Abstract
It is a plausible and compelling theoretical assumption that epistemic rationality is just a matter of having doxastic attitudes that are the correct responses to one’s epistemic reasons, or that all requirements of epistemic rationality reduce to requirements on doxastic attitudes. According to this idea, all instances of epistemic rationality are instances of rational belief. Call this assumption, and any theory working under it, belief-centered. In what follows, I argue that we should not accept belief-centered theories of epistemic rationality. This is an argument in three acts. In the first, I present counterexamples that problematize the belief-centered assumption: cases whose protagonists (i) fail to meet any plausible requirements on belief but (ii) nevertheless appear epistemically rational. In the second act, I consider alternative explanations of the counterexamples, friendly to the belief-centered theorist, and find them wanting. In the third and final act, I show that there are significant theoretical benefits to acknowledging a distinct agent-centered dimension of epistemic rationality and sketch a candidate agent-centered approach: a view that grounds an agent’s epistemic rationality in the possession of good epistemic policies. In the end, we see that a complete theory of epistemic rationality is as much of a theory of rational agents as it is of rational belief.
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Notes
Rationality may be a bit nebulous. By ‘rationality’ here I mean that property we attribute when something is praiseworthy (‘that was the rational choice, John’) or criticizable (‘the decision to rob the train was irrational, Arthur’); I do not mean the capacity of rationality that perhaps Aristotle means to refer to when he calls man a rational animal. There are norms, constraints, or standards associated with rationality such that when an agent or concrete action/state fails to meet those standards, they’re criticizably irrational; when an agent meets those standards, they’re praiseworthily rational. This is the normative, or at least evaluative, notion that I think many of us have in mind when thinking about rationality (on rationality’s normativity, see, e.g., Earl Conee, Errol Lord, Derrick Parfit, and Michael Titelbaum, amongst others).
This is not to suggest that evidentialism is the only belief-centered view. Varieties of virtue epistemology may be belief-centered by grounding epistemic rationality in belief rationality. While the virtue-theoretic picture fits nicely with a rejection of belief-centered thinking, one can certainly have a belief-centered and virtue-theoretic theory (e.g., a view that calls a belief rational when it is the product of an epistemic competence).
Most clearly found in Dougherty (2011). Note that while Dougherty’s specific thesis is about responsibility, it has a parallel argument about rationality and has implications for epistemic normativity generally.
Dougherty’s reasons for reducing epistemic responsibility to moral responsibility (or instrumental rationality) are similar to some I offer for extending epistemic rationality. He argues that a belief's not fitting the evidence cannot be sufficient for irresponsibility due to the fact that it may be involuntary. Where Dougherty zigs—arguing that this shows that there is no epistemic irresponsibility present—I zag, arguing that it reveals not that epistemic rationality is absent, but that epistemic rationality is properly attributed to the agent, not her belief.
As John Hawthorne, Yoaav Isaacs, and Maria Lasonen-Aarnio suggest, an individual “might have a belief and yet fail to realize one has it.” (p. 207) If we grant this, April may falsely believe that she believes what she judged, that members of all races deserve equal moral respect.
N.b. that one might use the same kind of cases to generate an argument for thinking that knowledge does not require belief (along the lines of Jody Azzouni’s argument). I welcome this consequence with open and loving arms. Thanks to an anonymous reviewer for pointing this out.
Some precision may assist here. When I say that an agent is ‘doing her epistemic best’, I am flagging the fact that when we take the entirety of the agent’s situation into account and consider the details of her epistemic circumstances, the agent herself is doing what we expect of a strong epistemic agent. The important connection here is not between rationality and trying one’s hardest at what the one is doing: giving it the good ol’ college try is not sufficient for being epistemically rational. The important connection is between epistemic rationality and what one does.
This distinction is important. As an anonymous referee pointed out, one may treat rationality as a strictly ‘evaluative’ notion and contend that doing one’s best is irrelevant to epistemic rationality. For, on the strict evaluative picture, the standards of rationality involve elements that are out of an agent’s control, and doing one’s best only seems relevant if we assume otherwise. The argument above makes no such assumption. The claim is that, given the kinds of things agents can do (i.e., make judgments, reason, consciously assess evidence), they are successful and praiseworthy (in an epistemic sense) with respect to the instances of judgment and reasoning despite the presense of unevidenced beliefs. The standards against which we assess their success and praiseworthiness needn’t vary according to how well they can reason. For a different agent, it may be that meeting the standards for rationality—including standards for particular judgments—is out of her control (she may not be very good at reasoning), so even if she tried her hardest, she would not be doing her epistemic best in the sense I intend here. Now, if the evaluative picture assumes something stronger than this (e.g., an assumption that any sort of rational flaw bars the agent from epistemically rationality in all respects), then one can treat the argument above as also creating tension for that strong evaluative picture, since it presents scenarios where an agent’s overall state contains a rational flaw (unevidenced belief) but the attribution of rationality is still appropriate for individual, isolated doings. Of course, such a strong picture may be implausible for independent reasons.
This is all consistent with attributing an irrational belief to the agent. I am not denying that the agents can be rational and possess irrational beliefs. I think this is not uncommon, and accepting the main conclusion of this paper helps provide additional resources to correctly describe such individuals.
Perhaps most clearly in Richard Foley (175–86), who dedicates a section of his book to show how that his theory of epistemic rationality can accommodate the propositional/doxastic distinction.
Indeed, ‘justification’ and ‘rationality’ are sometimes employed interchangeably or to refer to different, but closely related concepts or properties. Lisa Miracchi, e.g., comments that the distinction between rationality and justification “roughly correspond[s] to internalist and externalist epistemic properties.” (3).
Firth says that they should be causally connected “in a way that corresponds in the appropriate way to the evidential relationships in virtue of which the belief is propositionally warranted for him.” (220).
This is just to say: when we evaluate our body of evidence E and see that it supports p, other things being equal, we tend to believe that p on the basis of that evaluation and evidence.
I add this caveat to avoid an instance where there is some proposition p which fits S’s evidence but about which S has not given any consideration (e.g., a sort of junk belief). S could still be rational in such an instance despite lacking a belief that p.
This is the sort of akrasia discussed by Hawthorne, Isaacs, and Lasonen-Aarnio. As they define it, “to be epistemically akratic is either.
(1) to believe [that] p and also believe that believing [that] p is rationally forbidden, or.
(2) to not believe [that] p and also believe that not believing [that] p is rationally forbidden.” (p. 206).
This point resembles one made below in reply 3 when discussing what I call ‘doxastic delay’; one may also use the doxastic delay example to respond to the objector here.
E.g., Kiesewetter’s, Lord’s (2018), and Parfit’s.
While the device attracting lightning seems to accomplish this, we may further ensure it by stipulating that Leo has a complex device, implanted by Mikey, in his heart that is set to explode (guaranteeing Leo’s death) right before the doxastic delay period ends.
I mean this second ‘do’ in the functional, biological sense, not necessarily in the sense that we do intentional actions. (Though I do think that we can believe intentionally, i.e., that we can intentionally form beliefs, at least some times.).
Note that this distinction between belief-centered and agent-centered resembles the oft-noticed distinction between synchronic and diachronic rationality. Indeed, a belief-centered view is a theory of synchronic rationality, for it reduces assessments of rationality to assessments of current doxastic attitudes. But an agent-centered view is not quite a theory of diachronic rationality. To see this, note that introducing diachronic considerations is insufficient to make a view agent-centered, though some assessments of agent rationality will be diachronic.
For a related discussion, see Kiesewetter, especially 2 fn. 3.
Indeed: there is a dedicated section titled “Virtue Critiques: Evidence and Inquiry” in Dougherty’s Evidentialism and its Discontents.
This is related to but not quite identical with the tension explained in Friedman (2020) and discussed by Thorstad (2021). That tension focuses on a traditional belief norm (evidentialist or reliabilist, e.g.) conflicting with an instrumental norm for inquiry, which Friedman names ‘ZIP’: if S wants to figure out Q, then S ought to take the necessary means to figuring out Q. (Friedman 2020; Thorstad 2021) In a situation where ZIP requires not forming a particular belief because doing so would prevent completing the given inquiry (limited time, distraction, etc.) but where forming that belief would be permissible according to evidentialism or reliabilism, we have a theoretical tension between norms. The resources employed in my argument here can be applied to this related tension.
This is a tentative, non-exhaustive list. All I intend to flag here is that there are behaviors that typically seem incompatible with genuinely investigating Q. This is in line with the main claim of this paper: that—as epistemologists—we should move beyond belief-focused theorizing.
By ‘successful’ here I don’t merely mean success at achieving the end of a token inquiry, but success at doing the right sort of things during a token inquiry.
Thanks to an anonymous reviewer for suggesting a discussion of this topic in the paper.
I think Miracchi’s adverbial use of ‘rationally’ is revealing. As I have been urging, when we start without the assumption that epistemic rationality is equivalent to belief rationality, we are not required to only describe believings with ‘rationally’. Without that assumption, the class of things that can be substituted for ‘’ in statements of the form “S rationally s” or “S is ing rationally” is broader than the class of beliefs.
Because it needn’t be a who. As my mother (who delivers newspapers for a living) explained to me: foxes have been dragging newspapers from her customers’s homes and into the woods.
As an anonymous reviewer wisely pointed out, one might be skeptical of this idea of epistemic rationality simpliciter. I share some sympathy with this skepticism, but I think there is something meaningful and contentful here.
One may begin to find a partial answer by consulting Paul Helm’s Belief-Policies. While that work differs in some fundamental ways from mine, they also align in many ways that make it a useful resource.
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Acknowledgements
This paper owes a great deal to the feedback and work of the University of Florida’s Epistemology Working Group, particularly John Biro, Greg Ray, Rodrigo Borges, Chris Dorst, and James Simpson. I’m grateful for their philosophical feedback and support to submit this work. I also want to thank Peter Westmoreland, David Thorstad. and Jon Matheson for their useful comments and encouragement. Finally, I thank two anonymous Synthese referees whose comments greatly improved this work and the broader project of which this is but a piece.
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Gillespie, J. Agent-centered epistemic rationality. Synthese 201, 95 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-023-04088-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-023-04088-4