Martin Grajner

What grounds epistemic normativity? Or, in other words, why should agents follow epistemic norms? A popular view about the source of epistemic normativity is instrumentalism. This view holds that epistemic norms gain their authority by being conducive to other things we place value in, such as survival or practical reasoning. In this paper, I explore an alternative view, which is inspired by Christine Korsgaard’s account of the source of moral normativity. This view claims that the authority of epistemic norms is grounded in the self-identities of agents and thereby ultimately in the value of humanity. I will argue that the account sketched in this paper enjoys crucial advantages over alternative accounts that have been proposed in recent literature – in particular those that develop Kant-inspired accounts of epistemic normativity.

Dogmatists or phenomenal conservatists about epistemic justification hold that if an agent S is in possession of a seeming with the content p, then S has at least prima facie justification to believe p. Dogmatism or phenomenal conservatism is often adopted due to its explanatory power. However, there are cases that dogmatism fails to accommodate, the most famous ones resulting from “bad” cognitive penetration. In this paper, I propose a novel augmented form of dogmatism. The view I recommend maintains that only seemings that result from actually reliable belief-forming processes are apt to confer prima facie justification on a belief. The view proposed here not only escapes the main counterexamples to dogmatism but also possesses additional advantages in comparison to dogmatism or alternative qualified versions of this view.

This book contains twelve original contributions from leading epistemologists, which connect the debate over epistemic dilemmas with fundamental issues in contemporary epistemology. In an epistemic dilemma, any doxastic response of an agent will violate an epistemic requirement. Recently, there has been a surge of interest in epistemic dilemmas. However, few attempts have been made to systematically connect epistemic dilemmas to a wider range of issues in epistemology and normative theorizing. The present volume begins to fill this lacuna. Some of its contributions explore new responses to epistemic dilemmas and others present novel epistemic dilemmas, which connect in interesting ways to other areas of epistemology. Several contributions discuss links between epistemic dilemmas and the nature of epistemic and practical reasons, investigate the nature of evidence or of doxastic attitudes, or explore dilemmas arising in collective or oppressive contexts.

One influential response to apparent higher-order dilemmas implies that agents can rationally both believe p on the basis of their evidence and simultaneously believe that their evidence does not support believing p. This possibility of rational epistemic akrasia seems to call into question the Enkratic Requirement, which prohibits believing a proposition p according to one’s lower-level evidence, while believing that one’s lower-level evidence does not support believing p. In this chapter, we explore two ways to defend the Enkratic Requirement. First, evidentialists about epistemic justification are committed to holding that an ex post (or doxastically) justified belief, as part and parcel of being ex post justified, is accompanied by a corresponding higher-order belief that the first-order belief is supported by the evidence. In a dilemma case, this higher-order belief comes into direct rational conflict with the subject’s other higher-order belief, that her evidence does not support the belief – so the subject has contradictory beliefs. In this way, the so-called ‘level-splitting’ strategy for the claim that being akratic is not per se irrational is called into question. Our second argument for the Enkratic Requirement presupposes normativism about belief and appeals to the conditions of having epistemically permissible beliefs. We sketch an argument starting from an influential view about the normativity of belief: that irrational beliefs are impermissible beliefs. From this claim, together with some widely held as-sumptions about the notion of rationality, we show that agents who display akratic combi-nations of attitudes hold impermissible beliefs.

Dieser Sammelband ist den Themen Wahrheit, Bedeutung und Existenz gewidmet sowie dem Bezug dieser Themen zur Realismus-Antirealismus-Problematik. Die Aufsatze zum Thema Wahrheit behandeln unter anderem, welche Rolle ein realistischer Wahrheitsbegriff fur unsere Erkenntnispraxis spielt und wie man einen realistischen Wahrheitsbegriff genau charakterisieren sollte. In den Beitragen zu dem Thema Bedeutung wird diskutiert, ob sich eine irrtumstheoretische Version des Antirealismus bezuglich der Existenz semantischer Tatsachen aufrechterhalten lasst und welche Variante des Antirealismus Saul Kripke in Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language vertreten hat. Die Beitrage aus der letzten Themengruppe gehen dem Status moglicher Welten, der Existenz vergangener Objekte und der Frage nach, wieso wir Sachverhalte als existent postulieren sollten, fur deren Existenz eigentlich keine vernunftigen Grunde sprechen."

In this paper, I sketch an account of intuitions according to which intuitions are seemings. My paper consists of four sections. I the first section, I give an overview of the conceptions of intuitions that are endorsed in the literature and examine their interrelations. In the second section of the paper, I present an argument in favour of the view that intuitions are seemings. I argue that this view is backed up by certain linguistic data and that there exist linguistic data against rival views, on which intuitions can be reduced to doxastic states or dispositions to doxastic states. In the third section of the paper, I motivate the claim that the content of an intuition is not modal. In the last section of the paper, I discuss whether some intuitions are a priori. I examine an argument due to Alvin Goldman that intuitions do not confer a priori warrant. I argue that Goldmans argument does not establish that intuitive warrant is not a priori. In the remainder of the section, I try to develop a positive view about what characterises an intuition as being apt to confer a priori warrant. I argue that the fact whether an intuition is a priori is a matter of their etiology.

In this paper I outline and defend a theory of immediate or foundational justification that I call "phenomenal reliabilism". This theory incorporates elements from Huemer’s theory of phenomenal conservatism and Comesaña’s indexical reliabilism. The basic idea of the theory I propose is that certain mental states contribute in a twofold way to the epistemic justification of beliefs, namely due to the way they determine how things seem to a subject and due to the fact that they are actually reliable indicators of the truth of their contents. The first component allows this theory to accommodate internalist intuitions. The second component allows it to foster the connection between justification and truth without being subject to the counterexamples that plague simple or unqualified reliabilist theories. I also try to show that this theory is superior to rival theories that have been proposed in the literature, like Huemer’s theory itself (2001) or a process-reliabilist treatment of foundational justification as in Goldman (2008a).

Dieser Sammelband ist den Themen Wahrheit, Bedeutung und Existenz gewidmet sowie dem Bezug dieser Themen zur Realismus-Antirealismus-Problematik. Die Aufsätze zum Thema Wahrheit behandeln unter anderem, welche Rolle ein realistischer Wahrheitsbegriff für unsere Erkenntnispraxis spielt und wie man einen realistischen Wahrheitsbegriff genau charakterisieren sollte. In den Beiträgen zu dem Thema Bedeutung wird diskutiert, ob sich eine irrtumstheoretische Version des Antirealismus bezüglich der Existenz semantischer Tatsachen aufrechterhalten lässt und welche Variante des Antirealismus Saul Kripke in Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language vertreten hat. Die Beiträge aus der letzten Themengruppe gehen dem Status möglicher Welten, der Existenz vergangener Objekte und der Frage nach, wieso wir Sachverhalte als existent postulieren sollten, für deren Existenz eigentlich keine vernünftigen Gründe sprechen.

In this paper, I sketch an account of intuitions on which intuitions are seemings. My paper consists of four sections. I the first section, I give an overview of the conceptions of intuitions that are endorsed in the recent literature and examine their interrelations. In the second section of the paper, I present an argument in favour of the view that intuitions are seemings. I argue that this view is backed up by linguistic data. In the third section of the paper, I try to motivate the claim that the content of intuitions is not necessarily modal. In the last section of the paper, I discuss whether some intuitions are a priori. I examine an argument due to Alvin Goldman that intuitions do not confer a priori warrant. I try to argue that Goldman's argument does not establish that intuitive warrant is not a priori. In the remainder of the section, I try to develop a positive view. I argue that whether an intuition is a priori is a matter of their etiology.