Normativity of belief and epistemic agency workshop

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Fernando Broncano
Universidad Carlos III de Madrid

'Daring to Believe': Epistemic Agency and Reflective Knowledge in Virtue Epistemology
We shall examine the concept of reflective knowledge in Sosa’s Virtue Epistemology. On the one hand, it is a kind of metacompetence. From this view, it could be considered as a mere cognitive device. But, on the other hand, it represents a higher stage on the process of knowledge. What sort of level is one in which reflective knowledge reaches epistemic significance? We will argue that Virtue Epistemology confronts an “Integration Problem” for epistemic agents, and that reflective knowledge must be located, to solve it, at a personal level. By considering a psychological mechanism as metacognition as an empirical instance of the integration issue, we will reflect about what means to be an epistemic agent and what it has to do with the Integration Problem.

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Jason D’Cruz
SUNY Albany 

Rationalization in the Pejorative Sense and the Aim of Belief
In this paper I consider the bearing of rationalization in the pejorative sense to the claim that belief aims at truth. Widespread and systematic patterns of biased self-justification in deliberation present a prima facie challenge to view that the distinctive mark of belief is that it is designed to be responsive to evidence and reasoning in a way that is truth conducive. I argue that some versions of the claim that belief has a truth aim come away unscathed, while others do not.

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Allan Hazlett
Fordham University

The Aim of Belief: A Priori Defenses
I consider two strategies for defending, a priori, the claim that truth is the aim of belief. The first appeals to the apparent inconceivability of beliefs not "regulated" for truth. The second appeals to the inconceivability of judgments that aren't directed at the truth. I criticize both these arguments, and offer a diagnosis of their mistake: beliefs not not artifacts (with functions or purposes derived from the intentions of their creators), nor is believing an intentional activity (whose success or failure depends on the intentions of the person acting). I argue that these disanalogies make a difference, and that we should therefore favor a non-normative conception of belief.

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Benajmin McMyler
Texas A&M University

Responsibility for Testimonial Belief
Much recent work in virtue epistemology has exploited the idea that what distinguishes knowledge from merely accidentally true belief is that knowledge is an achievement of an epistemic agent, something for which an epistemic agent is creditable or responsible. According to so-called “credit views of knowledge”, a subject knows that p just in case the truth of her belief is an achievement that can be properly ascribed to her, an achievement that is the result of the exercise of an intellectual virtue, competence, or ability of the agent. One influential criticism of the credit view of knowledge holds that the credit view has difficulty making sense of knowledge acquired from testimony. As Jennifer Lackey has argued, in many ordinary cases of the acquisition of testimonial knowledge, if anyone deserves credit for the truth of the audience’s belief it is the testimonial speaker rather than the audience, and so it isn’t clear that testimonial knowers are appropriately creditable or responsible for the truth of their beliefs. In this paper I argue that the credit view of knowledge can be saved from Lackey’s objection by focusing on the way in which testimonial knowledge is the result of the exercise of an essentially social epistemic competence, a competence that is seated in a collective rather than in an individual or even a combination of individuals. Even though there is indeed a sense in which a testimonial audience is only partially epistemically responsible for her testimonial belief, this is consistent with the truth of her belief being creditable to her in another sense. The truth of her belief is most saliently explained by, and hence is fully creditable to, an essentially social epistemic competence, a competence that is only partially seated in the knowing subject.

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Veli Mitova
Instituto de Investigaciones Filosóficas, UNAM


The normativity of belief and the need for a theory of epistemic motivation
The idea that the concept of belief is constitutively normative is swiftly becoming the order of the day. So much so, that Boghossian urges it as a pretty irresistible premise in his latest argument for the normativity of mental content (2003, 2005). His argument turns on two theses:

(1) Belief is constitutively normative.
(2) Belief is conceptually primary.

I argue that the first thesis undermines the second, unless Boghossian has in place a particular account of epistemic motivation. An account, that is, of how belief is motivated by the correctness-norm which supposedly constitutes it. But my talk has a more ambitious aim than to solicit allegiance to a particular account. Based on thoughts about Boghossian, I argue that we must, in the first instance, acknowledge the need for a theory of epistemic motivation. Until we do so, we shan't have a hope of getting a handle on the widely championed, but still fairly abstruse, idea that belief is normative.

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Mark Nelson
Westmont College

We have no positive epistemic duties
In ethics, it commonly supposed that we have both positive duties and negative duties, things we ought to do and things we ought not to do. Given the many parallels between ethics and epistemology, we might suppose that the same is true in epistemology, and that we have both positive epistemic duties and negative epistemic duties. I argue that this is false; i.e., that we have negative epistemic duties, but no positive ones. There are things that we ought not to believe, but there is nothing that we ought to believe, on purely epistemic grounds. I also consider why the parallels between ethics and epistemology break down at this particular point.

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Jill Rusin
Wilfrid Laurier University

Doxastic Deontology without Doxastic Voluntarism
Statements about what a person ought or ought not to believe are common. “Colin Powell ought not to have believed apocryphal CIA reports about Iraq.” Such claims sound as if they attribute epistemic duties to their subjects. Yet many epistemologists reject doxastic voluntarism. To do so seems to strip persons of the sort of agency necessary to support epistemic deontology. So how to reconcile epistemic deontology with a rejection of doxastic voluntarism? In this paper, I look at two possible courses here, to see how each fares with respect to a set of particular examples. The cases I examine involve what Miranda Fricker terms ‘epistemic injustice’. Such cases are useful for testing the theories since they tend to elicit strong intuitions. Pamela Hieronymi’s distinction between ‘evaluative’ and ‘managerial’ control helps disentangle the complex deontological judgments common to such cases. I ultimately argue that while Hieronymi’s account faces several difficulties, it fares better than either a deflationary deontologism or accounts that rely on reflective endorsement as the hallmark of doxastic agency.

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Nishi Shah
Amherst College

Denying Doxastic Reasons
In this paper I defend evidentialism against an error-theorist about doxastic reasons. The error-theorist rejects evidentialism not because he thinks there are pragmatic reasons for belief, but because he thinks that there are no reasons for belief at all. He claims that our practice of reason-attributions is defective in the same way that the practice of witch-attributions is defective. Just as no persons have the property of being a witch, so there are no facts or states of affairs that have the property of being a reason for belief. Any judgment that attributes to something the property of being a reason for belief is, therefore, false. I argue that my previous argument for evidentialism can be used to refute this type of error-theorist about doxastic reasons. I conclude by discussing whether my refutation of the error-theorist is an illegitimate form of transcendental argument.

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Asbjørn Steglich–Petersen
University of Aarhus

Desires are conceptually prior to beliefs
Paul Boghossian (2003, 2005) has recently argued that beliefs are conceptually prior to desires, and relies on this claim in his influential argument for the normativity of mental content. Against this thesis, Allan Miller (2008) has argued that the concepts of beliefs and desires are in fact interdependent. In this paper, I argue for a more radical claim, namely that the conceptual dependence is the opposite of what Boghossian supposes: in at least one important sense, having to do with the use of mental concepts in simulation-based interpretation, desires are conceptually prior to beliefs.

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Jesús Vega
Universidad Autónoma, Madrid

Engaged Epistemic Agents
In this paper, we address the problem of epistemic normativity. Our aim is to throw some light on the kind of normativity that is characteristic of human knowledge. In order to do that, we describe what we call normative domains. A normative domain is a certain field of human agency defined by the sort of achievement that is characteristic of it. In this sense, knowledge, considered as an achievement, constitutes the domain that is called “epistemic”. In order to infuse normativity, an achievement must involve more than mere success in performing a task or an activity; it requires to take into consideration how success is obtained. Success is a valuable outcome of our activities, but, as we will argue, the contribution of an agent to the obtaining of this particular state is critically relevant to evaluate it as an achievement. What is constitutive of the normative status of knowledge is explained by how an epistemic agent is engaged in the task of knowing. What ultimately explains the normativity of knowledge is the sort of agent's engagement that contributes to the success in an epistemic task. To elucidate what we mean by engagement, the last section of our paper proposes to appeal to the idea of adopting an epistemic perspective.