the prescriptive and the hypological in the epistemic domain by drawing on the theoretical resources provided by this framework. I then generalise the lesson to the moral domain. I begin by motivating feasibilism. A wide range of norms appear to leave uncharted an important part of the normative landscape. Across different domains we need norms more directed at the subject, and less dependent on how the world beyond our control plays out. In the beginning of this paper I briefly outline two broad ways of seeking such subject-directed norms: perspectivism and feasibilism. According to feasibilism, the ultimate reason why more objectivist norms are inadequate on their own is not that they fail to take into account the limits of an agent’s perspective, but that they are not sensitive to limits on what ways of choosing, acting, and believing are feasible in a given situation. I think of these ways of choosing, acting, and believing in terms of an agent’s dispositions. This paper focuses on a gnosticist implementation of feasibilism. Such a view supplements a knowledge norm with a norm urging one to only be in doxastic states that are manifestations of the most knowledge-conducive feasible dispositions – that is, a norm urging one to be in doxastic states that are reasonable. But how should we think about the normative statuses of knowledge versus reasonableness? By drawing on two general hypotheses about the relationship between succeeding (e.g. knowing) and manifesting dispositions conducive to success (e.g. reasonable belief), I argue for a view on which the prescriptive and the hypological come radically apart. The result is that an epistemic analogue of a thesis that many have assumed to hold in the moral realm should be rejected. This thesis is Only Blameworthy for Wrongs: we can only ever be blameworthy for acts that are morally wrong. I argue that on the picture presented, we can be epistemically blameworthy for doxastic states that do not violate any prescriptive epistemic norms. I then generalise the considerations to the moral realm, arguing against Only Blameworthy for Wrongs.

According to a version of Infallibilism, if one knows that p, then one’s evidence for p entails p. In her Fallibilism: Evidence and Knowledge, Jessica Brown has recently developed two arguments against Infalliblism, which can both be presented in the form of a dilemma. According to the first dilemma, the infallibilist can avoid scepticism only if she endorses the claim that if one knows that p then p is part of one’s evidence for p. But this seems to come at the cost of making infelicitous claims. According to the second dilemma, the infallibilist cannot make sense of the phenomenon of defeat unless she rejects closure. In this paper, we argue that the infallibilist has the conceptual tools to resist both dilemmas.

The notion of credit plays a central role in virtue epistemology and in the literature on moral worth. While virtue epistemologists and ethicists have devoted a significant amount of work to providing an account of creditable success, a unified theory of credit applicable to both epistemology and ethics, as well as a discussion of the general form it should take, are largely missing from the literature. Our goal is to lay out a theory of credit that seems to underlie much of the discussion in virtue epistemology, which we dub the Cake Theory. We argue that given the goals that virtue epistemologists and ethicists who discuss moral worth have, this theory is problematic, for it makes credit depend on the wrong facts.

Being incoherent is often viewed as a paradigm kind of irrationality. Numerous authors attempt to explain the distinct-seeming failure of incoherence by positing a set of requirements of structural rationality. I argue that the notion of coherence that structural requirements are meant to capture is very slippery, and that intuitive judgments – in particular, a charge of a distinct, blatant kind of irrationality – are very imperfectly correlated with respecting the canon of structural requirements. I outline an alternative strategy for explaining our patterns of normative disapproval, one appealing to feasible dispositions to conform to substantive, non-structural norms. A wide range of paradigmatic cases of incoherence, I will argue, involve manifesting problematic dispositions, dispositions that manifest across a range of cases as blatant-seeming normative failures.

I begin with by discussing cases that seem to show that a range of norms – norms like Choose the best!, Believe the truth!, and even Keep your promises! – fail to map out an important part of normative space. At the core of the problem is the observation that in some cases we can only conform to these norms by luck, in a way that is not creditable to us. I outline a prevalent diagnosis of the problem of luck, which I label perspectivist. According to this diagnosis, the problem with a range of objectivist norms is that they make reference to facts that may lie outside our perspectives, not being present to our minds. An agent’s perspective is a kind of representation of the world: her evidence, knowledge, beliefs, experiences, etc. The first aim of this paper is to argue that the perspectivist diagnosis of the problem of luck is not ultimately correct. The correct diagnosis, I argue, is feasibilist: in some situations it is not feasible to choose, act, or believe in ways that conformity to objectivist norms robustly depends on. That is, it is sometimes not feasible to manifest dispositions that robustly enough track what one ought to do or believe, according to norms like those listed above. The same, I argue, is true of perspectivist norms: sometimes it is not feasible to track facts about our own perspectives. This shift in focus from the limits of our perspectives to limits on what dispositions it is feasible to manifest has, I argue, deep ramifications for normative theory. My second aim is to sketch an alternative, feasibilist way of thinking about a more subject-directed kind of normativity, one that takes into account our limitations as human agents. The result is a normative picture that unifies the practical and theoretical domains.

The main aims in this article are to discuss and criticize the core thesis of a position that has become known as phenomenal conservatism. According to this thesis, its seeming to one that p provides enough justification for a belief in p to be prima facie justified. This thesis captures the special kind of epistemic import that seemings are claimed to have. To get clearer on this thesis, the article embeds it, first, in a probabilistic framework in which updating on new evidence happens by Bayesian conditionalization, and second, a framework in which updating happens by Jeffrey conditionalization. The article spells out problems for both views, and then generalizes some of these to nonprobabilistic frameworks. The main theme of the discussion is that the epistemic import of a seeming should depend on its content in a plethora of ways that phenomenal conservatism is insensitive to.

Numerous authors have defended the rough idea that it is irrational to fail to conform to one’s judgments about what it would be rational to do, or what doxastic states it would be rational to be in. This chapter examines rational reflection principles as an attempt to implement this idea in contexts of uncertainty about what credence distributions are rational. After outlining some problems with Old Rational Reflection, the chapter discusses what seems like a well-motivated fix, New Rational Reflection. It is argued that an intuitive way of trying to motivate the principle fails, and that it faces counterexamples. To say the least, the principle imposes substantial and controversial constraints on the kinds of epistemic situations it is possible to be in. A more general problem is that rational reflection principles seem doomed to take seriously certain kinds of uncertainty about what is rational, but not others.

Subjects who retain their beliefs in the face of higher-order evidence that those very beliefs are outputs of flawed cognitive processes are at least very often criticisable. Many think that this is because such higher-order evidence defeats various epistemic statuses such as justification and knowledge, but it is notoriously difficult to give an account of such defeat. This paper outlines an alternative explanation, stemming from some of my earlier work, for why subjects are criticisable for retaining beliefs in the face of paradigm kinds of putatively defeating higher-order evidence: they manifest dispositions that are bad relative to a range of candidate epistemic successes such as true belief and knowledge. In particular, giving up belief in response to higher-order evidence only when that evidence is not misleading would require subjects to have dispositions that discriminate between cases in which their original cognitive processes is fine, and cases in which they merely seemed to be fine. But, I argue, such dispositions are not normally humanly feasible. I show that retaining belief in putative cases of defeat by higher-order evidence is problematic irrespective of whether veritism or some form of gnosticism is true. In the end I contrast my account of dispositional evaluations with similar-sounding ideas that have been put forth in the literature, such as consequentialist views that focus on instrumental means to success.

Evidence is one of the most fundamental notions in the field of epistemology and is emerging as a major topic across academic disciplines. The practice of every academic discipline consists largely in providing evidence for key theses and The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of the Philosophy of Evidence, the first collection of its kind, is an outstanding reference source to the key topics, problems and debates in this exciting subject. Comprising over forty chapters by a team of international contributors the Handbook is divided into six parts: Ontology of evidence Sources of evidence Evidence and normativity Evidence and probability Social epistemology of evidence Evidence in the disciplines. Within these sections central issues, debates and problems are examined. Questions covered include: What is evidence? What is the relationship between knowledge and evidence? Is a pluralism of evidence possible? What other sources of evidence are there in addition to perception? Is what a person ought to believe completely fixed by the totality of evidence they have, or does it also depend on other factors like practical interests? Can evidential force be measured in any well-behaved way? How do socially created biases - for instance, gender biases - affect evidence-gathering? How is evidence relevant within different academic disciplines? The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of the Philosophy of Evidence is essential reading for students and researchers in philosophy of science and epistemology and related disciplines such as law, religion, history and the social sciences.

According to the Dogmatism Puzzle, knowledge breeds dogmatism: if a subject knows a proposition h, then she is justified in disregarding any future evidence against h, for she knows that such evidence is misleading. The standard, widely accepted, solution to the puzzle appeals to the defeasibility of knowledge. I argue that the defeat solution leaves intact a residual dogmatist puzzle. Solving this puzzle requires proponents of defeat to deny a plausible principle that the original puzzle relies on called Entitlement, a principle stating roughly that knowing that a piece of evidence is misleading entitles one to disregard it. The plausibility of Entitlement should cast doubt not only on the defeat solution, but on an assumption that has often been taken for granted: the falsity of the dogmatist conclusion of the original puzzle. I conclude that we face a dilemma between giving up Entitlement and living with dogmatism.

In this article we aim to reconstruct some aspects of Davidson's idea of triangulation, and against this reconstruction, ask whether the idea is viciously circular. We begin by looking at the claim that without a triangularn setting, there is no saying what the cause of a being's responses is. In the first section we discuss the notion of relevant similarity, and what difference the presence of a second non‐linguistic being could make for the individuation of a common focus of attention. In the second section we look at the role of a second person in language‐acquisition. It is important that being corrected to ‘go on as others do’ does not yet presuppose thought, and similarity standards can be applied to a learner's reactions even before she is aware of these standards. We also show why Davidson is not committed to any consensus view of correctness. In the last section we discern three charges of circularity that can be levelled against the idea of triangulation. We argue that Davidson can respond to the first two charges, and point to a way of answering the third. But the response we propound raises a new question, namely, why does the second being have to be a speaker or thinker even before the learner is aware of the three points of the triangle?

It is tempting to think that multi premise closure creates a special class of paradoxes having to do with the accumulation of risks, and that these paradoxes could be escaped by rejecting the principle, while still retaining single premise closure. I argue that single premise deduction is also susceptible to risks. I show that what I take to be the strongest argument for rejecting multi premise closure is also an argument for rejecting single premise closure. Because of the symmetry between the principles, they come as a package: either both will have to be rejected or both will have to be revised.

Recent authors have drawn attention to a new kind of defeating evidence commonly referred to as higher-order evidence. Such evidence works by inducing doubts that one’s doxastic state is the result of a flawed process – for instance, a process brought about by a reason-distorting drug. I argue that accommodating defeat by higher-order evidence requires a two-tiered theory of justification, and that the phenomenon gives rise to a puzzle. The puzzle is that at least in some situations involving higher-order defeaters the correct epistemic rules issue conflicting recommendations. For instance, a subject ought to believe p, but she ought also to suspend judgment in p. I discuss three responses. The first resists the puzzle by arguing that there is only one correct epistemic rule, an Über-rule. The second accepts that there are genuine epistemic dilemmas. The third appeals to a hierarchy or ordering of correct epistemic rules. I spell out problems for all of these responses. I conclude that the right lesson to draw from the puzzle is that a state can be epistemically rational or justified even if one has what looks to be strong evidence to think that it is not. As such, the considerations put forth constitute a non question-begging argument for a kind of externalism.

I look at incompatibilist arguments aimed at showing that the conjunction of the thesis that a subject has privileged, a priori access to the contents of her own thoughts, on the one hand, and of semantic externalism, on the other, lead to a putatively absurd conclusion, namely, a priori knowledge of the external world. I focus on arguments involving a variety of externalism resulting from the singularity or object-dependence of certain terms such as the demonstrative ‘that’. McKinsey argues that incompatibilist arguments employing such externalist theses are at their strongest, and conclusively show that privileged access must be rejected. While I agree on the truth of the relevant externalist theses, I show that all plausible versions of the incompatibilist reductio argument as applied to such theses are fundamentally flawed, for these versions of the argument must make assumptions that lead to putatively absurd knowledge of the external world independently of the thesis of privileged access.

McKinsey-style incompatibilist arguments attempt to show that the thesis that subjects have privileged, a priori access to the contents of their thoughts is incompatible with semantic externalism. This incompatibility follows – it is urged – from the fact that these theses jointly entail an absurd conclusion, namely, the possibility of a priori knowledge of the world. In a recent paper I argued that a large and important class of such arguments exemplifies a dialectical failure: if they are valid, the putatively absurd conclusion can be generated without the privileged access premise. Michael McKinsey has responded by arguing that the semantic externalist should adopt a neutral free logic invalidating a principle that my argument essentially relies on. I will say why the semantic commitments of the externalist are in tension with free logic, thereby vindicating my original argument.

We think we have lots of substantial knowledge about the future. But contemporary wisdom has it that indeterminism prevails in such a way that just about any proposition about the future has a non-zero objective chance of being false.2, 3 What should one do about this? One, pessimistic, reaction is scepticism about knowledge of the future. We think this should be something of a last resort, especially since this scepticism is likely to infect alleged knowledge of the present and past. One anti-sceptical strategy is to pin our hopes on determinism, conceding that knowledge of the future is unavailable in an indeterministic world. This is not satisfying either: we would rather not be hostage to empirical fortune in the way that this strategy recommends. A final strategy, one that we shall explore in this paper, is one of reconciliation: knowledge of a proposition is compatible with a subject’s belief having a non-zero objective chance of error.4 Following Williamson, we are interested in tying knowledge to the presence or absence of error in close cases, and so we shall explore the connections between knowledge and objective chance within such a framework. We don’t want to get tangled up here in complications involved in attempting to formulate a necessary and sufficient condition for knowledge in terms of safety. Instead, we will assume the following rough and ready necessary condition: a subject knows P only if she could not easily have falsely believed P.5 Assuming that easiness is to be spelt..

My starting point is some widely accepted and intuitive ideas about justified, well-founded belief. By drawing on John Pollock’s work, I sketch a formal framework for making these ideas precise. Central to this framework is the notion of an inference graph. An inference graph represents everything that is relevant about a subject for determining which of her beliefs are justified, such as what the subject believes based on what. The strengths of the nodes of the graph represent the degrees of justification of the corresponding beliefs. There are two ways in which degrees of justification can be computed within this framework. I argue that there is not any way of doing the calculations in a broadly probabilistic manner. The only alternative looks to be a thoroughly non-probabilistic way of thinking wedded to the thought that justification is closed under competent deduction. However, I argue that such a view is unable to capture the intuitive notion of justification, for it leads to an uncomfortable dilemma: either a widespread scepticism about justification, or drawing epistemically spurious distinctions between different types of lotteries. This should worry anyone interested in well-founded belief.