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Notes
For a nice discussion of this see chapter 3 of Comesaña (2020).
I have switched variables in the quote to bring it into line with my standard way of thinking about conditional credence. With Ramsey, I think such credence rationally aligns with credence lent to an indicative conditional; and with philosophers in general, I think indicatives are built from an antecedent and a consequent. This is why I use “C” for an arbitrary claim and “A” for the restricting claim.
Arguably we need one for the rational absorption of testimony with indicative conditionals too, but that is a longer story. See chapter 4 of the book.
For an extended discussion of level issues in epistemology see my (2022).
And thus Sosa- and Gettier-like worries are avoided. These worries about the environment robbing us of knowledge are analogous to Burge- and Putnam-like worries about the environment robbing us of semantic success. The significance of this is discussed in chapter 3 of my (2000).
This is one reason why knowledge-conferring rationality is factive. For independent arguments for this view of knowledge-conferring rationality see my (1993), Zagzebski’s (1994), or Merrick’s (1995).
For arguments that these should not always align see my (2022) and (ms.).
For similar views of preference- or desire-based decision theory, see Ayars (ms.) and references therein. If I had known of this literature when writing TRM, I would certainly have used it to help readers understand the perspective defended.
There are other worries for the upper-bound idea. Let SIMP be a simple and intrinsically plausible claim and INC be a complex and hard-to-understand claim (like the claim that arithmetic is incomplete). One might become aware of conclusive evidence for SIMP and INC yet remain more attracted to the former than the latter. (I should say that the perspective behind Rosen’s second question is one adopted in my (2010), a paper written before I became fully clear on the perspective defended in TRM.).
Pragmatic considerations are also thought to encroach. The encroachment terminology comes from a blog post by Jonathan Kvanvig: “Pragmatic aspects of knowledge?”, Certain Doubts, 12 June, 2004. There is a good deal of literature on the subject. For state-of-the-art discussion see Schroeder’s Reasons First, OUP, 2021.
For related discussion see literature on so-called “paradoxes of proof” in the philosophy of law—a classic in the area is Redmayne (2008). See also Buchak (2014), Littlejohn (2017), and Papineau (2019).
To see why have a look at Eleanor Gordon-Smith’s (ms.).
It is also a view which helps make sense of intuition in lottery and preface cases, intuition surrounding the epistemology of “raw statistics”, and more. See my “Reply to Neta” in this symposium, and the literature sited in footnote 4.
Jane Friedman takes issues with this aspect of the book. See her terrific critical notice “Committed Neutrality in the Rational Mind”, Analysis forthcoming.
Thanks to Dave Chalmers, Susanna Siegel, and Maja Spener for help with this precis of The Rational Mind. And huge thanks to Juan Comesaña, Ram Neta, and Gideon Rosen for contributing to the symposium. I’ve learned a great deal from their contributions.
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Sturgeon, S. Reply to Comesaña. Philos Stud 180, 3231–3252 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-023-01926-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-023-01926-6