The Priority of the Epistemic

Medicine, Health Care and Philosophy, 2019

We aim to establish the following claim: other factors held constant, the relative weights of the epistemic burdens of competing treatment options serve to determine the options that patient surrogates pursue. Simply put, surrogates confront an incentive, ceteris paribus, to pursue treatment options with respect to which their knowledge is most adequate to the requirements of the case. Regardless of what the patient would choose, options that require more knowledge than the surrogate possesses (or is likely to learn) will either be neglected altogether or deeply discounted in the surrogate's incentive structure. We establish this claim by arguing that the relation between epistemic burdens and incentives in decision-making is a general feature of surrogate decision-making. After establishing the claim, we draw out some of the implications for surrogate decision-making in medicine and offer philosophical and psychological explanations of the phenomenon. decisions on what they think the patient would want, if she could express such a preference. 1 It is often the case, however, that this standard can be met only if the surrogate first overcomes her ignorance of various considerations. These include, first, that the surrogate may be ignorant of the patient's values, beliefs, attitudes, and dispositions. When we make our own medical decisions, we don't need to think about what kind of person we are. If she is to meet the relevant standard, however, a surrogate must possess intimate knowledge of the patient's values, beliefs, etc. This knowledge may be difficult to acquire. 2 Second, the surrogate may be ignorant of what the patient would want in the context under consideration, i.e., the surrogate may not know what the patient's values, beliefs, etc., imply about the decision she would want made under prevailing circumstances. When we make our own medical decisions, we make them in the context of our own lives and how we want to live them. For surrogates, however, this deliberation, must be more explicit in order to make a decision that meets the relevant standard. Third, the surrogate may be ignorant of some of the medical facts knowledge of which is required to meet the standard of deciding as the patient would decide. If there is a disconnect between what the surrogate and the patient know about pertinent medical facts, there is likely to be a disconnect between the surrogate's decision and the patient's unexpressed preference. Scheall defines the epistemic burden of some objective as "simply everything that one must know…which one does not already know, in order to realize [the objective] deliberately as

Philosophical Perspectives, 2010

Synthese, 2014

It has been suggested, by Michael Bishop, that empirical evidence on human reasoning poses a threat to the internalist account of epistemic responsibility, which he takes to associate being epistemically responsible with coherence, evidence-fitting and reasons-responsiveness. Bishop claims that the empirical data challenges the importance of meeting these criteria by emphasising how it is possible to obtain true beliefs by diverging from them. He suggests that the internalist conception of responsibility should be replaced by one that properly reflects how we can reliably obtain true beliefs. In this paper I defend the internalist account by arguing that Bishop has misinterpreted the relevance of the empirical evidence to the philosophical theory. I argue that the empirical data actually provides support for the idea that, if we want to obtain true beliefs by being responsible, we should aim to meet the criteria that internalists associate with epistemic responsibility.

Synthese, 2021

According to epistemic utility theory, epistemic rationality is teleological: epistemic norms are instrumental norms that have the aim of acquiring accuracy. What’s definitive of these norms is that they can be expected to lead to the acquisition of accuracy when followed. While there’s much to be said in favor of this approach, it turns out that it faces a couple of worrisome extensional problems involving the future. The first problem involves credences about the future, and the second problem involves future credences. Examining prominent solutions to a different extensional problem for this approach reinforces the severity of the two problems involving the future. Reflecting on these problems reveals the source: the teleological assumption that epistemic rationality aims at acquiring accuracy.

As epistemic agents, we have certain responsibilities as "knowers"--there are behaviors and actions which are conducive to knowledge building, and others which are not. I argue that these epistemic responsibilities are not completely removed from the ethical sphere, and there are cases in which a responsible moral agent must also be epistemically responsible.

Evidence from inside and outside the laboratory indicates that strategically ignoring the negative social consequences of self-interested decisions drives anti-social behavior, cor- ruption and even genocide. In an experimental allocation game taken from behavioral economics, I investigate when subjects decide not to know the consequences of a self- interested decision for another person. On the one hand, decision makers remain ignorant more often if fairness requires a larger sacrifice. On the other hand, a larger expected loss for others does not lead to significant changes in ignorance or prosocial behavior. The results show that subjects consciously choose to avoid inconvenient information, and this decision is mainly driven by the desire to avoid personal sacrifices. These findings have consequences for the design of public policies to promote awareness of social problems, like unsustainable consumption patterns and climate change.

Philosophy of Science, 2017

We use a theorem from Schervish (1989) to explain the relationship between accuracy and practical success. If an agent is pragmatically rational, she'll quantify the expected loss of her credence with a strictly proper scoring rule. Which scoring rule is right for her will depend on the sorts of decisions she expects to face. We relate this pragmatic conception of inaccuracy to the purely epistemic one popular among epistemic utility theorists.

Mind, 2013

I explore the prospects for modelling epistemic rationality (in the probabilist setting) via an epistemic decision theory, in a consequentialist spirit. Previous work has focused on cases in which the truth-values of the propositions in which the agent is selecting credences do not depend, either causally or merely evidentially, on the agent's choice of credences. Relaxing that restriction leads to a proliferation of puzzle cases and theories to deal with them, including epistemic analogues of evidential and causal decision theory, and of the Newcomb problem and 'Psychopath Button' problem. A variant of causal epistemic decision theory deals well with most cases. However, there is a recalcitrant class of problem cases for which no epistemic decision theory seems able to match our intuitive judgements of epistemic rationality. This lends both precision and credence to the view that there is a fundamental mismatch between epistemic consequentialism and the intuitive notion of epistemic rationality; the implications for understanding the latter are briefly discussed.

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.

K. McCain, S. Stapleford, and M. Steup (Eds.), Epistemic Dilemmas: New Arguments, New Angles (pp 165– 181). New York, Routledge., 2021

This paper concentrates on a particular sort of case where it’s plausible that epistemic requirements can conflict: cases where an agent’s higher-order evidence supports doubting her reliability in reacting to her ordinary evidence. Conflicting epistemic requirements can be seen as generating epistemic dilemmas. The paper examines two ways that people have sought to recognize conflicting requirements without allowing them to generate epistemic dilemmas: separating epistemic norms into two different varieties, and positing rational indeterminacy in cases where principles conflict. It argues that these views incur costs, and that the sense in which they avoid dilemmas does not gain them an advantage over a view that simply recognizes dilemmas as a natural outgrowth of agents’ rational reflection on their own thinking.