Abstract
When are you in a position to rely on p in practical reasoning? Existing accounts say that you must know that p, or be in a position to know that p, or be justified in believing that p, or be in a position to justifiably believe it, and so on. This paper argues that all of these proposals face important problems, which I call the Problems of Negative Bootstrapping and of Level Confusions. I offer a diagnosis of these problems, and I argue that an adequate epistemic norm must be transparent in the following sense: According to any transparent epistemic norm, a consideration counts in favor of (or against) relying on p in practical reasoning for action iff, and to the extent that, this consideration also counts in favor of (or against) p being true. I introduce a candidate epistemic norm that satisfies this condition. According to this norm, one should rely on p in practical reasoning only if it must be that p. I show that if we adopt a non-factualist account of “must”, this amounts to a novel and attractive proposal, a proposal that satisfies the transparency condition.
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Notes
I will take the liberty to sometimes use letters like p and q in the grammatical role of singular terms for propositions (as in “rely on p”) and to sometimes use them in the grammatical role of sentences (“it must be that p”). I trust that no serious confusion will be caused by this, and I apologize to those whose aesthetic sense is offended.
Of course, the proposition that my friend is okay is not among these reasons either. The idea is that I have other reasons to do other things, which I may rely on, and lack permission to rely on any particular views about my friend.
I thank an anonymous reviewer for prompting this clarification.
Many proponents of secondary norms (like DeRose (2009), Weiner (2005)) require justified (or “reasonable”) belief. But this creates some unclarity. In their presentations, one is reasonable if one justifiably believes one satisfies the primary norm, and one is not reasonable if one believes one does not satisfy it. This, however, raises the question of how to deal with cases in which one lacks either belief. I think the most plausible way to generalize the norm to cover these cases makes justification central. A further advantage of this version of a secondary norm is that it makes fewer demands regarding the presence of higher order beliefs.
In what follows, I assume that a secondary norm is tied closely to our ordinary understanding of when agents are reasonable, or deserve blame etc. After all, the purpose of DeRose’s distinction and similar proposals is precisely to accommodate our ordinary intuitions about when agents do not assert or reason with full propriety. Admittedly, there has been some debate about the nature of secondary propriety, in particular concerning whether it is a technical notion or intended to capture intuitive judgments. As I see it, this debate arises from problems regarding the Knowledge Norm in particular. Many authors have argued that subjects who have a true, justified, but Gettiered belief that p do not need an excuse when they rely on p or assert p (see Douven (2006), Brown (2008), Kvanvig (2009), Schechter (2017)). So whatever secondary propriety amounts to in these cases, it cannot be to provide an excuse (though see Littlejohn 2012). I think that this is a reason to doubt the Knowledge Norm, and not a reason to employ a technical and revisionary notion of secondary propriety. Thanks to an anonymous reviewer for alerting me to this issue.
Thanks to an anonymous reviewer for this question.
Kvanvig insists on this because he thinks that his norm should provide an explanation of Moorean sentences like “P, but I do not know that P” (which figure prominently in defenses of the knowledge norm, see Williamson (2000)).
Thanks to an anonymous reviewer for urging me to elaborate on the objection to Kvanvig.
Thanks to an anonymous reviewer for prompting this clarificatory remark.
For a good overview of the debate and some experimental evidence supporting Kratzer’s restricted quantification account, see Del Pinal and Waldon (2019).
Does this sit well with Accuracy? If our aim must be rely on p iff p, how can the adequate norm be non-factive? As I said, practical aims are not usually taken to translate directly into practical norms. What we expect of agents is to rely on p depending on whether their perspective suggests that this will satisfy Practical Aim – and that may very well be the case even if Practical Aim is not in fact satisfied.
Although it may seem otherwise at first glance, Schulz’s theory grants us a similar freedom. In his theory, much depends on what it means to have a rational credence of 1. Many authors think that it is hardly ever rational to have such a credence. This cannot be what Schulz has in mind. In fact, he mentions that the relevant probability function will often be one that would result from updating with “negations of sentences we do not know to be false” (Schulz 2010b, 372). Given this, we again have the possibility to say that “must” allows for a possibility of error.
For helpful comments on drafts and presentations, I thank Christian Nimtz, Ralf Busse, Nick Haverkamp, Timo Meier, Jan Barbanus, participants in the workshop Dimensions of Rationality at the University of Frankfurt, and two referees for this journal.
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Henning, T. An epistemic modal norm of practical reasoning. Synthese 199, 6665–6686 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-021-03086-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-021-03086-8