Defending the Uniqueness Thesis: A Reply to Luis Rosa

Erkenntnis, 2011

Control of our own beliefs is allegedly required for the truth of epistemic evaluations, such as ''S ought to believe that p'', or ''S ought to suspend judgment (and so refrain from any belief) whether p''. However, we cannot usually believe or refrain from believing at will. I agree with a number of recent authors in thinking that this apparent conflict is to be resolved by distinguishing reasons for believing that give evidence that p from reasons that make it desirable to believe that p whether or not p is true. I argue however that there is a different problem, one that becomes clearer in light of this solution to the first problem. Someone's approval of our beliefs is at least often a non-evidential reason to believe, and as such cannot change our beliefs. Ought judgments aim to change the world. But 'ought to believe' judgments can't do that by changing the belief, if they don't give evidence. So I argue that we should instead regard epistemic ought judgments as aimed mainly at influencing assertions that express the belief and other actions based on the belief, in accord with recent philosophical claims that we have epistemic norms for assertion and action. There has been much discussion recently of a philosophical problem about our control of our own beliefs. 1 Such control is alleged to be required for the truth of normative judgments, such as ''S ought to believe that p'', ''S ought not to believe that q'', or ''S ought to suspend judgment (and so refrain from any belief) whether r''. Some of those 'ought' judgments seem to be true. But if 'ought' implies 'can', then in cases where one ought to believe that p, one can believe that p, and where one ought to refrain from believing that q, one can refrain from believing that q.

A central question in epistemology is: which beliefs are rational? However, I intend to argue that the notion of rationality is, in fact, a conflation of two quite different notions: the notion of what we ought to believe and the notion of what the evidence supports. I also think that many of the problems that epistemologists face can be solved by distinguishing these two notions. I will say more about these notions later in the paper, but for now, the crucial point to note is that what beliefs we ought to have depends, in part, on our cognitive capacities, whereas what beliefs the evidence supports does not. In this paper, I will focus on how this distinction can be used to address some puzzling issues that arise with regard to the question of how precise our doxastic attitudes should be.

In the past few years permissivism - the claim that a body of evidence can rationalize more than one response - has enjoyed somewhat of a revival. But it is once again being threatened, this time by a host of new and interesting arguments that, at their core, are challenging the permissivist to explain why rationality matters. A version of the challenge that I am especially interested in is this: if permissivism is true, why should we expect the rational credences to be more accurate than the irrational ones? My aim is to turn this challenge on its head and argue that, actually, those who deny permissivism will have a harder time responding to such a challenge than those who accept it.

Deontological evidentialism is the claim that S ought to form or maintain S's beliefs in accordance with S's evidence. A promising argument for this view turns on the premise that consideration c is a normative reason for S to form or maintain a belief that p only if c is evidence that p is true. In this paper, I discuss the surprising relation between a recently influential argument for this key premise and the principle that ought implies can. I argue that anyone who antecedently accepts or rejects this principle already has a reason to resist either this argument's premises or its role in support of deontological evidentialism.

2018

In this paper, I will present and defend an argument from the conditional character of inferential justification (the argument from conditionality) against the version of epistemic infinitism Klein advances. More specifically, after proposing a distinction between propositional and doxastic infinitism, which is based on a standard distinction between propositional and doxastic justification, I will describe in considerable detail the argument from conditionality, which is mainly an argument against propositional infinitism, and clarify some of its main underlying assumptions. There are various responses to be found in Klein’s works to this argument, and my aim is to show that none of those responses can be plausibly held without infinitism losing its title to being a genuine non-skeptical alternative.

According to epistemic deontologism, attributions of epistemic justification are deontic claims about what we ought to believe. One of the most prominent objections to this conception, due mainly to William P. Alston (1988), is that the principle that ‘ought’ implies ‘can’ (OIC) rules out deontologism because our beliefs are not under our voluntary control. In this paper, I offer a partial defense of Alston’s critique of deontologism. While Alston is right that OIC rules out epistemic deontologism, appealing to doxastic involuntarism is not necessary for generating that tension. Deontologists would still have a problem with OIC if doxastic voluntarism turned out to be true or if deontologism did not require voluntarism. This is because, in short, epistemic justification does not imply ‘can’. If, as deontologists maintain, epistemic justification implies ‘oughts’, then epistemic justification must also imply ‘can’ given OIC. But since epistemic justification does not imply ‘can’, OIC dictates that we reject deontologism. I end by exploring the possible consequences of this incompatibility between OIC and deontologism. My conclusion is that at least one of the following claims must be true. Either (i) ‘ought’ does not imply ‘can’, (ii) attributions of epistemic justification are not deontic claims, or (iii) epistemic claims lack categorical normative authority.

Law and philosophy library, 2017

Common epistemological wisdom has it that epistemic facts supervene on non-epistemic ones which is usually thought to be just a particular instance of the general truth that evaluative facts supervene on non-evaluative ones (Turri 2010a). More specifically, it is widely held that facts concerning the epistemic justification of beliefs supervene on facts concerning beliefs' non-epistemic properties. It is not my purpose here to add to the literature on this topic: the issue with which I will be concerned has to do, rather, with the relationship between facts concerning one particular kind of epistemic justification, that is, propositional justification, and facts concerning people's doxastic states. For a number of contemporary epistemologists seem to believe that the basis upon which facts concerning propositional justification supervene only includes facts concerning the reasons or evidence to which agents have accessa suggestion that deserves closer scrutiny, if only because it is in tension with the way epistemic justification has been conceived in much traditional epistemology. The supervenience issue on which I propose to shed some light in this paper is then different from the issue that is at stake in familiar debates on epistemic supervenience. Moreover, I will address it in a slightly indirect way, by focussing on the question of the order of explanation between propositional and doxastic justification. By discussing a recent challenge to the answer that is usually given to this question I hope I will eventually put in an interesting perspective the specific issue concerning the supervenience basis of propositional justification that I am interested in in this paper. The challenge I have in mind is posed by John Turri in his paper 'On the Relationship between Propositional and Doxastic Justification' (Turri 2010b). As I explain in Section 1, in that paper Turri offers two counterexamples to the 'orthodox' view that doxastic justification should be explained in terms of propositional justification and goes on to suggest that the order of explanation must be reversed: it is propositional justification that should be explained in terms

Many epistemologists treat rationality and justi cation as the same thing. Those who don't lack detailed accounts of the di erence, leading their opponents to suspect that the distinction is an ad hoc attempt to safeguard their theories of justi cation. In this paper, I o er a new and detailed account of the distinction. The account is inspired by no particular views in epistemology, but rather by insights from the literature on reasons and rationality outside of epistemology. Speci cally, it turns on a version of the familiar distinction in meta-ethics between possessing apparent normative reasons (which may be merely apparent) and possessing objective normative reasons. The paper proceeds as follows. In §1, I discuss the history of indi erence to the distinction between rationality and justi cation in epistemology and the striking contrast with meta-ethics. I introduce the distinction between apparent reasons and possessed objective reasons in §2 and provide a deeper basis for it in §3. I explain how the ideas extend to epistemology in §4 and explore the upshots for some central issues in §5.

Logos & Episteme, 2023

This paper discusses the Uniqueness Thesis, a core thesis in the epistemology of disagreement. After presenting uniqueness and clarifying relevant terms, a novel counterexample to the thesis will be introduced. This counterexample involves logical disagreement. Several objections to the counterexample are then considered, and it is argued that the best responses to the counterexample all undermine the initial motivation for uniqueness.

I Abstract: Three objections to epistemic theories of argument are briefly presented and rebutted. In light of this I reply, a ease for argumentative epistemic eclecticism is made.