The Place of Reasons in Epistemology (with Ernest Sosa)

Philosophy Compass

The paper is an opinionated tour of the literature on the reasons for which we hold beliefs and other doxastic attitudes, which I call “operative epistemic reasons”. After drawing some distinctions in §1, I begin in §2 by discussing the ontology of operative epistemic reasons, assessing arguments for and against the view that they are mental states. I recommend a pluralist non-mentalist view that takes seriously the variety of operative epistemic reasons ascriptions and allows these reasons to be both propositions and truth-making facts. In §3, I turn to consider what it takes for a consideration to be an operative epistemic reason, examining three conditions—the representational, treating, and explanatory conditions—that have been proposed. I offer a novel view about the explanatory condition. In §4, I discuss the special case of inferential operative reasons and examine attempts to understand them in terms of rule-following, sketching a competence-based spinoff of dispositionalism. Finally, in §5, I consider whether there are non-inferential operative reasons, observing that one needn’t countenance them to be a foundationalist but then developing a view about what they are and how they do and don't differ from inferential reasons.

Philosophy Compass

This paper is an opinionated guide to the literature on normative (=good) epistemic reasons. After making some distinctions in §1, I begin in §2 by discussing the ontology of normative epistemic reasons, assessing arguments for and against the view that they are mental states, and concluding that they are not mental states. In §3, I examine the distinction between normative epistemic reasons there are and normative epistemic reasons we possess. I offer a novel account of this distinction and argue that we in fact ought to acknowledge a threefold distinction between objective, possessed, and apparent normative epistemic reasons. In §4, I discuss the question of which normative reasons for doxastic attitudes are the epistemic ones, evaluating reasons against a simple evidentialist answer. Finally, in §5, I look at the role of reasons in epistemology, considering challenges to viewing them as the building blocks of epistemic normativity and maintaining that the challenges recommend a novel bi-level epistemology rather than the marginalization of reasons in epistemology.

Southern Journal of Philosophy, 1993

Journal of Cognition and Neuroethics

2017

Endriss Justify This! The Roles of Epistemic Justification 2 [J]ustification is primarily a status which knowledge can confer on beliefs that look good in its light without themselves amounting to knowledge. Timothy Williamson(2000),p. 9. 0. BACKGROUND Suppose that Smith and Jones have applied for a certain job. 1 And suppose that Smith has strong evidence for the following conjunctive proposition: (i) Jones is the man who will get the job, and Jones has ten coins in his pocket. Smith's evidence for (i) might be that the president of the company assured him that Jones would in the end be selected, and that he, Smith, had counted the coins in Jones's pocket ten minutes ago. Proposition (i) implies: (ii) The man who will get the job has ten coins in his pocket. Let us further suppose that Smith sees the implication from (i) to (ii) and accepts (ii) on the grounds of (i), for which he has strong evidence. In this case, Smith is clearly justified in believing that (ii) is true. But imagine, further, that unknown to Smith, he himself, not Jones, will get the job. And, also, unknown to Smith, he himself has ten coins in his pocket. Proposition (ii) is then true, though proposition (i), from which Smith inferred (ii), is false. In our example, then, all of the following are true: (ii) is true, Smith believes that (ii) is true, and Smith is justified in believing that (ii) is true. But it is equally clear that Smith does not know that (ii) is true; for (ii) is true in virtue of the number of coins in Smith's pocket, while Smith does not know how many coins are in Smith's pocket, and bases his belief in 1 The following case study is taken directly from Edmund Gettier's (1963/2008) "Is Justified True Belief Knowledge?" Some minor changes have been made to remove elements of the original language that are unnecessary for this paper. Endriss Justify This! The Roles of Epistemic Justification

In A. Reisner and A. Steglich-Petersen (ed.) Reasons for Belief (Cambridge University Press)

Discusses epistemic norms and the demands that reasons place upon us. Argues against evidentialist views on the grounds that relations between evidence and belief are not the only normatively significant relations. Argues against knowledge-first approaches to epistemic normativity on the grounds that one might do no epistemic wrong even if one believes what one doesn't know.

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.

Forthcoming in Nous

Synthese, 1985

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.