How to endorse conciliationism

Fleisher, Will

doi:10.1007/s11229-020-02695-z

Cited by 12 publications

(14 citation statements)

References 70 publications

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“…Metaphilosophical convictions: These are cases where the author's disbelief towards a claim is rooted in a metaphilosophical stance that requires extremely high standards for belief which are practically impossible to meet, or one that precludes belief in any philosophical claim rather than being the result of a doubt towards the particular claim at hand. These stances are often motivated by epistemological problems such as the problem of persistent peer disagreement in philosophy (Fumerton 2010, Kornblith 2013 or the problem of unconceived objections (Mizrahi 2014), or by the idea that philosophy does not or should not involve belief but some other attitude (Goldberg 2013, Carter 2018, Barnett 2019, Fleisher 2020b. There can also be cases of PWB that result from positions in philosophy of science, when a philosophical claim relies on a scientific theory and the author does not regard any scientific theory to be true due to her instrumentalist or anti-realist views.…”

Section: Trivial and Substantive Cases Of Pwbmentioning

confidence: 99%

Problems with Publishing Philosophical Claims We Don't Believe

Sarıhan¹

2022

Episteme

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Plakias has recently argued that there is nothing wrong with publishing defences of philosophical claims which we don't believe and also nothing wrong with concealing our lack of belief, because an author's lack of belief is irrelevant to the merit of a published work. Fleisher has refined this account by limiting the permissibility of publishing without belief to what he calls ‘advocacy role cases’. I argue that such lack of belief is irrelevant only if it is the result of an inexplicable incredulity or the result of a metaphilosophical or epistemic stance that is unrelated to the specific claim. However, in many real-life cases, including Fleisher's advocacy role cases, our doubts regarding the claims we defend arise from reasons that have something to do with the insufficiency of the philosophical evidence supporting the claim, and publishing an unconditional defence of a claim without revealing our doubts is impermissible as it involves withholding philosophically relevant reasons. Plakias has also argued that discouraging philosophers from publishing claims they don't believe would be unfair to junior philosophers with unsettled views. I propose that we should change our academic practices that pressure philosophers to publish articles that pretend to be defences of settled views.

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Section: Trivial and Substantive Cases Of Pwbmentioning

confidence: 99%

Problems with Publishing Philosophical Claims We Don't Believe

Sarıhan¹

2022

Episteme

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“…Proponents of versions of conciliationism include Christensen (2007), Elga 2007, Bogardus (2009), and Feldman (2009. For discussions of the criticisms I mention, see, e.g., Elga (2010), Carey and Matheson (2013), Fleisher (2021), and references therein. 3 Variations on steadfast views are proposed by e.g.…”

Section: Three Ways Of Responding To Misleading Higher Order Evidencementioning

confidence: 99%

“…Another alternative attitude view is defended by Fleisher (2021) as a response to the selfundermining objection to the conciliatory view of higher-order evidence. Fleisher argues that conciliationists should accept an attitude towards their view he calls "endorsement", which is distinct from graded and full belief, and which "is the appropriate attitude of committed advocacy for researchers to have toward their own theories during inquiry."…”

Section: Alternative Viewsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Transitional attitudes and the unmooring view of higher‐order evidence

Staffel

2021

Nous

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This paper proposes a novel answer to the question of what attitude agents should adopt when they receive misleading higher-order evidence that avoids the drawbacks of existing views. The answer builds on the independently motivated observation that there is a difference between attitudes that agents form as conclusions of their reasoning, called terminal attitudes, and attitudes that are formed in a transitional manner in the process of reasoning, called transitional attitudes. Terminal and transitional attitudes differ both in their descriptive and in their normative properties. When an agent receives higher-order evidence that they might have reasoned incorrectly to a belief or credence towards p, then their attitude towards p is no longer justified as a terminal attitude towards p, but it can still be justified as a transitional attitude. This view, which I call the unmooring view, allows us to capture the rational impact of misleading higher-order evidence in a way that integrates smoothly with a natural picture of epistemic justification and the dynamics of deliberation.

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“…11 11 For support of the claim that such debate is beneficial for inquiry, see Mercier and Sperber (2011), De Cruz and De Smedt (2013), and Fleisher (2020). …”

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confidence: 99%

Publishing without (some) belief

Fleisher

2020

Thought: A Journal of Philosophy

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Philosophers have recently been interested in the appropriate attitude to have toward a controversial philosophical theory. There are a variety of reasons to doubt that belief is appropriate, as the high epistemic standards required for justified belief would seem to exclude too many philosophical theories as viable options. Relatedly, there are worries about assertions of philosophical claims, since assertion is also thought to be governed by substantive epistemic norms. In light of this, a variety of alternative attitudes have been proposed in order to characterize philosophical commitment and assertion. 1 Alexandra Plakias (2019) has helpfully expanded this discussion to the topic of philosophical publication. Plakias argues that it is permissible for philosophers to write and publish works (e.g., journal articles or books) that include claims they do not believe, a practice she calls publishing without belief (PWB). 2 Her thesis is carefully limited to philosophy, as opposed to publishing in other fields. Plakias' appeals to three helpful cases to provide a compelling argument that PWB is sometimes permissible. However, this raises further questions: just when is PWB permissible? Is it universally or even generally permissible? I argue that only claims of a certain kind are permissible to publish without belief. The picture I propose recognizes two roles for claims made in published works: what I will call the advocacy and evidential roles. Advocacy claims should often be published despite authors' lack of belief in them. Evidential role claims, however, require a higher epistemic standing, one that does include a belief requirement. On this theory, Plakias' cases are permissible examples of PWB because they involve advocacy role claims. I will offer another three cases illustrating that it is impermissible to publish evidential role claims without belief. The resulting account of the norms of publishing is applicable to research areas beyond just philosophy.

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How to endorse conciliationism

Cited by 12 publications

References 70 publications

Problems with Publishing Philosophical Claims We Don't Believe

Problems with Publishing Philosophical Claims We Don't Believe

Transitional attitudes and the unmooring view of higher‐order evidence

Publishing without (some) belief

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