Search Results

This chapter examines the important distinction between practical and theoretical reason and rationality. As a consequence, a modification is made to the version of externalism regarding reasons for action advocated elsewhere in the book. It is contended that the sorts of items that properly qualify as reasons for actions, externalistically conceived, must differ fundamentally from those that properly qualify as reasons for belief, and that these items are needs rather than facts. It is also argued that this ontological difference between reasons for action and reasons for belief goes hand-in-hand with equally fundamental differences between the logic of action and the logic of belief.

Although Peirce endorsed fallibilism, he had no sympathy for philosophical concerns with scepticism. This was because ‘real doubt’ required a reason and the fact that we have no positive reason for accepting a proposition does not give us reason to doubt it. He argued that we can take scepticism seriously only if we adopt a flawed ‘nominalist’ conception of reality. If we adopt his favoured ‘realist’ conception of reality, and recognize that we have direct knowledge of external things, then there is no reason to take scepticism seriously. His pragmatic maxim provided reasons for accepting Peirce’s conception of reality and for demonstrating that the truth is knowable by the method of science

Direct doxastic voluntarism is commonly thought to be conceptually impossible owing to the way in which belief aims at truth. In this chapter, Reisner argues that the view that belief aims at truth actually strongly suggests the conceptual possibility of direct doxastic voluntarism. Reisner considers some possible consequences to this argument, including the ramifications for our views about normative reasons for belief.

An alternative argument is provided for rejecting internalism-parity. It is claimed that, from the perspective of internalism-based moral error theorists, categorical reasons for action are more problematic than categorical reasons for belief. This is because there are considerably stronger arguments for thinking that one’s reasons for action are constitutively dependent on one’s desires than for thinking that one’s reasons for belief are constitutively dependent on one’s desires. Three such arguments are considered: from action-explanation, from reasoning, and from paradigmatic-ascriptions. It is claimed that the first of these three arguments clearly does not apply to reasons for belief as to reasons for action. The applicability of the second and third arguments is harder to ascertain.

This chapter asks to which judgements the error theory applies, what the error theory entails, and whether what the error theory entails can be true. It argues that the error theory does not apply to judgements about standards, but does apply to instrumental normative judgements and judgements about reasons for belief. It then compares the error theory that this book defends to the moral error theories that have been defended by J.L. Mackie, Richard Joyce, and Jonas Olson. The chapter argues that Mackie, Joyce, and Olson underestimate the generality of their own arguments. It ends by arguing that the error theory entails that all normative judgements are false, and that it can be true that all normative judgements are false.

McDowell holds that our thinking, in order to have intentional content, must stand in a normative relation to empirical reality. He thinks that this condition can be satisfied only if we adopt “minimal empiricism”: the view that beliefs and judgements stand in rational relations to perceptual experiences, conceived as passive. I raise two complementary difficulties for minimal empiricism, one challenging McDowell’s view that experiences, conceived as passive, can be reasons for belief, the other challenging his view of experience as presupposing conceptual capacities. I go on to argue that minimal empiricism is not necessary for satisfying the condition that thinking be normatively related to the empirical world. There is another way of understanding the relation between thought and reality which construes it as normative without being rational: we can understand it as the world’s normative constraint on the activity through which empirical concepts, and hence empirical thinking, become possible.

Epistemic instrumentalists seek to understand the normativity of epistemic norms on the model of practical instrumental norms governing the relation between aims and means. Non-instrumentalists often object that this commits instrumentalists to implausible epistemic assessments. This chapter argues that this objection presupposes an implausibly strong interpretation of epistemic norms. Once we realize that epistemic norms should be understood in terms of permissibility rather than obligation, and that evidence only occasionally provides normative reasons for belief, an instrumentalist account becomes available that delivers the correct epistemic verdicts. On this account, epistemic permissibility can be understood on the model of the wide-scope instrumental norm for instrumental rationality, while normative evidential reasons for belief can be understood in terms of instrumental transmission.

This paper begins with a Davidsonian puzzle in the epistemology of perception and introduces two solutions to that puzzle: the Truth-Maker View (TMV) and the Content Model. The paper goes on to elaborate TMV, elements of which can be found in the work of Kalderon (2011) and Brewer (2011). The central tenant of TMV is the claim that one’s reason for one’s perceptual belief should, in all cases, be identified with some item one perceives which makes the proposition believed true. I defend an argument against TMV which appeals to (a) the claim that the reason for which one believes should always to be identified with the explanans of the rationalizing explanation to which one’s belief is subject and (b) the claim that the explanantia of rationalizing explanations must be identified with truths. I finish by replying to two objections to the argument.

Many moral error theorists hold that moral facts are irreducibly normative. They also hold that irreducible normativity is metaphysically queer and conclude that there are no irreducibly normative reasons and consequently no moral facts. A popular response to moral error theory utilizes the so-called ‘companions in guilt’ strategy and argues that if moral reasons are irreducibly normative, then epistemic reasons are too. This is the Parity Premise, on the basis of which critics of moral error theory draw the Parity Conclusion that if there are no irreducibly normative reasons, there are no moral reasons and no epistemic reasons. From the Parity Conclusion and Epistemic Realism (the view that there are epistemic reasons), it follows that it is false that there are no irreducibly normative reasons. In this chapter, it is argued that the Parity Premise and the Parity Conclusion can both plausibly be rejected.

This chapter gives three arguments for the claim that there can be a reason for a person to perform an action only if this person can perform this action: the argument from crazy reasons, the argument from tables and chairs, and the argument from deliberation. It considers and rejects several potential counterexamples to this claim. It then argues that if these arguments show that there can be a reason for a person to perform an action only if this person can perform this action, similar arguments show that there can be a reason for a person to have a belief only if this person can have this belief. The chapter concludes that since we cannot believe the error theory, there is no reason for us to believe this theory.

It is argued that the first version of the parity premise—internalism-parity—is false. It is false because epistemic judgements are committed to the existence of ‘merely institutional’ reasons. Moral judgements, by contrast, are committed to the existence of genuinely normative reasons. This claim is defended by appeal to the basic rationale that epistemic judgements are normative or evaluative only in the sense of normative or evaluative judgements within ‘institutions’ such as sports and games, etiquette, fashion, and the law, but moral judgements are not. It is argued that this does not render epistemic norms merely conventional in an objectionable sense.

Does belief aim at knowledge or merely at the truth? And what does it mean for belief to aim at something? One account of what it is for belief to aim at something is provided. If you believe that p, then you’re committed to p’s being true. This distinguishes belief from other propositional attitudes. If you imagine or hope that p, then you imagine or hope that p is true. But you’re not committed to p’s being true. The relevant notion of commitment is understood along the following lines. If you acquired evidence that your belief wasn’t true, you’d no longer be justified in believing that p. So on this account, it’s fairly obvious that belief aims at the truth. But the question is whether it merely aims at the truth. If you acquired evidence that your belief is not justified, that could defeat the justification for the belief. So belief aims at justification as well. A consideration of the various kinds of thing that can defeat justification suggests that belief aims at knowledge.

Wilfrid Sellars recognized a conflict between what he called “the scientific image” of our place in the world, and “the manifest image.” Sellars sought, somehow, to join these views together in spite of their apparent conflict. This chapter argues that we should endorse features of the manifest image only to the extent that they are part of the scientific image. It presents a case study in epistemology, showing how these issues play out in discussion of doxastic deliberation. The manifest image of such deliberation is flatly in conflict with the best current scientific theorizing about the nature of deliberative processes. The only reasonable response to such conflict, the chapter argues, is to embrace the scientific account and reject our first-personal view of deliberation as illusory. This case study is suggestive of a broader conclusion about the relationship between the scientific and the manifest image.

This chapter suggesteds that rather than a single univocal norm of belief, there is instead a dual-aspect norm of belief, each aspect taking a different form and focusing on a different epistemic aim. This suggestion grows out of an approach to epistemic norms taking its model of normativity from ancient virtue ethics. In developing a virtue approach to epistemic normativity, the chapter shows that there are two distinct aims that any intellectually virtuous person will have, and those two aims correspond to two aspects of the norm that should constrain all believers. The chapter then tests the adequacy of this model in capturing some basic intuitions about beliefs that are permissible and impermissible, as well as intuitions about the ways in which one ought to respond to different sorts of reasons for belief. The chapter concludes by briefly sketching how the dual-aspect virtue norm can be extended to apply to the case of assertion, and shows how this account can also explain our complex and nuanced judgments about failures in some cases of assertion.

An advantage of using conditionals as the standard formula for reasons for action is that the conditional form can also be used to bring out the structure of reasons for belief—thus making possible a close comparison between these kinds of reasons and reasoning. It then becomes apparent that the direction of derivation is the reverse in the practical case when we reason our way to desiring sufficient means to an end from desiring the end to the theoretical case when we derive beliefs from sufficient conditions for their truth. This reversal reflects the opposite direction of fit of beliefs and desires. The implications of this account of reasoning with desires for the moral doctrine of the double effect and for reasoning with respect to emotions are briefly considered.

Human beings are rational animals, not in the sense of never being irrational, but in the sense of having a capacity at least occasionally displayed in thought and behavior. The display of this capacity can be casual or carefully controlled, but in neither case is there any guarantee that things will go well just because the capacity in question is on display. The goal of the present chapter is to inquire into the interstices of the three dimensions just employed: the descriptive realm of what people typically do, the normative realm of what they should or shouldn’t do, and the evaluative realm of what is good for them to do.