Papers by Tricia Magalotti
Topoi, 2021
Emotions seem to be epistemically assessable: fear of an onrushing truck is epistemically justifi... more Emotions seem to be epistemically assessable: fear of an onrushing truck is epistemically justified whereas, mutatis mutandis, fear of a peanut rolling on the floor is not. But there is a difficulty in understanding why emotions are epistemically assessable. It is clear why beliefs, for instance, are epistemically assessable: epistemic assessability is, arguably, assessability with respect to likely truth, and belief is by its nature concerned with truth; truth is, we might say, belief’s “formal object.” Emotions, however, have formal objects different from truth: the formal object of fear is danger, the formal object of indignation is injustice, and so on. Why, then, are emotions epistemically assessable too? Here we make a negative claim and a positive claim. On the negative side, we consider how cognitivist and perceptualist accounts of emotion may respond to this challenge, and argue against those responses. On the positive side, we develop an alternative picture of the domain o...
Erkenntnis, 2022
While it is commonly accepted that justified beliefs must be strongly supported by evidence and t... more While it is commonly accepted that justified beliefs must be strongly supported by evidence and that support comes in degrees, the question of how much evidential support one needs in order to have a justified belief remains. In this paper, I consider how the question about degrees of evidential support connects with recent debates between consequentialist and deontological explanations of epistemic norms. I argue that explaining why strong, but not conclusive, evidential support is required for justification should be one explanandum that such theories seek to explain. Furthermore, I argue that foundational theories that appeal to the promotion of epistemic value (especially consequentialism, but perhaps also some versions of epistemic deontology) are better suited to provide such an explanation.
Erkenntnis
While it is commonly accepted that justified beliefs must be strongly supported by evidence and t... more While it is commonly accepted that justified beliefs must be strongly supported by evidence and that support comes in degrees, the question of how much evidential support one needs in order to have a justified belief remains. In this paper, I consider how the question about degrees of evidential support connects with recent debates between consequentialist and deontological explanations of epistemic norms. I argue that explaining why strong, but not conclusive, evidential support is required for justification should be one explanandum that such theories seek to explain. Further- more, I argue that foundational theories that appeal to the promotion of epistemic value (especially consequentialism, but perhaps also some versions of epistemic deontology) are better suited to provide such an explanation.
Topoi, 2021
Emotions seem to be epistemically assessable: fear of an onrushing truck is epistemically justifi... more Emotions seem to be epistemically assessable: fear of an onrushing truck is epistemically justified, mutatis mutandis, whereas fear of a peanut rolling on the floor is not. But there is a difficulty in understanding why emotions are epistemically assessable. It is clear why beliefs, for instance, are epistemically assessable: epistemic assessability is, arguably, assessability with respect to likely truth, and belief is by its nature concerned with truth; truth is, we might say, belief's "formal object." Emotions, however, have formal objects different from truth: the formal object of fear is danger, the formal object of indignation is injustice, the formal object of grief is loss, and so on. After considering how a number of different accounts of emotion might account for the epistemic assessability of emotion, we develop a novel account of the domain of the epistemically assessable, according to which any mental state which is constitutively evidence-responsive is epistemically assessable, regardless of whether its formal object is truth.
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Papers by Tricia Magalotti