Donnie Barnett

Epistemic perceptualism is the view that emotions provide immediate prima facie justification for evaluative beliefs. I defend this view against recent criticism by Michael Brady. I address two of his arguments in particular: what I have termed the Proxy and Symmetry Arguments. According to the former, emotions are only proxy reasons. They can stand in for genuine reasons, but they lack justificatory force of their own. This objection fails, I argue, because it assumes that proxy reasons can always be rendered epistemically superfluous in light of other reasons. I show that this is not always true, and in particular that it is not true of emotions. Far from being superfluous, emotions appear to play an important epistemic role: to independently verify the veracity of our evaluative judgments. Finally, I show that the Symmetry Argument is sound only if Brady’s account of proxy reasons is generally correct.

There appears to be a tension between two widely held philosophical theses: content externalism and what is often called “privileged access”. The first is the metaphysical thesis that the contents of many propositional attitude-types are at least partially determined by properties external to the thinking subject. The second is the epistemological thesis that we have a priori access to the contents of our own propositional attitudes. Those who hold that at least one of these theses must be false are called incompatibilists. My goal is to show that the incompatibilists are wrong, that content externalism and privileged access can both be true.