Necessity and Rational Insight

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.

Dialectica, 2004

Moderate rationalists maintain that our rational intuitions provide us with prima facie justification for believing various necessary propositions. Such a claim is often criticized on the grounds that our having reliable rational intuitions about domains in which the truths are necessary is inexplicable in some epistemically objectionable sense. In this paper, I defend moderate rationalism against such criticism. I argue that if the reliability of our rational intuitions is taken to be contingent, then there is no reason to think that our reliability is inexplicable. I also suggest that our reliability is, in fact, necessary, and that such necessary reliability neither admits of, nor requires, any explanation of the envisaged sort.

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.

Erkenntnis, 2007

In this paper, I argue that what underlies internalism about justification is a rationalist conception of justification, not a deontological conception of justification, and I argue for the plausibility of this rationalist conception of justification. The rationalist conception of justification is the view that a justified belief is a belief that is held in a rational way; since we exercise our rationality through conscious deliberation, the rationalist conception holds that a belief is justified iff a relevant possible instance of conscious deliberation would endorse the belief. The importance of conscious deliberation stems from its role in guiding us in acquiring true beliefs: whereas the externalist holds that if we wish to acquire true beliefs, we have to begin by assuming that some of our usual methods of belief formation generally provide us with true beliefs, the internalist holds that if we form beliefs by conscious deliberation, we can be conscious of reasons for thinking that our beliefs are true. Conscious deliberation can make us conscious of reasons because it proceeds via rational intuitions. I argue that despite the fallibility of rational intuition, rational intuitions do enable us to become conscious of reasons for belief.

Philosophy and Phenomenological Research

This paper looks at whether it is possible to unify the requirements of rationality with the demands of normative reasons. It might seem impossible to do because one depends upon the agent’s perspective and the other upon features of the situation. Enter Reasons Perspectivism. Reasons perspectivists think they can show that rationality does consist in responding correctly to reasons by placing epistemic constraints on these reasons. They think that if normative reasons are subject to the right epistemic constraints, rational requirements will correspond to the demands generated by normative reasons. While this proposal is prima facie plausible, it cannot ultimately unify reasons and rationality. There is no epistemic constraint that can do what reasons perspectivists would need it to do. Some constraints are too strict. The rest are too slack. This points to a general problem with the reasons-first program. Once we recognize that the agent’s epistemic position helps determine what she should do, we have to reject the idea that the features of the agent’s situation can help determine what we should do. Either rationality crowds out reasons and their demands or the reasons will make unreasonable demands.

2016

Drawing on insights from Imre Lakatos' seminal work on theories of rationality, Leslie Allan develops seven criteria for rational theory choice that surmount a major shortcoming of Lakatos' methodology. By articulating the various criteria of dependence and independence applying to evidence-statements, Allan shows how his axioms of rationality follow from the general demands of an objectivist epistemology. He thus avoids Lakatos' Achilles' heel; the presupposition that science is a rational enterprise. Allan concludes his essay with a consideration of two problems for his theory: the problem of logical incommensurability and of implicit rationality.

International Journal for the Study of Skepticism, Volume 7, Issue 4, pages 246 – 257 Publication Year : 2017

The two main components of Coliva's view are Moderatism and Extended Rationality. According to Moderatism, a belief about specific material objects is perceptually justified iff, absent defeaters, one has the appropriate course of experience and it is assumed that there is an external world. I grant Moderatism and instead focus on Extended Rationality, according to which it is epistemically rational to believe evidentially warranted propositions and to accept those unwarrantable assumptions that make the acquisition of perceptual warrants possible and are therefore constitutive of ordinary evidential warrants. I suggest that, even though Extended Rationality might be true, it cannot do the work that Coliva wants it to do. Although my objections do not show that it is false, they can serve to clarify what sorts of problem a theory of justification or rationality could possibly address. This provides an alternative to Coliva's view of the skeptical problem and the question, on what does rationality hinge?

2020

Value theorists routinely distinguish structural rationality-a matter of attitudinal coherence-from substantive rationality-a matter of reasons-responsiveness. Epistemologists do not likewise distinguish structural epistemic rationality (SER) from justification, but they should. I first argue that SER demands self-coherence , not classical consistency, and show that this means its epistemic work is not superfluous to justification's. I then provide a vindication (in BonJour's (1985) sense) of SER by showing that it promotes a fundamental cognitive goal. In doing so, I argue that fundamental cognitive goals ought to be understood not in terms of truth, but of a broader notion of accuracy.