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DISSERTATION
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On the Normativity
of Epistemic Rationality: An Overview |
My dissertation had two major goals. The first was to defend a novel version of the distinction between rationality and justification in epistemology that profits from recent theorizing about rationality and reasons outside of epistemology. In meta-ethics, it has become common to separate the question of whether it would be rational for one to act from the question of whether one possesses objectively good reasons to act. Rationality only requires us to heed apparent reasons and the pressures of coherence exerted by our attitudes, and both can fail to coincide with objectively good reasons. My distinction is inspired by this picture. While justification does not require one to heed the objective reasons given by all the facts, it does require one to possess some objectively good reasons that are not outweighed by other objectively good reasons that one possesses. Rationality does not require so much: indeed, one can be rationally required to comply with reasons that aren't objectively good at all.
The second major goal was to explain how epistemic rationality could have any necessary significance from the epistemic point of view, given the need to divorce rationality and justification. The parallel distinction in meta-ethics led many to think that it is an open question whether rationality has any normative significance as such. Of course, it is intuitive that rationality has this significance. But one craves an explanation. This is so even if we are merely interested in the significance of epistemic rationality from the epistemic point of view: for as I argue, epistemic rationality does not necessarily reliably promote fundamental epistemic values like true belief, and has no necessary connection to objectively good epistemic reasons.
To explain the necessary significance of rationality from the epistemic point of view, I argue that we must reject some widely assumed views about epistemic value. We must deny that all derivative epistemic value is instrumental epistemic value and deny that our epistemic obligations are best understood in consequentialist terms. To undermine these views, I show that they are the source of long-standing problems in the theory of epistemic value. Indeed, I show we cannot even explain the epistemic value of properties that are instrumental to truth given a consequentialist model. If we reject that model, we can get a unified account of the epistemic value of rationality, justification, and knowledge and solve long-standing problems in the theory of epistemic value. Epistemic rationality matters in the same way that justification and knowledge matter: epistemologists have just been wrong across the board about what it is to matter epistemically.
A striking feature of my view is that it preserves the idea that true belief is the fundamental epistemic value but unpacks this idea in a non-consequentialist way. In a crude slogan: accuracy is fundamentally to be respected as the norm of belief, not to be produced as a goal. The way to respect the norm of accuracy just is to form beliefs in the ways characteristic of epistemic rationality. So, there is a truth-oriented explanation of why rational belief matters, though it is not a consequentialist one. A similar kind of explanation, I show, can and should be given of the epistemic value of justified belief and knowledge. In this way, we can secure truth-oriented unity in the theory of epistemic value even though rationality doesn’t guarantee reliability.
Epistemologists have so far been unable to grasp this unity because they have made some optional assumptions about how derivative epistemic value is grounded in fundamental epistemic value. While the epistemic value of rationality looks puzzling from an instrumentalist angle, that fact is evidence that this angle is mistaken. Rationality is not the exception but the rule: we cannot fully understand the value of any epistemically significant ways of believing from a purely instrumentalist angle.
The dissertation was split into two parts defending the two goals outlined above. Although they formed a unified narrative, these chapters were written to be digested as self-contained papers, and they have been developed further since I finished the dissertation. By clicking the button, you can read a more detailed description of the chapters and how they connected, and see the final version of the dissertation. Note that my new paper "Respect and the Reality of Apparent Reasons" was originally intended to be the last chapter, but was cut because I defended earlier than expected in order to take the post at Southampton.
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