Abstract
In this essay, I motivate and defend a pluralistic view of epistemic rationality. The core of the view is the notion that epistemic rationality is essentially a species of (teleological) practical rationality that is put in the service of various epistemic goals. First, I sketch some closely related views that have appeared in the literature. Second, I present my preferred, pluralistic version of the view, and I sketch some of its benefits. Third, I defend the view against a prominent objection recently offered against a class of closely related views by Selim Berker. Last, I raise some distinct, lingering worries, and I sketch some possible ways one might address them.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
This terminology is perhaps not ideal, due to some confused early scholars who used the term ‘normative’ when applied to epistemology to contrast it with ‘naturalistic’ epistemology, on the false assumption that naturalistic accounts in philosophy are necessarily devoid of proper oughts. All the same, the usage is starting to take hold. Berker (2013a) is one prominent example.
Cf. Brössel et al. (2013). Cowie doesn’t specify that he means meta-epistemological instrumentalism, since he doesn’t focus on this distinction. But I think it is clear from his discussion that this is what he would intend.
I should say at the outset that my inspiration for classifying the various views in the way that follows was, in large part, the excellent discussion of many of these issues in Foley (1993). Folks familiar with that work will see much in common.
That is, if she’s capable of forming such a belief. This is a somewhat important hedge, since some have tried to use it to make pragmatist views seem less absurd, as in Bishop’s (2009) attempt to bolster Stich’s view. But since Stich (2009) himself doesn’t accept Bishop’s help here, I’ll set the worry aside.
It will soon become clear that this formulation is not quite specific enough to be useful. But I hope the reader will accept the intuitive notion for the time being.
Lockhard takes himself to be talking solely about ‘instrumentalist’ views, but there is no harm in using his apt label there to discuss a broader range of teleological views.
In his later book (1993), Foley moved to calling this kind of goal a ‘purely epistemic goal’, and modified it slightly to be the goal of having as accurate and comprehensive a belief system as possible. I leave this out of the discussion above, because Foley also leans toward a kind of pluralism in that later work, and I’ll discuss that move in depth below.
As he puts it, “Cognitive value derives from the project of trying to understand nature. Some truths are worthless because they play no role in that project. Some falsehoods are valuable because they do play such a role” (104).
In case the reader wasn’t aware, the geocentric theory was, in fact, the more predictively accurate theory for many decades after the scientific community had rejected it as false (cf. Forster and Sober 1994).
For Foley, when we assess an agent based upon facts about her own perspective, we shouldn’t simply base it upon the agent’s current state of mind, but rather upon what perspective she would have after achieving some manner of reflective stability (1993, pp. 94–101). I’m not yet convinced that this modification is required, at least outside of cases where an agent is so badly incoherent that it makes little sense to talk of her perspective on things in the first place. So, I won’t make such a restriction in what follows. I thank an anonymous referee for reminding me of this aspect of Foley’s view.
Foley (1993) adds a third category, namely, how the world seems to the agent’s community, which he calls the sociocentric perspective. Since I’m concerned with what makes agents rational, not what makes agents seem rational to their community, I’ll drop this category from the account. But I do not mean to minimize the possible importance of those kinds of questions. For example, they will be very important if we wish to retrospectively judge exactly how revolutionary a particular historical scientist’s thinking was.
The distinction has appeared under different names. For example, Foley (1993) refers to this as the egocentric/objective distinction. In the literature on instrumental or practical rationality, it is sometimes referred to as the subjective/objective distinction. I think these terms are likely to invite confusion. For example, a liberalist may well think there are objective facts of the matter concerning what an agent ought to do from her subjective point of view. The epistemologist’s terminology is just awkward enough to clearly signal that we are talking in technical terms.
This position is often associated with Hume (1739). Whether Hume was himself a ‘Humean’, in this sense, is up for debate.
One example would be a view of practical rationality based on an objective-list theory of well-being, such as the view defended in Nussbaum and Sen (1993). Maguire (2016) is a more recent defender of the value-based approach, although he seems to equate value-based assessments with moral assessments. (I prefer not to equate the two.)
One sort of pluralism is already a well-established position in the practical rationality literature, that is, the pluralism between external and internal practical reasons. (It’s usually referred to as pluralism between the “subjective” and “objective” notions of practical rationality, although I feel that terminology invites confusion, since those terms have also been used to refer to the desire-based and value-based distinction.) One recent example of a pluralist of this sort is Schroeder (2010). Foley (1993) seems to be the closest thing to an explicit desire-based/value-based pluralist about practical rationality at the non-morally loaded normative level. Those who take a so-called ‘hybrid’ approach to the grounding of practical normativity, like Ross (1930), Chang (2013), and Behrends (2015), think that both desires and values can generate practical reasons, but this leaves open whether these distinct domains give rise to a plurality of normative requirements. Some authors hold so-called “dualist” views (cf. Crisp 1996; Dorsey 2013), where prudential reasons and moral reasons generate incommensurable normative demands, e.g., Copp (1997). Such views would amount to a desire-based/value-based pluralism of the kind I’m after, so long as the moral status of any action is determined by facts about egoistic value promotion (which is obviously dubious). And those who deny that there is an ‘all-things-considered ought’ or an ‘ought simpliciter’ in the practical domain, such as Tiffany (2007) with his ‘deflationary normative pluralism’, seem to hold closely related pluralist views. See Baker (2017) for a survey of some of the various views one can take on the nature, and possible incommensurability, of different normative domains. I thank two anonymous referees for suggesting that I spell out more clearly the relationship between my view here and those in the practical rationality literature.
Of course, it’s possible that he might not, in fact, have held such a belief. Let us just assume that he did.
Perhaps after we add the further specifications I mention in fn11.
Of course, one might find Foley’s insistence implausible. Let us take it for granted for now, but more on this below.
I’ll back off from this a bit later in the essay. But for now, I’ll be as liberal as possible.
In other words, I’m assuming that epistemic value monism is wrong-headed, although I won’t present a full argument against that view here. For a defense of the monist position, see Ahlstrom-Vij (2013).
For example, this kind of assessment often occurs when we judge whether a poker player will be rational in calling a raise, given the cards she has in her hand and the cards she can see on the table. Since we can conclude, very naturally, that she would be right to call even if we (watching on the television) know that her opponent already has her beat, we must be making internalist assessments in such contexts.
I’m doubtful that such an objective evidential favoring relation exists, for the reasons sketched in Titelbaum and Kopec (ms). But I could be wrong.
We could think of this position as an epistemic analogue of a view like Ross’s (1930) in the practical domain. I thank an anonymous referee for suggesting this parallel.
I should mention that I am only sympathetic to the view that there is no all-things-considered ought in the practical case if we are setting aside all moral assessments. I am much less comfortable denying such an ought simpliciter, once we allow moral normativity to also weigh in the judgement.
I thank an anonymous referee for pressing me to make my position on this matter clear.
Just to be clear, this kind of situation will not always occur. In any case where an agent’s own epistemic goals align with the epistemic ends that we think are of independent value, and the world looks to her as the world actually is, all the various assessments will issue the same verdict. But, admittedly, we will not usually be so lucky.
I should admit that the possibility of having justified false beliefs about the evidence is not entirely uncontroversial. For example, Titelbaum (2015) argues, roughly, that mistakes about what rationality requires are, themselves, mistakes of rationality. If he is right, and evidentialism happens to be true, then the kind of case I’m sketching here isn’t really a possibility.
To borrow an example from Jackson and Smith (2016), someone might tell you how to escape a labyrinth by saying something like, “Walk in a path that doesn’t cross any hedges until you reach the end.” While this may still counts as advice in some sense of the word, it is certainly not helpful advice, since it is not implementable.
I do not mean to suggest that these rival views don’t offer agents any useful guidance for how they can improve their cognitive behavior. They surely do, since they give the agent something to aim for, be it true beliefs, coherence, beliefs that accord with the evidence, or what have you. I only intend to point out that these views might promise less guidance than is often thought, so that the pluralist view doesn’t seem like an automatic non-starter by comparison. I thank an anonymous referee for encouraging me not to overstate my point here.
I thank an anonymous referee for helping me clarify my position here.
If views in epistemology can be ‘consequentialized’ as some have suggested is possible in ethics (see Portmore 2009), then the vast majority of other normative epistemological views would be special cases. Thanks to Daniel Cohen for pointing me toward the literature on consequentializing deontological views.
For some of the possible normative consequences of these kinds of group directed epistemic goals, see Kopec (2012).
I sketch the benefits of my pluralistic account when applied to social epistemology in more detail in Kopec (ms).
As Berker admits, the kind of criticism he presents really goes back at least to Firth (1981). But since Berker’s version has been the topic of much recent debate, I’ll focus on his as well.
Berker realizes that there are many versions that will lack the consequence in question. In fact, he raises many such examples and then cooks up new cases corresponding to each to show they also share in the counterintuitive consequences under the revised cases. But he ignores one that I discuss here, and his modified case fails for the other, as I show shortly.
Hausman’s apt example involves Jack, a patient who needs to determine his preference for either a treatment that will leave him deaf or a treatment that will leave him without the use of his legs (2011, pp. 120–123). It should be obvious that Jack, unless he is rather unusual, would not come to such a decision with a ready-made preference one way or the other. Rather, he would have to go through a somewhat messy process to form such a preference. The point here is that a mature decision theory ought to have something to say about which ways of forming such a preference would be rational.
The pluralist could offer a similar response to the charges Kelly (2003, 2007) levels against what he calls ‘epistemic instrumentalism’. Kelly argues that epistemic instrumentalism, which amounts to the liberalistic mode of assessment in my terminology, can’t be correct, because epistemic norms are intuitively categorical in nature. Since they are categorical in nature, they cannot be determined by the goals held (or lacked) by particular agents. A pluralist who accepts the validity of idealistic assessments can account for these intuitions. In other words, the agents in Kelly’s cases really are irrational, in some sense, i.e., when assessed according to whether their attitudes accord with the evidence, are truth tracking, etc. But the agents aren’t irrational when assessed from a liberalistic perspective.
In more technical terms, her preferences dictate that she’ll maximize her expected subjective epistemic utility every time she commits the gambler’s fallacy for two temporally correlated events.
References
Ahlstrom-Vij, K. (2013). In defense of veritistic value monism. Pacific Philosophical Quarterly, 94, 19–40.
Ahlstrom-Vij, K., & Dunn, J. (2014). A defence of epistemic consequentialism. The Philosophical Quarterly, 64, 541–51.
Baker, D. (2017). The varieties of normativity (chap 36). In T. McPherson & D. Plunkett (Eds.), The Routledge Handbook of Metaethics.
Baker, D. (ms). Skepticism about ought simpliciter. In Presented at the 2016 Metaethics Workshop.
Behrends, J. (2015). Problems and solutions for a hybrid approach to grounding practical normativity. Canadian Journal of Philosophy, 45, 159–178.
Berker, S. (2013a). Epistemic teleology and the separateness of propositions. The Philosophical Review, 122, 337–393.
Berker, S. (2013b). The rejection of epistemic consequentialism. Philosophical Issues, 23, 363–87.
Bishop, M. (2009). Reflections on cognitive and epistemic diversity: Can a Stich in time save Quine? In D. Murphy & M. Bishop (Eds.), Stich and his critics (pp. 113–136). New York: Wiley.
Bishop, M., & Trout, J. D. (2005). Epistemology and the psychology of human judgment. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Brössel, P., Eder, A.-M., & Huber, F. (2013). Evidential support and instrumental rationality. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 87, 279–300.
Chang, R. (2013). Grounding practical normativity: Going hybrid. Philosophical Studies, 164, 163–187.
Coady, D. (2012). What to believe now: Applying epistemology to contemporary issues. New York: Wiley-Blackwell.
Conee, E., & Feldman, R. (2004). Evidentialism: Essays in epistemology. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Copp, D. (1997). The ring of Gyges: Overridingness and the unity of reason. Social Philosophy and Policy, 14, 86–101.
Cowie, C. (2014). In defence of instrumentalism about epistemic normativity. Synthese, 191, 4003–17.
Crisp, R. (1996). The dualism of practical reason. Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, 96, 53–73.
Descartes, R. (1641). Meditations on first philosophy. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing (Printed 1993)
Dorsey, D. (2013). Two dualisms of practical reason. In R. Shafer-Landau (Ed.), Oxford Studies in metaethics (Vol. 8, pp. 114–139). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Dunn, J. (nd). Epistemic consequentialism. Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy. http://www.iep.utm.edu/epis-con/.
Earman, J. (1992). Bayes or bust? A critical examination of bayesian confirmation theory. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Firth, R. (1981). Epistemic merit, intrinsic and instrumental. Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association, 55, 5–23.
Foley, R. (1987). The theory of epistemic rationality. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Foley, R. (1993). Working without a net: A study of egocentric epistemology. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Forster, M., & Sober, E. (1994). How to tell when simpler, more unified, or less ad hoc theories will provide more accurate predictions. British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, 45, 1–35.
Fumerton, R. (2001). Epistemic justification and normativity. In M. Steup (Ed.), Knowledge, truth, and duty: Essays on epistemic justification, responsibility, and virtue (pp. 49–60). Oxford: Blackwell.
Giere, R. (1988). Explaining science: A cognitive approach. Chicago: Chicago University Press.
Giere, R. (1989). Scientific rationality as instrumental rationality. Studies in History and Philosophy of Science, 20, 377–384.
Gilovich, T. (1993). How we know what isn’t so: The fallibility of human reason in everyday life. New York: First Free Press.
Goldman, A. (1986). Epistemology and cognition. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Goldman, A. (1999). Knowledge in a social world. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Goldman, A. (2010). Systems-oriented social epistemology. In T. Gendler & J. Hawthorne (Eds.), Oxford studies in epistemology (Vol. 3, pp. 189–214). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Goldman, A. (2015). Reliabilism, veritism, and epistemic consequentialism. Episteme, 12, 131–143.
Greaves, H. (2013). Epistemic decision theory. Mind, 122, 915–952.
Greaves, H., & Wallace, D. (2006). Justifying conditionalization: Conditionalization maximizes expected epistemic utility. Mind, 115, 607–32.
Harman, G. (1986). Change in view. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Hausman, D. (2011). Preference, value, choice, and welfare. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Hieronymi, P. (2006). Controlling attitudes. Pacific Philosophical Quarterly, 87, 45–74.
Howson, C., & Urbach, P. (1993). Scientific reasoning: The Bayesian approach. La Salle: Open Court.
Hubin, D. (1999). What’s special about Humeanism. Noûs, 33, 30–45.
Hubin, D. (2001). The groundless normativity of instrumental reason. The Journal of Philosophy, 98, 445–468.
Hume, D. (1739). Treatise of human nature. Oxford: Oxford University Press (printed 1978).
Jackson, F., & Smith, M. (2016). The implementation problem for deontology. In E. Lord & B. Maguire (Eds.), Weighing reasons (pp. 279–291). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
James, W. (1896). The will to believe. Mineola: Dover Publishers (Printed 1956)
Joyce, J. (1998). A nonpragmatic vindication of probabilism. Philosophy of Science, 65, 575–603.
Joyce, J. (2009). Accuracy and coherence: Prospects for an alethic epistemology of partial belief. In F. Huber & C. Schmidt-Petri (Eds.), Degrees of belief (pp. 263–297). Berlin: Springer.
Kelly, T. (2003). Epistemic rationality as instrumental rationality: A critique. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 66, 612–640.
Kelly, T. (2007). Evidence and normativity: Reply to Leite. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 75, 465–474.
Kitcher, P. (1990). The division of cognitive labor. The Journal of Philosophy, 87, 5–22.
Kitcher, P. (1992). The naturalists return. The Philosophical Review, 101, 53–114.
Kolodny, N., & Brunero, J. (nd). Instrumental rationality. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/rationality-instrumental/.
Kopec, M. (2012). We ought to agree: A consequence of repairing Goldman’s group scoring rule. Episteme, 9, 101–114.
Kopec, M. (ms). Unifying group rationality.
Kornblith, H. (1993). Epistemic normativity. Synthese, 94, 357–376.
Kornblith, H. (2002). Knowledge and its place in nature. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Kruger, J., & Dunning, D. (1999). Unskilled and unaware of it: How difficulties in recognizing one’s own incompetence lead to inflated self-assessments. Journal of personality and social psychology, 77, 1121–1134.
Kuhn, T. (1962/1996). The structure of scientific revolutions (3rd edn). Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Kuhn, T. (1970). Reflections on my critics. In I. Lakatos & A. Musgrave (Eds.), Criticism and the growth of knowledge. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Laudan, L. (1990a). Normative naturalism. Philosophy of Science, 57, 44–59.
Laudan, L. (1990b). Aimless epistemology? Studies in the history and philosophy of science, 21, 315–322.
Leitgeb, H., & Pettigrew, R. (2010a). An objective justification of Bayesianism I: Measuring inaccuracy. Philosophy of Science, 77, 201–35.
Leitgeb, H., & Pettigrew, R. (2010b). An objective justification of Bayesianism II: The consequences of minimizing inaccuracy. Philosophy of Science, 77, 236–72.
List, C., & Pettit, P. (2011). Group agency: The possibility, design, and status of corporate agents. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Lockard, M. (2013). Epistemic instrumentalism. Synthese, 190, 1701–18.
Mayo-Wilson, C., Zollman, K., & Danks, D. (2011). The independence thesis: When individual and social epistemology diverge. Philosophy of Science, 78, 653–77.
Mayo-Wilson, C., Zollman, K., & Danks, D. (2013). Wisdom of crowds versus groupthink: Learning in groups and in isolation. International Journal of Game Theory, 42, 695–723.
Maguire, B. (2016). The value-based theory of reasons. Ergo, 3, 233–262.
Muldoon, R. (2013). Diversity and the division of cognitive labor. Philosophy Compass, 8, 117–25.
Nussbaum, M., & Sen, A. (1993). The quality of life. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Pascal, B. (1670). Pensées. London: Penguin Classics (Printed 1995).
Pettigrew, R. (2013). Epistemic utility and norms for credences. Philosophy Compass, 8, 897–908.
Portmore, D. (2009). Consequentializing. Philosophy Compass, 4, 329–347.
Quine, W. V. O., & Ulian, J. S. (1970). The web of belief. New York: Random House.
Ross, W. D. (1930). The right and the good. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Rinard, S. (2017). No exception for belief. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 94, 121–143.
Scheier, M., & Carver, C. (1992). Effects of optimism on psychological and physical well-being: Theoretical overview and empirical update. Cognitive Therapy and Research, 16, 201–228.
Schroeder, M. (2010). Slaves of the passions (1st ed.). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Steglich-Petersen, A. (2009). Weighing the aim of belief. Philosophical Studies, 145, 395–405.
Stich, S. (1990). The fragmentation of reason: Preface to a pragmatic theory of cognitive evaluation. Cambridge: Bradford Books.
Stich, S. (1993). Naturalizing epistemology: Quine, Simon and the prospects for Pragmatism. Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplements, 34, 1–17.
Stich, S. (2009). Replies. In D. Murphy & M. Bishop (Eds.), Stich and his critics (pp. 190–252). New York: Wiley.
Strevens, M. (2003). The role of the priority rule in science. The Journal of Philosophy, 100, 55–79.
Taber, C., & Lodge, M. (2006). Motivated skepticism in the evaluation of political beliefs. American Journal of Political Science, 50, 755–769.
Talbot, B. (2014). Truth promoting non-evidential reasons for belief. Philosophical Studies, 168, 599–618.
Tiffany, E. (2007). Deflationary normative pluralism. Canadian Journal of Philosophy, 37, 231–262.
Titelbaum, M. (2015). Rationality’s fixed point (or: In defense of right reason). Oxford Studies in Epistemology, 5, 253–94.
Titelbaum, M., & Kopec, M. (ms). When rational reasoners reason differently.
Velleman, D. (ed.). (2000). On the aim of belief. In The possibility of practical reason (pp. 244–281). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Wedgewood, R. (2002). The aim of belief. Philosophical Perspectives, 16, 267–97.
Weisberg, M., & Muldoon, R. (2009). Epistemic landscapes and the division of cognitive labor. Philosophy of Science, 76, 225–52.
Williams, B. (1970). Deciding to believe. In H. Kiefer & M. Munitz (Eds.), Language, belief, and metaphysics (pp. 95–111). Albany: SUNY Press.
Zollman, K. (2013). Network epistemology: Communication in epistemic communities. Philosophy Compass, 8, 15–27.
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Sandy Goldberg, Matthew Lockhard, Sophie Horowitz, Brian Talbot, and the audiences at Charles Sturt University-Wagga Wagga, Monash University, Northwestern University, University of Melbourne, University of North Carolina-Charlotte, University of Sydney, the 2015 meeting of the Central Division of the American Philosophical Association, and the Morris Colloquium on Cognitive Values at University of Colorado-Boulder for their helpful comments and discussion. I would especially like to thank Jeff Behrends and James Willoughby for their timely help with various aspects of the paper, and two anonymous referees for their careful and critical remarks that helped me greatly improved the paper. My apologies to anyone I’ve accidentally omitted.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Kopec, M. A pluralistic account of epistemic rationality. Synthese 195, 3571–3596 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-017-1388-x
Received:
Accepted:
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-017-1388-x