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Core and Ancillary Epistemic Virtues

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Abstract

We argue, primarily by appeal to phenomenological considerations related to the experiential aspects of agency, that belief fixation is broadly agentive; although it is rarely (if ever) voluntary, nonetheless, it is phenomenologically agentive because of its significant phenomenological similarities to voluntary-agency experience. An important consequence is that epistemic rationality, as a central feature of belief fixation, is an agentive notion. This enables us to introduce and develop a distinction between core and ancillary epistemic virtues. Core epistemic virtues involve several inter-related kinds of epistemic rationality in belief fixation. Other “habits of mind” pertinent to belief fixation constitute ancillary epistemic virtues. Finally, we discuss the relationship between both kinds of virtues, offering a unified account of epistemic virtuousness.

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Notes

  1. This formulation will be refined below, in light of what we will say about multiple kinds of epistemic rationality and their connections to epistemic virtuousness.

  2. For more on the limits of introspection concerning the satisfaction conditions of voluntary-agency phenomenology, and on extra-phenomenological reasons to doubt that such phenomenology has metaphysical-libertarian satisfaction conditions, see Horgan and Timmons (2011) and Horgan (2011, 2012, 2015).

  3. We acknowledge that there are important open questions concerning the satisfaction conditions of optionality-phenomenology, and also concerning the satisfaction conditions of judgments to the effect that one “could do otherwise” given one’s current circumstances and one’s current psychological state. In our view, an important preliminary task here is to give a plausible account of the semantical workings of modal statements and counterfactual statements in general—an account under which such statements can be true even if determinism obtains. (Standard possible-worlds semantics does not do well in this respect.) Such an account then would be potentially applicable to agentive optionality.

  4. Moral-reasons phenomenology is different. Moral reasons are experienced as categorically favoring (or requiring) a given action, independently of one’s pre-existing desires. We leave this issue aside in this paper (cf. Horgan and Timmons 2009, 206–208; 2010, 110–113; Mandelbaum 1955).

  5. Our use of the notion “the space of reasons” is Sellarsian in spirit. Sellars related it to the notion of knowledge in stating that “in characterizing an episode or a state as that of knowing, we are not giving an empirical description of that episode or state; we are placing it in the logical space of reasons, of justifying and being able to justify what one says” (Sellars 1956, §36).

  6. We focus on belief formation because belief maintenance is often just a default matter, without distinctive or salient phenomenology. And we focus on formation of occurrent beliefs because phenomenology accrues to occurrently conscious mental states.

  7. Here too, it is important not to conflate the feature not being experienced as the outcome of a state-causal process with the putative feature being experienced as not the outcome of a state-causal process. Although the aspect of self-sourcehood in experiences of belief formation clearly involves the former feature, introspection by itself cannot reliably ascertain whether or not the second feature is present as well. And, since there are powerful extra-phenomenological reasons to hold that belief-fixation is indeed a state-causal process (for instance, the rich body of scientific knowledge about state-causal processes in the brain and central nervous system, with some of the pertinent brain-states implementing mental states like episodes of evidence-appreciation), there is also the following strong extra-phenomenological reason to deny that credentive phenomenology represents one’s own belief-formation as a non-causal process: if the phenomenology did have such content, then it would be systematically non-veridical and systematically illusory.

  8. It might initially appear that these successive objectives are not smoothly nested, because Goal is framed primarily in “reliabilist” terms whereas the other three objectives are framed primarily in “evidentialist” terms. On the contrary, however, reliabilist and evidentialist elements fit smoothly together in this means/ends hierarchy because one’s constitutive best means vis-à-vis the primary epistemic telos of reliable generation of true beliefs involve reliance on one’s available evidence.

  9. For elaboration and defense of these claims, see Henderson et al. (2017).

  10. These successively stronger attributes, each of which includes its immediate predecessor as a constituent, constitute virtues because of the agentive aspects of belief fixation that we are emphasizing in this paper.

  11. For some epistemological purposes, Level-4 virtuousness is usefully subdivided into two sub-levels: Level 4.a, comprising (i) experiential subjective rationality, plus (ii) sensibility-based subjective rationality, plus (iii) objective rationality, plus (iv) reliability in general of the operative belief-forming process; and Level 4.b, comprising all this plus truth of the pertinent belief (i.e., reliability here and now). The latter sub-level embeds the former, but not conversely.

  12. A natural way to understand the pertinent notion of likelihood is this: a given belief is highly likely to be true (/false) just in case it is true (/false) in a wide range of experientially possible global environments, and is only false (/true) in a narrow range of such environments (cf. Henderson et al. 2007 and Henderson and Horgan 2011, Chapters 4 and 5).

  13. This is the needed refinement, anticipated in note 1 above, to our initial characterization of core epistemic virtuousness, in Section 2, as “rational belief-fixation.” Core-virtuously rational belief-fixation can be minimal (only experiential subjective rationality, without either of the other two kinds), partial but non-minimal (only experiential subjective rationality plus sensibility-based subjective rationality, without the third kind), or complete (experiential subjective rationality plus sensibility-based subjective rationality plus objective rationality).

  14. Here is a similar thought as voiced by Blackburn. “For there is an account of how a trait gets to be on the list of epistemic virtues. It will be there because it promotes an alignment of belief and truth.” (Blackburn 2001, 21)

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Correspondence to Vojko Strahovnik.

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Horgan, T., Potrč, M. & Strahovnik, V. Core and Ancillary Epistemic Virtues. Acta Anal 33, 295–309 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12136-018-0349-4

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