Skip to main content

On the role of knowers and corresponding epistemic role oughts

Synthese volume 199, pages 9497–9522 (2021)Cite this article

Abstract

The claim that epistemic oughts stem from the “role” of believer is widely discussed in the epistemological discourse. This claim seems to stem from the common view that, in some sense, epistemic norms derive from what it is to be a believer. Against this view, I argue that there is no such thing as a “role” of believer. But there is a role of knower, and this is the role to which some epistemic norms—epistemic role oughts—are attached. Once we conceive of epistemic role oughts as attaching to the role of knower (and not the “role” of believer) we can better understand the nature of epistemic obligation and doxastic control. In advancing a new epistemic role ought approach that recognizes knowers as the subjects of epistemic role oughts, I explain why many epistemic oughts—epistemic role oughts—have normative force and presuppose voluntary control.

This is a preview of subscription content, access via your institution.

Access options

Buy single article

Instant access to the full article PDF.

£ 29.95

Price includes VAT (United Kingdom)
Tax calculation will be finalised during checkout.

Notes

  1. This is a view attributed to what Feldman refers to as “The Voluntarism Argument” (669). Alston’s target is the deontological conception of justification. Feldman, though, does not argue that epistemic justification should be analyzed in deontological terms. Rather, he defends only the claim that deontological judgments about belief are sometimes true.

  2. Feldman thus rejects “strong” epistemic deontology, or what he calls the “package view,” which is the position that all deontological terms, including “requirement, prohibition, responsibility, praiseworthy, blameworthy, permissible, impermissible, obligation, ought, [and] duty,” apply to the “domain of belief” (Stapleford 2015a, b).

  3. Relatedly, Nicholas Wolterstorff (2010) argues that the epistemic ‘ought’ is an ‘ought’ of proper functioning, and thus is a non-obligation ‘ought.’

  4. As an alternative, Kornblith (2001) proposes that we conceive of doxastic oughts as ideals of cognitive performance, which allegedly play a role in guiding action.

  5. As an alternative, Chrisman (2008) proposes that we conceive of doxastic oughts as “rules of criticism” that are not role oughts.

  6. ‘Ought’ is intermediate in strength between stronger terms like ‘must’ and ‘is necessary’ and weaker terms like ‘may or ‘could.’

  7. There may be other sorts of modalities, such as bouletic modality, circumstantial modality, and teleological modality (von Fintel, 2006).

  8. For instance, Harman (1986, 131) suggests that someone who cooks a chicken might think that, after 2 h of it being in the oven, it ought to be done, which is a judgment of epistemic modality using ‘ought.’ Harman also suggests that the judgments ‘a tree ought to have strong roots’ and a ‘heart ought to pump regularly’ might count as judgments of alethic modality using ‘ought.’

  9. Relatedly, Humberstone (1971) argues that there’s a distinction between “situational oughts” and “agent-implicating oughts.”

  10. There might be other (normative) duties, such as legal duties. I will set this aside, given that most role duties aren’t interpreted as expressing a legal duty, such as teaching duties.

  11. There might be other hypothetic imperatives, such as legal imperatives. I will set this aside, given that most role oughts aren’t plausibly interpreted as expressing legal imperatives.

  12. Note that hypothetical prudential imperatives are not the only kind of prudential imperatives. Prudential imperatives concern what is good for us or what is on our interest, and what’s good for us often includes more than just the ends we’ve chosen. So, it’s arguably the case that “you ought not to, prudentially speaking, kill an innocent person” even if you have chosen the end of being a hitman. So, if you’ve chosen the end of being a hitman, there’s a sense in which (1) you ought to kill innocent people, and there’s a sense in which (2) you ought not to kill innocent people. In the first claim, the ‘ought’ functions as a hypothetical prudential imperative, while the ‘ought’ in the second sentence functions as what we might call a categorical prudential imperative. My claim is that if role oughts express prudential imperatives, they express hypothetical prudential imperatives. But this doesn’t mean that there aren’t categorical (i.e., non-role) prudential imperatives that might conflict with our hypothetical (i.e., role) prudential imperatives.

  13. And this is true even if we are forced into a social position. For instance, someone who occupies the social position of soldier because he was drafted into war can give up this social position through desertion.

  14. Moreover, if being a teacher is someone who causes learning, Professor X, in virtue of the fact that he is unable to explain things, could never be a teacher—and this is true even if he occupies the professional position of teacher). So, the teaching imperative, which applies only to teachers, wouldn’t even apply to Professor X at all, because he simply would occupy the professional position of teacher without actually being a teacher.

  15. Likewise, incapable parents ought to give their kids up for adoption or try to provide care for their children.

  16. I thus reject the claim that all moral rules are categorical. Because there are clearly moral obligations that apply to teachers and not to non-teachers, there must be moral obligations that aren’t categorical. Ethicists who believe that there are categorical moral duties tend to overlook the possibility that there are hypothetical moral duties simply because they tend to overlook the notion of role morality.

  17. And if role oughts turn out to be based on what’s good performance, then Hilary Kornblith (2001) is right to say that epistemic role oughts are ideals of cognitive performance.

  18. And, in a sense, P “ought” to do these things, for her own benefit.

  19. Of course, we can occupy the position of knower in virtue of occupying other kinds of social positions, including that of student, child, consumer, mother, and so forth.

  20. Relatedly, Wrenn (2007, 125) argues that to consider P is to necessarily adopt the end of believing the truth about P and avoiding error as to P. It thus serves one’s ends to believe in accord with one’s evidence (Wrenn 2007, 125). In response, Stapleford (2015a, b) argues against reducing the epistemic ‘ought’ to a moral ‘ought’.

  21. This is not an exhaustive list. And if it turns out that Henderson and Graham (2019) are right that shard epistemic norms promote a coordinated community of epistemic goods, there may be additional epistemic norms not listed here.

  22. Likewise, parents can be better or worse, even if they are not perfect. And we expect parents to at least try to take care of their children. And if they are incapable of doing so, we expect that they give them up for adoption.

  23. For instance, refraining from making assertions about P is under our voluntary control and claiming “I don’t know about P” is under our voluntary control.

  24. This, however, amounts to a prima facie duty, and not an absolute duty. Indeed, there may be situations in which we morally ought to make assertions that aren’t based on sufficient evidence.

  25. Unless we have some morally compelling reason for asserting something that is false.

  26. Relatedly, Ryan (2015) argues that, to some extent, our doxastic attitudes are influenced by the questions we consider, what we read, how much we concentrate, how we weigh our evidence, how closely we listen to the world around us, whether (and how thoroughly) we check our sources, and so forth, and these are things we can in fact control.

  27. Rik Peels (2017) argues that we should talk in terms of influence over our beliefs, rather than control. As he argues, although we lack direct control over our beliefs, we can influence them in virtue of our control over things like intellectual virtues and vices. On his view, while we don’t have obligations to hold certain beliefs, we can still be blamed for holding certain beliefs. Similarly, Pamela Hieronymi (2008) argues that believers are ultimately responsible for their “epistemic personalities,” arguing that even though our beliefs aren’t voluntary, we have indirect or “evaluative control” over beliefs, and this is enough for doxastic responsibility. In this vein, David Owens (2017) argues that we have a form of control over our beliefs that is different than the kind of control we have over our actions, and different kinds of control give rise to different kinds of responsibility.

  28. Of course, there may be moral duties that are related to various biological functions. For instance, we may have a moral duty not to chomp on our food loudly in public, given that this is often bothersome to others. But this moral duty isn’t derivative from or reducible to a biological ‘ought’ or biological “norm.”

  29. It’s also possible that biological “oughts” are actually a kind of alethic ‘ought’ or teleological ‘ought,’ in which case they would be neither evaluative nor deontic.

References

  • Alston, W. (1985). Concepts of epistemic justification. The Monist, 68, 57–89.

    Google Scholar 

  • Alston, W. (1988). The deontological conception of epistemic justification. In J. E. Tomberlin (Ed.), Philosophical perspectives. Vol. 2: Epistemology (pp. 257–99). Ridgeview.

  • Altschul, J. (2014). Epistemic deontologism and role-oughts. Logos & Episteme, V(3), 245–263.

    Google Scholar 

  • Banton, M. (1965). An introduction to the study of role relations. Basic Books.

    Google Scholar 

  • BonJour, L. (1985). The structure of empirical knowledge. Harvard University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Boothe, A. (2012). All things considered duties to believe. Synthese, 187, 509–517.

    Google Scholar 

  • Charlow, N., & Chrisman, M. (2016). Introduction. In Deontic modality. Oxford University Press.

  • Chisholm, R. (1964). The ethics of requirement. American Philosophical Quarterly, 1, 147–153.

    Google Scholar 

  • Chrisman, M. (2008). Ought to believe. Journal of Philosophy, 105(7), 346–370.

    Google Scholar 

  • Chrisman, M. (2018). Epistemic normativity and cognitive agency. Noûs, 52, 508–529.

    Google Scholar 

  • Chuard, P., & Southwood, N. (2009). Epistemic norms without voluntary control. Noûs, 43(4), 599–632.

    Google Scholar 

  • Clifford, W. K. 1877 (1999). The ethics of belief. In T. Madigan (Ed.), The ethics of belief and other essays (pp. 70–96).Prometheus.

  • Congdon, M. (2018). Knower’ as an ethical concept: From epistemic agency to mutual recognition. Feminist Philosophy Quarterly, 4(4), Article 2.

  • Derose, K. (2000). Ought we to follow our evidence? Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 60(3), 697–706.

    Google Scholar 

  • Feldman, R. (2000). The ethics of belief. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 60, 667–695.

    Google Scholar 

  • Feldman, R. (2001). Voluntary belief and epistemic evaluation. In M. Steup (Ed.), Knowledge, truth, and duty: Essays on epistemic justification, responsibility, and virtue (pp. 77–92). Oxford University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Feldman, R. (2004). The ethics of belief. In E. Conee & R. Feldman (Eds.), Evidentialism: Essays in epistemology (pp. 166–195). Oxford University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Feldman, R. (2008). Modest deontologism in epistemology. Synthese, 161, 339–355.

    Google Scholar 

  • Geach, P. (1981). Whatever happened to deontic logic? Philosophia, 11, 1–12.

    Google Scholar 

  • Goldberg, S. (2017). Should have known. Synthese, 194(8), 2863–2894.

    Google Scholar 

  • Grasswick, H. (2004). Individuals-in-communities: The search for a feminist model of epistemic subjects. Hypatia, 19(3), 85–120.

    Google Scholar 

  • Greco, J. (2007). Discrimination and testimonial knowledge. Episteme: A Journal of Social Epistemology, 4(3), 335–351.

    Google Scholar 

  • Harman, G. (1986). Change in view: Principles of reasoning. MIT Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Henderson, D. (2020). Are epistemic norms fundamentally social norms? Episteme, 17(3), 281–300.

    Google Scholar 

  • Henderson, D., & Graham, P. (2017). Epistemic norms and the “epistemic game” they regulate: The basic structured epistemic costs and benefits. American Philosophical Quarterly, 54(4), 367–382.

    Google Scholar 

  • Henderson, D., & Graham, P. (2019). Epistemic norms as social norms. In M. Fricker, P. J. Graham, D. Henderson, & N. J. L. L. Pedersen (Eds.), The Routledge handbook of social epistemology (pp. 425–436). Routledge.

    Google Scholar 

  • Hieronymi, P. (2008). Responsibility for believing. Synthese, 161, 357–373.

    Google Scholar 

  • Hill, T. (1973). The hypothetical imperative. The Philosophical Review, 82(4), 429–450.

    Google Scholar 

  • Humberstone, I. L. (1971). Two sorts of ‘ought’s. Analysis, 32(1), 8–11.

    Google Scholar 

  • Komarovsky, M. (1992). The concept of social role revisited. Gender and Society, 6(2), 301–313.

    Google Scholar 

  • Kornblith, H. (2001). Epistemic obligation and the possibility of internalism. In A. Fairweather & L. Zagzebski (Eds.), Virtue epistemology: Essays on epistemic virtue and responsibility (pp. 231–248). Oxford University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Millikan, R. G. (1984). Language, thought and other biological categories. MIT Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Oliveira, L. (2016). Deontological evidentialism, wide-scope, and privileged values. Philosophical Studies, 174, 485–506.

    Google Scholar 

  • Owens, D. (2017). Normativity and control. Oxford University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Peels, R. (2017). Responsible belief: A theory in ethics and epistemology. Oxford University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Plantinga, A. (1988). Chisholmian internalism. In D. F. Austin (Ed.), Philosophical analysis: A defense by example (pp. 127–151). Kluwer.

    Google Scholar 

  • Pohlhaus, G. (2002). Knowing communities: An investigation of Harding’s standpoint epistemology. Social Epistemology, 16(3), 283–293.

    Google Scholar 

  • Rusin, J. (2010). Reconciling epistemic duty with non-voluntary belief. International Journal of the Humanities, 8(8), 95–101.

    Google Scholar 

  • Ryan, S. (2003). Doxastic compatibilism and the ethics of belief. Philosophical Studies, 114, 47–79.

    Google Scholar 

  • Ryan, S. (2015). In defense of moral evidentialism. Logos & Episteme VI, 4, 405–427.

    Google Scholar 

  • Sellars, W. (1969). Language as thought and as communication. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 29(4), 506–527.

    Google Scholar 

  • Simion, M. (2019). Knowledge-first functionalism. Philosophical Issues, 29, 254–267.

    Google Scholar 

  • Stapleford, S. (2012). Epistemic duties and failure to understand one’s evidence. Principia, 16(1), 147–177.

    Google Scholar 

  • Stapleford, S. (2015a). Epistemic versus all things considered requirements. Synthese, 192, 1861–1881.

    Google Scholar 

  • Stapleford, S. (2015b). Why there may be epistemic duties. Dialogue, 54(1), 63–89.

    Google Scholar 

  • von Fintel, K. (2006). Modality and Language. In D. M. Borchert (Ed.), Encyclopedia of philosophy (2nd ed.). . MacMillan.

    Google Scholar 

  • Wolterstorff, N. (2010). Ought to believe—two concepts. In T. Cuneo (Ed.), Practices of belief (pp. 62–85). Cambridge University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Wood, A. (2008). The duty to believe according to the evidence. International Journal for Philosophy of Religion, 63(1/3), 7–24.

    Google Scholar 

  • Wrenn, C. (2007). Why there are no epistemic duties. Dialogue, XLVI, 115–136.

    Google Scholar 

Download references

Acknowledgements

The author thanks the members of the CU Boulder Philosophy Department’s summer epistemology reading group and two anonymous reviewers for their feedback on an earlier draft of this paper.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Nevada, Las Vegas, Las Vegas, USA

    Cheryl Abbate

Authors
  1. Cheryl Abbate
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Cheryl Abbate.

Additional information

Publisher's Note

Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.

Rights and permissions

Reprints and Permissions

About this article

Verify currency and authenticity via CrossMark

Cite this article

Abbate, C. On the role of knowers and corresponding epistemic role oughts. Synthese 199, 9497–9522 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-021-03213-5

Download citation

  • Received:

  • Accepted:

  • Published:

  • Issue Date:

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-021-03213-5

Keywords

  • Doxastic voluntarism
  • Epistemic deontology
  • Role oughts