A Holistic Defense of Veritic Epistemic Consequentialism

Philosophical Review

Despite the recent backlash against epistemic consequentialism, an explicit systematic alternative has yet to emerge. This paper articulates and defends a novel alternative, Epistemic Kantianism, which rests on a requirement of respect for the truth. §1 tackles some preliminaries concerning the proper formulation of the epistemic consequentialism / non-consequentialism divide, explains where Epistemic Kantianism falls in the dialectical landscape, and shows how it can capture what seems attractive about epistemic consequentialism while yielding predictions that are harder for the latter to secure in a principled way. §2 presents Epistemic Kantianism. §3 argues that it is uniquely poised to satisfy the desiderata set out in §1 on an ideal theory of epistemic justification. §4 gives three further arguments, suggesting that it (i) best explains the normative significance of the subject's perspective in epistemology, (ii) follows from the kind of axiology needed to solve the swamping problem together with modest assumptions about the relation between the evaluative and the deontic, and (iii) illuminates certain asymmetries in epistemic value and obligation. §5 takes stock and reassesses the score in the debate.

Analysis

Thought

The following is an advertisement for scalar epistemic consequentialism. Benefits include an epistemic consequentialism that (i) is immune from the no-positive-epistemic-duties objection and (ii) doesn’t require bullet-biting on the rightness of epistemic tradeoffs. The advertisement invites readers to think more carefully about both the definition and logical space of epistemic consequentialism.

In Social Epistemology and Epistemic Agency: De-Centralizing Epistemic Agency, (ed.) P. Reider, (Rowman & Littlefield)

In this volume, Goldberg (Chapter 1) defines his socio-epistemological research programme by noting that “the pursuit of social epistemology is the attempt to come to terms with the epistemic significance of other minds” (Chapter 1, section 1, p. 8)—and especially the ‘epistemic sensibility’ they exhibit when they operate in common epistemic environments. Goldberg of course has in mind the epistemic sensibility of individual epistemic agents, but he does not want to exclude the possibility of epistemically sensible collective epistemic agents either. The problem, however, is that Goldberg seems to systematically place at the hard core of his programme the assumption that epistemic agents are exclusively individuals and this forces him to leave the question of epistemically sensible collective epistemic agents unaddressed. The aim of the present chapter is to extend Goldberg’s programme to also account for this possibility. To do so, we elaborate on the idea of extended knowledge (Pritchard 2010b; Palermos & Pritchard 2013; Palermos 2011; Palermos 2014b), according to which knowledge-conducive cognitive abilities can be occasionally extended to the artifacts we interact with or they may be even distributed between several individuals at the same time. On the basis of this approach we demonstrate that collective epistemic subjects can qualify as epistemic agents on the basis of being able to collectively exhibit an appropriate form of epistemic sensibility.

Episteme

Epistemic burdens – the nature and extent of our ignorance (that and how) with respect to various courses of action – serve to determine our incentive structures. Courses of action that seem to bear impossibly heavy epistemic burdens are typically not counted as options in an actor's menu, while courses of action that seem to bear comparatively heavy epistemic burdens are systematically discounted in an actor's menu relative to options that appear less epistemically burdensome. That ignorance serves to determine what counts as an option means that epistemic considerations are logically prior to moral, prudential, and economic considerations: in order to have moral, prudential, or economic obligations, one must have options, and epistemic burdens serve to determine our options. One cannot have obligations without doing some epistemic work. We defend this claim on introspective grounds. We also consider how epistemic burdens distort surrogate decision-making. The unique episte...

Mind

According to accuracy-first epistemology, accuracy is the fundamental epistemic good. Epistemic norms-Probabilism, Conditionalization, the Principal Principle, and so on-have their binding force in virtue of helping to secure this good. To make this idea precise, accuracy-firsters invoke Epistemic Decision Theory (EPDT) to determine which epistemic policies are the best means toward the end of accuracy. Hilary Greaves and others have recently challenged the tenability of this programme. Their arguments purport to show that EPDT encourages obviously epistemically irrational behaviour. We develop firmer conceptual foundations for EPDT. First, we detail a theory of praxic and epistemic good. Then we show that, in light of their very different good-making features, EPDT will evaluate epistemic states and epistemic acts according to different criteria. So, in general, rational preference over states and acts won't agree. Finally, we argue that based on direction-of-fit considerations, it is preferences over the former that matter for normative epistemology, and that EPDT, properly spelt out, arrives at the correct verdicts in a range of putative problem cases.

Many epistemologists equate the rational and the justied. Those who disagree have done little to explain the dierence, leading their opponents to suspect that the distinction is an ad hoc one designed to block counterexamples. The rst aim of this dissertationpursued in the rst three chaptersis to improve this situation by providing a detailed, independently motivated account of the distinction. The account is unusual in being inspired by no particular theoretical tradition in epistemology, but rather by ideas in the meta-ethical literature on reasons and rationality. The account is also unusual in proposing that the distinction between rationality and justication can be derived from a reasons-based account of justication. Historically, this is a striking claim. In epistemology, reasons-based accounts of justication are standardly treated as paradigmatically internalist accounts, but this dissertation argues that we should believe the reverse: given the best views about reasonsagain drawn from meta-ethicswe should expect reasons-based accounts of justication to be strongly externalist.

Recent work has criticized consequentialist approaches to epistemic justification. These criticisms are generated by a fundamental conceptual tension between our concept of epistemic justification and the way that consequentialism is generally understood. Epistemic justification is not “forward-looking.” Intuitively, a belief is never epistemically justified in virtue of what it brings about. However, consequentialism is inherently “forward-looking.” The rightmaking features of belief and action are defined in terms of the production of good consequences. In this paper, we develop a framework for epistemic consequentialism that avoids this conceptual problem. In particular, we discuss two overlooked features of consequentialist systems. First, consequentialist views calculate the production of value within relevant situations. Second, the bearer of the property of being justified need not be identical to the entity that produces value. These two insights enable us to develop a framework for consequentialist views that obviates recent criticisms.

Metaphilosophy, 2003

Traditional epistemology has, in the main, presupposed that the primary task is to give a complete account of the concept knowledge and to state under what conditions it is possible to have it. In so doing, most accounts have been hierarchical, and all assume an idealized knower. The assumption of an idealized knower is essential for the traditional goal of generating an unassailable account of knowledge acquisition. Yet we, as individuals, fail to reach the ideal. Perhaps more important, we have epistemic goals not addressed in the traditional approach -among them, the ability to reach understanding in areas we deem important for our lives. Understanding is an epistemic concept. But how we obtain it has not traditionally been a focus. Developing an epistemic account that starts from a set of assumptions that differ from the traditional starting points will allow a different sort of epistemic theory, one on which generating understanding is a central goal and the idealized knower is replaced with an inquirer who is not merely fallible but working from a particular context with particular goals. Insight into how an epistemic account can include the particular concerns of an embedded inquirer can be found by examining the parallels between ethics and epistemology and, in particular, by examining the structure and starting points of virtue accounts. Here I develop several interrelated issues that contrast the goals and evaluative concepts that form the structure of both standard, traditional epistemological and ethical theories and virtue-centered theories. In the end, I sketch a virtue-centered epistemology that accords with who we are and how we gain understanding.

In Egidi, R, and de Caro , M. The Architecture of Reason, Roma, Carocci, 2010

New Directions in Term Logic, George Englebretsen, ed. College Publications, London, 2024

I propose a so-called Submodel Semantics (thereafter: SMS) that differs from both Bistring Semantics (Demey & Smessart 2018) and a recent Numbering Semantics (Schang & Falessi 2023). It deals with a number of statements including predicate negations, i.e. ancient statements and knowledge statements: - ancient statements are categorical propositions including either affirmative or negative predications, e.g. (1) "Socrates is just", (2) "Socrates is not-just", (3) "Socrates is unjust", and (4) "Socrates is not just". (4) includes of external of sentential operator of negation and proceeds as Boolean complementation, whereas (2) and (3) are two cases of internal or predicate negations that are called infinite and privative negations respectively; - knowledge statements are those statements introduced in Englebretsen (1969) that include one predicate of knowedge. Both kinds of statements are explained according to SMS into increasing and partial submodels, and the logical relations between these statements are explained in terms of iterative opposite-forming operators (see Schang 2011, 2018) and a corresponding set of deduction rules. Thus any subaltern is a contradictory of a contrary, and any subcontrary is a contradictory of superaltern. I will apply the above definitions to deduce most of logical relations between four kinds of matching statements, namely: ancient statements; knowledge statements; ancient knowledge statements; iterated ancient knowledge statements (e.g. privately infinite statements); individual negations will be eventually proposed in the line of SMS. By defining the predicate negations by means of submodels that include additional possible worlds (for privative negation) or additional predicates (for infinite negation), my main thesis is that internal or predicate negations proceed as expanding models by means of successor functions that nicely echo with an interpretation of Hegel's dialectical negation or Aufhebung (Schang 2020).

Synthese, 2020

Philosophers have recently argued that self-fulfilling beliefs, because of their exceptional structure, constitute an important counter-example to the widely accepted theses that we ought not and cannot believe at will. Cases of self-fulfilling belief are thought to constitute a special class where we enjoy the epistemic freedom to permissibly believe for pragmatic reasons, because whatever we choose to believe will end up true. In this paper, I argue that this view fails to distinguish between the aim of acquiring a true belief and the aim of believing what is true. While one cannot usually fail to establish that one will acquire a true belief without establishing the truth of the believed proposition, in the case self-fulfilling belief the two can come apart. I argue that insofar as the aim of belief has to do with determining whether the believed proposition is true, it will be both impossible and impermissible to believe for pragmatic reasons.

… Revista Hispanoamericana de …, 2011