Our Errant Epistemic Aim

Mamzen, Stephen; Maitzen, Stephen

doi:10.2307/2108337

Cited by 18 publications

(8 citation statements)

References 7 publications

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“…My favorite example of the overlooking of such a possibility occurs in the recent volume Contemporary Debates in Hall and Charles Johnson (1998), Allan Hazlett (2006, n.d.), Hilary Kornblith (1985Kornblith ( , 1993Kornblith ( , 2002, Jonathan Kvanvig (2003Kvanvig ( , 2005Kvanvig ( , 2011, Keith Lehrer (1977Lehrer ( , 1981Lehrer ( , 1988, Jarrett Leplin (2007), Michael Lynch (2004, 2009a, 2009b, Stephen Maitzen (1995), Nenad Miscevic (2007), James Montmarquet (1987Montmarquet ( , 1993Montmarquet ( , 2008, Philip Percival (2002), Alvin Plantinga (1988, 1993a, 1993b, Steven Reynolds (2002), Wayne Riggs (2003), Darrell Rowbottom (2008), Frederick Schmitt (1992, Tomoji Shogenji (2012aShogenji ( , 2012b, Asbjørn Steglich-Petersen (2009, Hamid Vahid (2006, 2010), Ralph Wedgwood (2002, Jonathan Weinberg (2007), Dennis Whitcomb (2007Whitcomb ( , 2011, and at least certain time-slices of Paul Moser (1985) and Ernest Sosa (1991).…”

Section: The Pervasiveness Of Teleology In Contemporary Epistemologymentioning

confidence: 99%

Epistemic Teleology and the Separateness of Propositions

Berker

2013

The Philosophical Review

133

101

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Abstract:When it comes to epistemic normativity, should we take the good to be prior to the right? That is, should we ground facts about what we ought and ought not believe on a given occasion in facts about the value of being in certain cognitive states (such as, for example, the value of having true beliefs)? The overwhelming answer among contemporary epistemologists is: "Yes, we should." In this essay I argue to the contrary. Just as taking the good to be prior to the right in ethics often leads one to sanction implausible trade-offs when determining what an agent should do, so too, I argue, taking the good to be prior to the right in epistemology leads one to sanction implausible tradeoffs when determining what a subject should believe. Epistemic value-and, by extension, epistemic goals-are not the explanatory foundation upon which all other normative notions in epistemology rest.

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Section: The Pervasiveness Of Teleology In Contemporary Epistemologymentioning

confidence: 99%

Epistemic Teleology and the Separateness of Propositions

Berker

2013

The Philosophical Review

133

101

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“…There are a number of versions of this objection floating in the literature, developed most prominently perhaps by Stephen Maitzen (1995) and Richard Fumerton (2001;2002), but the argument can be stated quite simply: Suppose that epistemic justification gets its rationale, or internal aim, from advancing the ultimate aim of believing the truth with respect to the propositions we are interested forming beliefs about. It follows that a belief is justified, or successful vis-à-vis the internal aim of epistemic justification, only if the belief advances the aim of truth.…”

Section: The Problemmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Maitzen (1995) illustrates this point by reference to a similar problem facing act utilitarianism in ethics. According to the act utilitarian, the morally right action to take in any given situation is the action that maximizes utility.…”

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confidence: 99%

Truth as the Aim of Epistemic Justification

Steglich‐Petersen¹

2013

The Aim of Belief

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A popular account of epistemic justification holds that justification, in essence, aims at truth. An influential objection against this account points out that it is committed to holding that only true beliefs could be justified, which most epistemologists regard as sufficient reason to reject the account. In this paper I defend the view that epistemic justification aims at truth, not by denying that it is committed to epistemic justification being factive, but by showing that, when we focus on the relevant sense of 'justification', it isn't in fact possible for a belief to be at once justified and false. To this end, I consider and reject three popular intuitions speaking in favor of the possibility of justified false beliefs, and show that a factive account of epistemic justification is less detrimental to our normal belief forming practices than often supposed.

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“…Other than the foregoing remarks I will not offer anything in defense of (G1) or (G2), and will simply assume that the majority is right about one of them being our epistemic goal 5 . I do want to mention that what follows should be of interest also to those who hold dissenting views about the epistemic goal, such as Maitzen (1995) and Kvanvig (2003), for the message of this essay can be turned around. What I will present as a challenge to the NJ‐accounts of justification, starting from the assumption that one of the mainstream conceptions of our epistemic goal is correct, one could, by starting from the assumption that some NJ‐account is correct, also take as posing a challenge to those conceptions of our epistemic goal 6…”

Section: Our Epistemic Goalmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Lottery Paradox and Our Epistemic Goal

Douven

2008

Pacific Philosophical Qtr

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Many have the intuition that the right response to the Lottery Paradox is to deny that one can justifiably believe of even a single lottery ticket that it will lose. The paper shows that from any theory of justification that solves the paradox in accordance with this intuition, a theory not of that kind can be derived that also solves the paradox but is more conducive to our epistemic goal than the former. It is argued that currently there is no valid reason not to give preference to the derived accounts over the accounts from which they come.

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Our Errant Epistemic Aim

Cited by 18 publications

References 7 publications

Epistemic Teleology and the Separateness of Propositions

Epistemic Teleology and the Separateness of Propositions

Truth as the Aim of Epistemic Justification

The Lottery Paradox and Our Epistemic Goal

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