Pranav Ambardekar

The view that agency is central to explaining why actions are subject to moral and prudential norms has considerable appeal. With an agential explanation of epistemic normativity, we would have a unified agential picture of moral, prudential, and epistemic normativity. This paper argues against an agential explanation of epistemic normativity. Prominent proposals about epistemic agency cash the idea out in terms of voluntary agency, reasons-responsiveness, or judgment. I show that each of these proposals faces the following dilemma: either the proposal fails to capture any genuinely explanatory concept of agency, or it fails to adequately capture the class of items that are governed by epistemic norms. I suggest that there is reason to think that any account of epistemic agency is likely to face this dilemma. My argument gives us grounds for pessimism about the prospects of an agential explanation of epistemic normativity, and a unified agential picture of all normativity. Furthermore, my paper motivates, without defending, an alternate picture of normativity: the idea that actions and beliefs are two distinct species of a common normative genus. Either there is some other property, apart from agency, which unifies all norm-governed phenomena, or there is no such unifying property at all.

Despite Radford’s (1966) case of the unconfident examinee, many epistemologists think that knowledge entails belief. Epistemologists have levelled two sorts of criticisms: first, they point out that Radford’s case isn’t a clear case of knowledge; second, they object that even if knowledge is granted in Radford-like cases, agents therein will still have dispositional belief. This paper offers a case that improves upon Radford’s. In my case, the agent’s evidence is intuitively sufficient for knowledge. And we do not need to posit dispositional belief to make the case empirically plausible. My counterexample involves a distinctive type of agent: cautious believers. Cautious believers care more about avoiding false belief. When armed with evidence that is sufficient - though only barely sufficient - to justify some proposition p, cautious believers suspend judgment about p. Nevertheless, they remain minimally behaviourally sensitive to the evidence. Ultimately, I argue that such agents are in a mental state that falls short of belief.

Against philosophical orthodoxy, Hilary Kornblith has mounted an empirically grounded critique of the epistemic value of reflection. In this paper, I argue that this recent critique of the epistemic value of reflection fails even if we concede that (a) the empirical facts are as Kornblith says they are and (b) reliability is the only determinant of epistemic value. The critique fails because it seeks to undermine the reliability of reflection in general but targets only one of its variants, namely individual reflection, while neglecting social reflection. This critique comprises two arguments which have a common structure: they both impose a requirement on the reliability of reflection, but deny, on empirical grounds, that the requirement is met. One argument imposes an introspection requirement, which I reject as superfluous. I show how reflection can proceed without introspection. The other argument imposes an efficacy requirement. This requirement concerns whether reflection is causally efficacious i.e., whether it leads us to change our minds for the better. I accept this as a genuine requirement. Even if we concede that individual reflection fails to meet this requirement, I argue that we have not been given sufficient evidence to believe that social reflection is bound to fail this requirement. Furthermore, my analysis of the conditions under which social reflection works best provides us with prima facie grounds for optimism regarding the reliability of social reflection. Ultimately, then, these arguments fail to undermine the epistemic value of reflection in general.