Tag Archives: rationality

Wai Lok CHEUNG ABSTRACT: Stewart Cohen’s epistemic responsibility conception of epistemic justification in illustrating the problem of the new evil demon is assessed through some virtue-theoretic attempts, notably by Timothy Williamson and Clayton Littlejohn, whose accounts provide a good departure point to differentiate epistemic blamelessness through epistemic excusability via exercise of epistemic competence with epistemic recklessness. Some failure of epistemic …

Lisa BASTIAN ABSTRACT: Although much has been written about the property of rationality, its requirements, and whether it is normative, rationality attributions themselves have not received much attention. The main aim of this paper is to address this oversight by focussing directly on rationality attributions and their complexities. After offering a diagnosis for why attributions have been largely overlooked, the …

Daniel RÖNNEDAL ABSTRACT: According to the so-called truth norm, we ought to believe that A if and only if A is true. There are many possible interpretations of this norm. What does ‘ought’ in this norm mean? Does ‘ought’ have a wide or a narrow scope, etc.? In this paper, I will investigate one version of this norm and I …

Ryan ROSS ABSTRACT: Kopec and Titelbaum collect five alleged counterexamples to Uniqueness, the thesis that it is impossible for agents who have the same total evidence to be ideally rational in having different doxastic attitudes toward the same proposition. I argue that four of the alleged counterexamples fail and that Uniqueness should be slightly modified to accommodate the fifth example. …

Claire Field ABSTRACT: The Enkratic Principle enjoys something of a protected status as a requirement of rationality. I argue that this status is undeserved, at least in the epistemic domain. Compliance with the principle should not be thought of as a requirement of epistemic rationality, but rather as defeasible indication of epistemic blamelessness. To show this, I present the Puzzle …

Eric WILAND ABSTRACT: When you discover that an epistemic peer disagrees with you about some matter, does rationality require you to alter your views? Concessivists answer in the affirmative, but their view faces a problem in special cases. As others have noted, if concessivism itself is what’s under dispute, then concessivism seems to undermine itself. But there are other unexplored …

Brian HEDDEN ABSTRACT: I argue that an attractive theory about the metaphysics of belief – the pragmatic, interpretationist theory endorsed by Stalnaker, Lewis, and Dennett, among others – implies that agents have a novel form of voluntary control over their beliefs. According to the pragmatic picture, what it is to have a given belief is in part for that belief to …

Daniel WHITING ABSTRACT: Mark Schroeder has recently proposed a new analysis of knowledge. I examine that analysis and show that it fails. More specifically, I show that it faces a problem all too familiar from the post-Gettier literature, namely, that it is delivers the wrong verdict in fake barn cases. Download PDF