Asbjørn Steglich-Petersen

It is tempting to think that whenever one has evidence for a proposition, one thereby has epistemic reason to believe it. Yet we often have evidence bearing on propositions that it would be pointless to believe. Such cases generate a familiar “too few reasons” problem for epistemic instrumentalism, but they are also puzzling for broader families of views that connect reasons to value or derive deontic verdicts from the comparative weight of normative reasons. This paper argues from three independently plausible principles that we should reject the existence of epistemic reasons for pointless beliefs and relies on this to motivate a version of epistemic instrumentalism. It also addresses the worry that even when it comes to uninteresting propositions it seems irrational to believe against one’s evidence, by explaining how this irrationality is compatible with the absence of epistemic reasons bearing on such propositions.

This paper argues that the idea that privacy concerns information admits two importantly different interpretations. On the aboutness view, a person's privacy is a function of others' access to information about that person. On the informational view, privacy is a function of access to states of affairs that have the capacity to be informative with regard to a person. We argue that these views are distinct and that the informational view is preferable. Our central argument turns on cases of informative absence: cases where the absence of a person from a database or record carries information about them despite containing nothing about them in the sense required by the aboutness view. We show that the informational view can explain when and why such absences matter for privacy in a principled way, while the aboutness view is systematically blind to this entire class of cases. Undergirding our argument is the adoption of Kelp and Simion's (2025) knowledge-based account of information, which we argue is superior to probabilistic alternatives both independently and for the specific purposes of privacy theory.

According to what is sometimes seen as a norm in liberal democratic societies, policy decisions should be founded on well-substantiated factual insights, with science and solid scientific institutions deemed as the authoritative entities on these matters. Call this norm Role of Science in Liberal Democracies (RSLD). We first offer some evidence supporting the presence of a commitment to RSLD and situate it within the foundational traits of liberal democracies. We explore what, if anything, justifies such commitment to RSLD and identify two distinct routes to its justification. RSLD could be _internally justified_ through some unique affinity between science and liberal democracies, or it could be _externally justified_ by some general norm of rationality or morality. We explore and reject both possibilities. Instead, we propose a new hybrid justification of RSLD, according to which deference to science on the part of democratic decision-makers is necessary for realizing a fundamental value of democracy, namely autonomy or self-government.

While difficulties with emotion regulation are widely recognized to be prevalent in individuals with ADHD, researchers disagree on the centrality and explanatory role of dysregulated emotions in ADHD. “Lumpers” comprehend emotion dysregulation as a core symptom alongside inattention, hyperactivity and impulsivity, while “splitters” view the combination as a distinct entity, and “diplomats” hold that they are correlated but ultimately dissociable (Shaw et al. 2014). The literature has predominantly focused on negative emotions such as anger and irritability, often overlooking positive emotional states like curiosity and interest, possibly because these were not traditionally regarded as genuine emotions. We argue that they indeed qualify as epistemic emotions and demonstrate how they can become dysregulated in various ways. By properly acknowledging these emotional dimensions, the core symptoms of ADHD can be understood as manifestations of emotional dysregulation. With this, our account will offer support for “lumpers” and indicates that granting a more prominent explanatory role to emotions and emotional dysregulation could lead to a more unified and integrative model of cognition and behavior in ADHD.

Akratic action is voluntarily acting against one’s better judgement. Akratic belief is believing against one’s better judgement. We here provide an account of a phenomena that sits somewhere between the two: ‘akratic thinking’. This is where we engage in a thought process against our better judgement. While the idea of akratic thinking has been tentatively considered before, no account has yet been offered of it. This is what we’ll offer here. Our account will seek to show how akratic thinking is possible, the different forms it can take, and the kind of irrationality involved. We’ll also explore how the notion of akratic thinking can provide an alternative explanation for some ostensible cases of akratic belief, and the implications it may have for our understanding of certain mental disorders.

People working on the ethics of discrimination have struggled with accounting for a kind of moral wrongdoing that is thought to be present in all instances of wrongful discrimination. So far, any moral wrong claimed to be characteristic of wrongful discrimination in this way has failed to generalize to all cases of wrongful discrimination, moving many to abandon the idea that wrongful discrimination is normatively distinct at all. Motivated by this situation, we propose to abandon the assumption that the common moral wrong of wrongful discrimination must be a first-order moral wrong. Instead, we argue that the common wrong of discrimination is a normative mistake in a more general sense, namely the flaw of being biased. Drawing on Thomas Kelly’s (2022) recent work on bias, we show that this account provides a unified and plausible answer to the question of what makes wrongful discrimination characteristically morally wrong, while being able to accommodate the plurality of moral considerations at play in wrongful discrimination.

In some cases of higher-order defeat, you rationally doubt whether your credence in p is rational without having evidence of how to improve your credence in p. According to the resilience framework proposed by Steglich-Petersen (Higher-order defeat and Doxastic Resilience), such cases require loss of doxastic resilience: retain your credence level but become more disposed to change your mind given future evidence. Henderson (Higher-Order Evidence and Losing One’s Conviction) responds that this allows for irrational decision-making and that we are better off understanding higher-order defeat in terms of imprecise probabilities. We argue first that Henderson’s imprecise probability framework models the wrong kind of thing. Credal imprecision is neither necessary nor sufficient for higher-order doubt. Second, we offer two ways of understanding the practical import of higher-order defeat given loss of doxastic resilience.

Inquiry is an aim-directed activity, and as such governed by instrumental normativity. If you have reason to figure out a question, you have reason to take means to figuring it out. Beliefs are governed by epistemic normativity. On a certain pervasive understanding, this means that you are permitted – maybe required – to believe what you have sufficient evidence for. The norms of inquiry and epistemic norms both govern us as agents in pursuit of knowledge and understanding, and, on the surface, they do so in harmony. Recently, however, Jane Friedman (2020, “The Epistemic and the Zetetic.” The Philosophical Review 129: 501–536) has pointed out that they are in tension with each other. In this paper, I aim to resolve this tension by showing that reasons for acts of inquiry – zetetic reasons – and epistemic reasons for belief can both be understood as flowing from the same general normative principle: the transmission principle for instrumental reasons. The resulting account is a version of epistemic instrumentalism that offers an attractive unity between zetetic and epistemic normativity.

Both traditional and recent accounts of the beneficial and therapeutic effects of psychedelic experiences tie these effects to specifically epistemic changes, for example the enabling of spiritual or psychological insight, or disruption of problematic beliefs or thought patterns. While these alleged benefits have sometimes been thought to be facilitated by false or even delusional beliefs (e.g. Pollan 2015), recent philosophical discussion strikes a more optimistic tone, arguing that the epistemic risks involved with psychedelic drug use tend to be relatively benign and outweighed by epistemic benefits (Letheby 2021). In this paper, we seek to nuance this picture by drawing attention to the crucial role played by social factors in determining the epistemic effects of psychedelic experiences. We argue that the very openness of mind and heightened sense of clarity and certainty that is often thought to facilitate the epistemic benefits of psychedelic drug use, also make the user more vulnerable to adverse epistemic influence from the social environment, to a degree not acknowledged in the current literature. Examining the epistemic influences of the social environment is thus important for understanding the necessary precautions of informed consent and overall safe drug use.

This paper outlines a new pluralistic theory of normative reasons for belief, welfarist pluralism, which aims to explain how there can be basic alethic/epistemic reasons for belief and basic pragmatic/non-alethic reasons for belief that can combine to determine what one ought to believe. The paper shows how this non-derivative first-order pluralism arises from a purely welfarist account of the foundations of theoretical normativity, thereby combining foundational pragmatism with non-derivative pluralism about normative reasons for belief. In addition, this paper outlines howwelfarist pluralism provides a new and potentially attractive account of the value of truth (or its indicators), namely that the value of truth (or its indicators) is its direct contribution to individuals’ personal good or wellbeing.

Body checking, characterized by the repeated visual or physical inspection of particular parts of one’s own body (e.g. thighs, waist, or upper arms) is one of the most prominent behaviors associated with eating disorders, particularly Anorexia Nervosa (AN). In this paper, we explore the explanatory potential of the Recalcitrant Fear Model of AN (RFM) in relation to body checking. We argue that RFM, when combined with certain plausible auxiliary hypotheses about the cognitive and epistemic roles of emotions, is able to explain key characteristics of body checking, including how body checking behavior becomes habitual and compulsive.

In a recent article, I criticized Kathrin Glüer and Åsa Wikforss's so‐called “no guidance argument” against the truth norm for belief, for conflating the conditions under which that norm recommends belief with the psychological state one must be in to apply the norm. In response, Glüer and Wikforss have offered a new formulation of the no guidance argument, which makes it apparent that no such conflation is made. However, their new formulation of the argument presupposes a much too narrow understanding of what it takes for a norm to influence behaviour, and betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of the point of the truth norm. Once this is taken into account, it becomes clear that the no guidance argument fails.

While research on Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) has traditionally focused on cognitive and behavioral deficits, there is increasing interest in exploring possible resources associated with the disorder. In this paper, we argue that the attention-patterns associated with ADHD can be understood as expressing an alternative style of inquiry, or “zetetic” style, characterized mainly by a lower barrier for becoming curious and engaging in inquiry, and a weaker disposition to regulate curiosity in response to the cognitive and practical costs associated with inquiry. Exploring this zetetic style from an epistemological perspective, we show that it is often epistemically rational and can be advantageous in important respects. We close by suggesting that the very aspects of the zetetic style that might at times render it disadvantageous from the point of view of individual subjects with ADHD, will often confer epistemic benefits to the social group that the subjects are part of.

Semantic theories that violate semantic innocence, that is require reference shifts when terms are embedded in ‘that’ clauses and the like, are often challenged by producing sentences where an anaphoric expression, while not itself embedded in a context in which reference shifts, is anaphoric on an antecedent expression that is embedded in such a context. This, in conjunction with a widely accepted principle concerning unproblematic anaphora (the ‘Principle of Anaphoric Reference’), is used to show that such reference shifting has absurd consequences. We show that it is the widely accepted principle concerning anaphora that is to be blamed for these consequences and not the supposed sin of reference shifting.

The DSM‐5 highlights two essential psychological features of anorexia nervosa (AN): recalcitrant fear of gaining weight and body image disturbance. Prominent accounts grant false beliefs about body weight and shape a central role in the explanation of AN behavior. In this article, we propose a stronger emphasis on recalcitrant fear. We show that such fear can explain AN behavior without the intermediary of a false belief, and thus without the associated explanatory burdens and conceptual difficulties. We illustrate how shifting the emphasis from false belief to recalcitrant fear can supplement a number of different non‐doxastic models of AN.

Many have found it plausible that practical circumstances can affect whether someone is in a position to know or rationally believe a proposition. For example, whether it is rational for a person to believe that the bank will be open tomorrow can depend not only on the person's evidence but also on how practically important it is for the person not to be wrong about the bank being open tomorrow. This supposed phenomenon is known as “pragmatic encroachment” on knowledge and rational belief. Assuming that the phenomenon is real, I ask what explains it. I argue that a variant of instrumentalism about epistemic reasons offers a natural explanation, that at the same time is able avoid commitment to a more radical form of pragmatism.

It is widely agreed that obsessive-compulsive disorder involves irrationality. But where in the complex of states and processes that constitutes OCD should this irrationality be located? A pervasive assumption in both the psychiatric and philosophical literature is that the seat of irrationality is located in the obsessive thoughts characteristic of OCD. Building on a puzzle about insight into OCD (Taylor 2022), we challenge this pervasive assumption, and argue instead that the irrationality of OCD is located in the emotions that are characteristic of OCD, such as anxiety or fear. In particular, we propose to understand the irrationality of OCD as a matter of harboring recalcitrant emotions. We argue that this account not only solves the puzzle about insight, but also makes better sense of how OCD sufferers experience and describe their condition and helps explain some otherwise puzzling features of compulsive behavior.

Our aim in this chapter is to draw attention to what we see as a disturbing feature of conciliationist views of disagreement. Roughly put, the trouble is that conciliatory responses to in-group disagreement can lead to the frustration of a group's epistemic priorities: that is, the group's favoured trade-off between the "Jamesian goals" of truth-seeking and error-avoidance. We show how this problem can arise within a simple belief aggregation framework, and draw some general lessons about when the problem is most pronounced. We close with a tentative proposal for how to solve the problem raised without rejecting conciliationism.

Epistemic instrumentalists think that epistemic normativity is just a special kind of instrumental normativity. According to them, you have epistemic reason to believe a proposition insofar as doing so is conducive to certain epistemic goals or aims—say, to believe what is true and avoid believing what is false. Perhaps the most prominent challenge for instrumentalists in recent years has been to explain, or explain away, why one’s epistemic reasons often do not seem to depend on one’s aims. This challenge can arguably be met. But a different challenge looms: instrumental reasons in the practical domain have various properties that epistemic reasons do not seem to share. In this chapter, we offer a way for epistemic instrumentalists to overcome this challenge. Our main thesis takes the form of a conditional: if we accept an independently plausible transmission principle of instrumental normativity, we can maintain that epistemic reasons in fact do share the relevant properties of practical instrumental reasons. In addition, we can explain why epistemic reasons seem to lack these properties in the first place: some properties of epistemic reasons are elusive, or easy to overlook, because we tend to think and talk about epistemic reasons in an ‘elliptical’ manner.

When one has both epistemic and practical reasons for or against some belief, how do these reasons combine into an all-things-considered reason for or against that belief? The question might seem to presuppose the existence of practical reasons for belief. But we can rid the question of this presupposition. Once we do, a highly general ‘Combinatorial Problem’ emerges. The problem has been thought to be intractable due to certain differences in the combinatorial properties of epistemic and practical reasons. Here we bring good news: if we accept an independently motivated version of epistemic instrumentalism—the view that epistemic reasons are a species of instrumental reasons—we can reduce The Combinatorial Problem to the relatively benign problem of how to weigh different instrumental reasons against each other. As an added benefit, the instrumentalist account can explain the apparent intractability of The Combinatorial Problem in terms of a common tendency to think and talk about epistemic reasons in an elliptical manner.

People tend to think that they know others better than others know them. This phenomenon is known as the “illusion of asymmetric insight.” While the illusion has been well documented by a series of recent experiments, less has been done to explain it. In this paper, we argue that extant explanations are inadequate because they either get the explanatory direction wrong or fail to accommodate the experimental results in a sufficiently nuanced way. Instead, we propose a new explanation that does not face these problems. The explanation is based on two other well-documented psychological phenomena: the tendency to accommodate ambiguous evidence in a biased way, and the tendency to overestimate how much better we know ourselves than we know others.

We often have reason to doubt our own ability to form rational beliefs, or to doubt that some particular belief of ours is rational. Perhaps we learn that a trusted friend disagrees with us about what our shared evidence supports. Or perhaps we learn that our beliefs have been afflicted by motivated reasoning or other cognitive biases. These are examples of higher-order evidence. While it may seem plausible that higher-order evidence should impact our beliefs, it is less clear how and why. Normally, when evidence impacts our beliefs, it does so by virtue of speaking for or against the truth of theirs contents. But higher-order evidence does not directly concern the contents of the beliefs that they impact. In recent years, philosophers have become increasingly aware of the need to understand the nature and normative role of higher-order evidence. This is partly due to the pervasiveness of higher-order evidence in human life. But it has also become clear that higher-order evidence plays a central role in many epistemological debates, spanning from traditional discussions of internalism/externalism about epistemic justification to more recent discussions of peer disagreement and epistemic akrasia. This volume brings together, for the first time, a distinguished group of leading and up-and-coming epistemologists to explore a range of issues about higher-order evidence.

It seems obvious that when higher-order evidence makes it rational for one to doubt that one’s own belief on some matter is rational, this can undermine the rationality of that belief. This is known as higher-order defeat. However, despite its intuitive plausibility, it has proved puzzling how higher-order defeat works, exactly. To highlight two prominent sources of puzzlement, higher-order defeat seems to defy being understood in terms of conditionalization; and higher-order defeat can sometimes place agents in what seem like epistemic dilemmas. This chapter draws attention to an overlooked aspect of higher-order defeat, namely that it can undermine the resilience of one’s beliefs. The notion of resilience was originally devised to understand how one should reflect the ‘weight’ of one’s evidence. But it can also be applied to understand how one should reflect one’s higher-order evidence. The idea is particularly useful for understanding cases where one’s higher-order evidence indicates that one has failed in correctly assessing the evidence, without indicating whether one has over- or underestimated the degree of evidential support for a proposition. But it is exactly in such cases that the puzzles of higher-order defeat seem most compelling.

A popular account of luck, with a firm basis in common sense, holds that a necessary condition for an event to be lucky, is that it was suitably improbable. It has recently been proposed that this improbability condition is best understood in epistemic terms. Two different versions of this proposal have been advanced. According to my own proposal :361–377, 2010), whether an event is lucky for some agent depends on whether the agent was in a position to know that the event would occur. And according to Stoutenburg :319–334, 2015, Synthese, 1–15, 2018), whether an event is lucky for an agent depends on whether the event was guaranteed or certain to occur in light of the agent’s evidence. In this paper, I argue that we should prefer the account in terms of knowledge over that in terms of evidential certainty.

The debate on the epistemology of disagreement has so far focused almost exclusively on cases of disagreement between individual persons. Yet, many social epistemologists agree that at least certain kinds of groups are equally capable of having beliefs that are open to epistemic evaluation. If so, we should expect a comprehensive epistemology of disagreement to accommodate cases of disagreement between group agents, such as juries, governments, companies, and the like. However, this raises a number of fundamental questions concerning what it means for groups to be epistemic peers and to disagree with each other. In this paper, we explore what group peer disagreement amounts to given that we think of group belief in terms of List and Pettit’s ‘belief aggregation model’. We then discuss how the so-called ‘equal weight view’ of peer disagreement is best accommodated within this framework. The account that seems most promising to us says, roughly, that the parties to a group peer disagreement should adopt the belief that results from applying the most suitable belief aggregation function for the combined group on all members of the combined group. To motivate this view, we test it against various intuitive cases, derive some of its notable implications, and discuss how it relates to the equal weight view of individual peer disagreement.

Metaphysics: 5 Questions is a collection of short interviews based on 5 questions presented to some of the most influential and prominent philosophers in the field. We hear their views on metaphysics, the aim, the scope, the future direction of research and how their work fits in these respects. Interviews with Lynne Rudder Baker, Helen Beebee, Thomas Hofweber, Hugh Mellor, Peter Menzies, Stephen Mumford, Daniel Nolan, Eric T.Olson, L. A. Paul, Lorenz B. Puntel, Gonzalo Rodriguez-Pereyra, Gideon Rosen, Jonathan Schaffer, Peter Simons, Barry Smith, Michael Tooley, Peter van Inwagen, Dean Zimmerman

In his influential discussion of the aim of belief, David Owens argues that any talk of such an ‘aim’ is at best metaphorical. In order for the ‘aim’ of belief to be a genuine aim, it must be weighable with other aims in deliberation, but Owens claims that this is impossible. In previous work, I have pointed out that if we look at a broader range of deliberative contexts involving belief, it becomes clear that the putative aim of belief is capable of being weighed against other aims. Recently, however, Ema Sullivan-Bissett and Paul Noordhof have objected to this response on the grounds that it employs an undefended conception of the aim of belief not shared by Owens, and that it equivocates between importantly different contexts of doxastic deliberation. In this note, I argue that both of these objections fail.

Many philosophers have argued that an event is lucky for an agent only if it was suitably improbable, but there is considerable disagreement about how to understand this improbability condition. This paper argues for a hitherto overlooked construal of the improbability condition in terms of the lucky agent’s epistemic situation. According to the proposed account, an event is lucky for an agent only if the agent was not in a position to know that the event would occur. It is also explored whether this new account threatens the anti- luck program in epistemology. It is argued that although not detrimental to the anti- luck program, the epistemic account of luck sets certain important limits to its scope and feasibility