Sebastian Becker

Turri describes a case in which a group of experts apparently correctly advise you not to withhold on a proposition P, but where your evidence neither supports believing nor disbelieving P. He claims that this presents a puzzle about withholding: on the one hand, it seems that you should not withhold on P, since the experts say so. On the other hand, we have the intuition that you should neither believe nor disbelieve P, since your evidence doesn't support it. Thus, there is apparently no doxastic attitude you are permitted to adopt to P. Turri considers various solutions to the puzzle, but in the end rejects all of them and concludes that it seems to be unsolvable. I suggest resolving the puzzle by distinguishing between what I call the subjective and the collective ‘should’. In light of your, the subject's, evidence, i.e., in the subjective sense of ‘should’, you should neither believe nor disbelieve P. However, in light of your and the experts' combined evidence, i.e., in the collective sense of ‘should’, you should not withhold on P. It is true that you are not permitted to adopt a doxastic attitude if you should not, in the subjective sense of ‘should’, adopt it; but this is not so if you should not adopt it in the collective sense. Thus, you are actually permitted to withhold on P. The puzzle is nonetheless philosophically interesting since it points something out that deserves more discussion in epistemology: epistemic advice and the collective sense of the doxastic ‘should’, which we use when giving epistemic advice.

This thesis explores the extent to which the doxastic ‘should’ is information-sensitive and the implications of this for a number of debates in normative epistemology. The doxastic ‘should’ is a special case of the deontic modal ‘should’ and occurs in sentences such as ‘You shouldn’t believe everything you read online’. In the recent semantics literature, it has been suggested that the deontic ‘should’ is information-sensitive, meaning that sentences of the form ‘S should do A’ are relativized to information-states. After a short introductory chapter, I survey the relevant semantics literature in chapter 2 and provide a simplified contextualist semantics for the doxastic ‘should’, according to which the truth-conditions of sentences containing the doxastic ‘should’ vary with the information-state provided by their context of utterance. In chapters 3 to 6, I discuss the different kinds of information-states the doxastic ‘should’ can be relativized to and how the respective relativization matters for normative epistemology. Chapter 3 argues that the doxastic ‘should’ has a subjective and an objective sense and that this distinction solves the apparent conflict between subjective epistemic norms and the truth norm for belief. Chapter 4 addresses the question of how one should react to misleading higher-order evidence. I propose that two seemingly opposing views on this issue, Steadfastness and Concilliationism, are both correct. In a sense of ‘should’ that is relativized to one’s first-order evidence, one should remain steadfast in the face of misleading higher-order evidence, but in another sense, which is relativized to one’s higher-order evidence, one shouldn’t. In chapters 5 and 6, I argue that when we advise others on what they should believe, we talk about what they should believe in light of their and our joint evidence. Chapter 7 concludes this thesis with a defence of contextualist semantics for the doxastic ‘should’ against truth-relativist challenges.