I formulate a resilient paradox about epistemic rationality, discuss and reject various solutions, and sketch a way out. The paradox exemplifies a tension between a wide range of views of epistemic ...justification, on the one hand, and
enkratic requirements
on rationality, on the other. According to the enkratic requirements, certain mismatched doxastic states are irrational, such as believing
p
, while believing that it is irrational for one to believe
p.
I focus on an
evidentialist
view of justification on which a doxastic state regarding a proposition
p
is epistemically rational or justified just in case it tracks the degree to which one’s evidence supports
p
. If it is possible to have certain kinds of misleading evidence (as I argue it is), then evidentialism and the enkratic requirements come into conflict. Yet, both have been defended as platitudinous. After discussing and rejecting three solutions, I sketch an account that rejects the enkratic requirements, while nevertheless explaining our sense that epistemic akrasia is a distinct kind of epistemic failure. Central to the account is distinguishing between two evaluative perspectives, one having to do with the relevant kind of success (proportioning one’s doxastic states to the evidence), the other having to do with manifesting good dispositions. The problem with akratic subjects, I argue, is that they manifest dispositions to fail to correctly respond to a special class of
conclusive
and
conspicuous
reasons.
Abstract In some cases we can only conform to norms like Choose the best! by luck, in a way that is not creditable to us. According to the perspectivist diagnosis, the problem with such norms is that ...they make reference to facts that may lie outside our perspectives. The first aim of this paper is to argue that the perspectivist diagnosis of the problem of luck is not ultimately correct. The correct diagnosis, I argue, is feasibilist: in some situations it is not feasible to choose, act, or believe in ways that conformity to objectivist norms robustly depends on. The same, I argue, is true of perspectivist norms: sometimes it is not feasible to track facts about our own perspectives. This shift in focus from the limits of our perspectives to limits on feasible ways of acting, choosing and believing has deep ramifications for normative theory. My second aim is to sketch an alternative, feasibilist way of thinking about a more subject‐directed kind of normativity that takes into account our limitations as human agents. The result is a normative picture that unifies the practical and theoretical domains.
Refuting two dilemmas for infallibilism Fratantonio, Giada; Lasonen-Aarnio, Maria
Philosophical Studies,
08/2022, Volume:
179, Issue:
8
Book Review, Journal Article
Peer reviewed
According to a version of Infallibilism, if one knows that p, then one’s evidence for p entails p. In her
Fallibilism: Evidence and Knowledge
(2018, OUP), Jessica Brown has recently developed two ...arguments against Infalliblism, which can both be presented in the form of a dilemma. According to the first dilemma, the infallibilist can avoid scepticism only if she endorses the claim that if one knows that p then p is part of one’s evidence for p. But this seems to come at the cost of making infelicitous claims. According to the second dilemma, the infallibilist cannot make sense of the phenomenon of defeat unless she rejects closure. In this paper, we argue that the infallibilist has the conceptual tools to resist both dilemmas.
Coherence as Competence Lasonen-Aarnio, Maria
Episteme,
09/2021, Volume:
18, Issue:
3
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Open access
Being incoherent is often viewed as a paradigm kind of irrationality. Numerous authors attempt to explain the distinct-seeming failure of incoherence by positing a set of requirements of structural ...rationality. I argue that the notion of coherence that structural requirements are meant to capture is very slippery, and that intuitive judgments – in particular, a charge of a distinct, blatant kind of irrationality – are very imperfectly correlated with respecting the canon of structural requirements. I outline an alternative strategy for explaining our patterns of normative disapproval, one appealing to feasible dispositions to conform to substantive, non-structural norms. A wide range of paradigmatic cases of incoherence, I will argue, involve manifesting problematic dispositions, dispositions that manifest across a range of cases as blatant-seeming normative failures.
PDF
