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Respect for Truth and the Normativity of Epistemic Rationality

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Respect for Truth and the Normativity of Epistemic Rationality 1 RESPECT FOR TRUTH AND THE NORMATIVITY OF EPISTEMIC RATIONALITY by KURT L. SYLVAN (Dissertation committee: Ernest Sosa (chair), Ruth Chang, Alvin Goldman, and Derek Parfit.) 2 CONTENTS INTRODUCTION 1. Reasons, rationality and problems of deontic significance: lessons from the practical sphere 2. Problems about the deontic significance of epistemic rationality 3. The generality of the problems of deontic significance 4. Teleology and the source of the problems in the epistemic domain 5. Non-teleology in the service of epistemic rationality: the limits of goal-driven epistemology 6. An overview of the following chapters 1. REASONS AND OTHER NORMATIVE FACTS 1. Three faces of the normative: deontic, evaluative, hypological 2. Reasons: some basic distinctions 2.1. Reasons there are, reasons had, and background conditions that provide reasons for one 2.2. Getting connected with good reasons 2.3. The ontology of epistemic reasons 2.4. Epistemic reasons and oughts, permissions and requirements 2.5. Epistemic permissions without reasons? 2.6. Epistemic justification and reasons 2.7. First vs. second-order theories and why there can be no reliabilism/evidentialism debate 2.8. Why an apparently deeper objection to reasons-first epistemology fails 2.9. Having reasons (again) 3. Criteria of quality for reasons and theories of epistemic value 3.1. Teleological criteria of quality 3.2. Strong anti-teleology 3.3 Stronger anti-teleology? 4. Hypological properties and separability theses 4.1. Hypological properties may not supervene on the current time-slice 4.2. How the separability theses could be false if epistemic Kantianism were true 5. The way forward: a preview 2. RATIONALITY 1. Introductory remarks 1.1. General ideas: narrowness and perspectival character 1.2. General ideas: local person-orientation and act/agent blur 1.3. General ideas: ex ante and ex post evaluations 2. Orthodox apparent reasons views of perspectival character 2.1. A dilemma for purely belief-relative views 2.2. Underived enkratic principles? Yes: they are wide-scope 2.3. The original sin: normative explanation and the conflation of intelligibility and rationality 2.4. “Apparent reasons” improved: the weak appearance-relative view for ex ante (ir)rationality 2.5. Ex post (ir)rationality 2.6. Have we avoided the problem of difficulty? Recognizing the primacy of ex post (ir)rationality 2.7. Overintellectualization? 2.8. Have we avoided the problem of easiness? More on the nature of appearance 3. On to epistemic rationality: flawed antecedents and renewed prospects for a unified theory 3.1. The weak appearance-relative view extended 3.2. Dimensions of epistemic rationality that go beyond “saving the appearances” 3.2.1. The dimension of intelligibility: wide-scope requirements 3.2.2. Inference and a puzzle about the rationality of deductive versus non-deductive cases 3.3. How epistemic rationality is internalist 3 3. PROBLEMS OF DEONTIC SIGNIFICANCE 1. Introductory remarks 1.1. Bootstrapping and implausible conflicts in the early literature 1.2. Bootstrapping and implausible conflicts transposed for appearance-relative requirements 1.3. How ignorance is deontically significant 1.4. The best account of the effects doesn't generally help with problems of deontic significance 2. Bringing out the problems of deontic significance for epistemic rationality 2.1. Criteria of quality for epistemic reasons in light of the core distinctions 2.2. Illustrations: bootstrapping with memory 2.3. Illustrations: bootstrapping with cognitively penetrated appearances 2.4. Illustrations: forgotten evidence and related problems 2.5. Illustrations: metacognitive anxiety and the appearance of lost reasons 3. The importance of the problems of deontic significance for epistemology 3.1. Reorienting internalism/externalism disputes 3.2. Defeat clauses in typical externalist accounts of ultima facie justification 3.3. Higher-order “evidence” 4. The options and a preview of coming attractions 4. WHAT EPISTEMIC VALUE CAN'T BE IF IT CAN FIX THE DEONTIC FACTS 1. Introductory remarks 1.1. The dialectical space 1.2. Why Berker hasn't refuted epistemic teleology 2. Undercutting the motivations for Weak Epistemic Teleology 2.1. Goals and values that are epistemic versus epistemic goals and values 2.2. The intrinsic/extrinsic distinction versus the final/instrumental distinction 2.3. A key illustration of how the explanatory order can reverse: the value of persons 3. Rebutting Weak Epistemic Teleology 3.1. A direct argument from the conditional/unconditional goal asymmetry 3.2. Support for the epistemic Kantian reversal: patterns of epistemic value derivation 3.3. More support: a broader range of evaluative intuitions 3.4. More support: when truly believing isn't epistemically good and falsely believing isn't bad 3.5. More support: asymmetries in support for promoting the Conditional T-Goal 3.6. Taking stock: why Weak Epistemic Teleology fails 4. A Scanlonian argument against Strong Epistemic Teleology 4.1. A note on the inspiration of the argument 4.2. The Scanlonian argument 4.3. Can the Strong Epistemic Teleologist subsume our view by retreating from veritism? 5. Some loose ends and the way forward 5. RETHINKING THE PLACE OF TRUTH IN EPISTEMOLOGY 6. WHY EPISTEMIC RATIONALITY IS DEONTICALLY ROBUST 7. EPISTEMIC VALUE THEORY AS A SECONDARY ENTERPRISE 8. REDIRECTING EPISTEMOLOGY APPENDICES A. Commitment to epistemically deontic facts does not require doxastic voluntarism 4 INTRODUCTION Asking the right question is often the hardest part. —Ted Sider1 1. Reasons, rationality, and problems of deontic significance: lessons from the practical sphere To ask the most important questions, epistemologists will need to acknowledge more distinctions than they have often done. On this score, I think they can benefit from reading ethicists and philosophers of practical reason, whose understanding of the high-level contours of normativity has tended to be more nuanced, at least in recent years. It has become increasingly common for these philosophers to distinguish (1) correctly responding to all the reasons that bear on whether to φ from (2) φ-ing or refraining from φ-ing rationally.2 While drawing a distinction between (1) and (2) may sound picky in isolation, simple cases make it attractive. Consider a well-worn example from Williams (1981). It looks to Bernie as if his glass contains gin and tonic. Nothing in his circumstances indicates otherwise. As it turns out, some knave put petrol in his glass. That fact is a conclusive reason for Bernie not to take a sip. Still, it would be wrong to say that Bernie is irrational for planning to take a sip. He displays no lack of rationality. Rationality in its ordinary sense is a narrow notion, to use Scanlon's nice word: it is the positive counterpart of a strong, agent-oriented criticism we express with “irrational”. Epistemologists would, I believe, be wise to consider a similar distinction. The distinction comes, I'll be arguing in Chapters 2 and 3, to a distinction between what beliefs would be epistemically justified and what we would be epistemically rational in believing. Indeed, this is an exact analogue of the distinction between (1) and (2), given a high-level view about justification I'll recommend in Chapter 1 that links it with reasons. 1Sider (2009: 384). 2To get a sense of how common this is, note that the distinction is explicitly drawn or taken seriously by Broome (1999, 2008, Ms), Dancy (2000), Kolodny (2005, 2008a–c), Lord (Ms1), Parfit (2001, 2011), Raz (2004), Reisner (2011a), Scanlon (1998, 2007), and Schroeder (2009), among others. It is also presupposed by Kantian internalists about practical reasons—e.g., Korsgaard (1986), Markovits (2011) and Smith (1994). They claim that you have a reason to A only if you'd be motivated to A after undergoing “rational deliberation”. If rationality just were responsiveness to reasons, this would be a patently circular view. It is also worth noting that Donald Davidson favored a narrow understanding of rationality in his (1982) and (1984). While he did not write much about normative reasons, I think he would have been happy to contrast rationality with responsiveness to genuine normative reasons—though rationality would surely be tied to motivating reasons for him. The distinction is implicit in some passages in his early work: “The justifying role of a reason […] depends upon the explanatory role, but the converse does not hold. Your stepping on my toes neither explains nor justifies my stepping on your toes unless I believe you stepped on my toes, but the belief alone, true or false, explains my action.” (1963: 690) Given that rationalizations for Davidson only require invoking “primary” (motivating) reasons—which are belief-desire pairs for him—it seems he would also grant that an action can be rationalized even if the beliefs from which it proceeds are false. Clearly, though, he is suggesting in this quote that a belief can only justify an action if it is true. (1) itself needs to be distinguished from correctly responding to all the possessed reasons. As I argue at the outset in Chapter 2, this, too, is distinct from rationality, though it is closer in some cases. 5 While it goes without saying that ethics and epistemology are substantively different enterprises, they are both normative enterprises. It is reasonable to expect a formal symmetry between them for this simple reason, and specifically with respect to the sorts of high-level notional distinctions that can be drawn. If drawing a distinction like this makes a big difference in ethics, it may in epistemology too. And if it doesn't make a difference in epistemology, that would call, I think, for explanation. While a few epistemologists have considered something close to this distinction, their treatment has not, as I'll argue in Chapter 2, been ideal.3 The association of the suggestion with these particular theories may explain why most mainstream epistemologists avoid it.
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