The Normative Evaluation of Belief and The Aspectual Classification of Belief and Knowledge Attributions

Abstract

It is a piece of philosophical commonsense that belief and knowledge are states. Some recent virtue epistemologists have been tempted to ignore this common sense because they think doing so is the key to some of the open and difficult questions in epistemology. In my view, however, they are wrong to do so, especially when it comes to two important questions about the normative evaluation of belief.

Knowledge, Cognitive Achievement, and Environmental Luck

“…The achievement in question – knowledge – is also acknowledged to be an ongoing state rather than a performance even if what accounts for why it is an achievement is at least partly a history of excellent performances in acquiring and sustaining the belief. Consequently, the criticisms of Chrisman (forthcoming) are not applicable to my version of robust virtue epistemology.…”

Epistemic Normativity and Cognitive Agency

“…I don't think this is actually what Boyle has in mind, and I'm not going to discuss further here the possibility of giving up on the orthodoxy that belief is a mental state. (I argue for the orthodoxy in Chrisman (). )…”

“…It is not, of course, obvious how to understand the difference between states and performances, but I think Steward () is definitely right that it has been a mistake to neglect this difference in philosophy of mind and epistemology, and once we get clearer about the difference some theories become very hard even to formulate sensibly. See Chrisman () for further discussion of difficulties with the performance view arising from this metaphysical observation.…”

CAN VIRTUE EPISTEMOLOGY CAPITALIZE ON JTB'S APPEAL?

“…On (i): Classifying justified belief and knowledge as instances of normative agency conflicts with the claim that belief isn't an action but instead a state , which enjoys support from both intuitive and empirical sources (cf. Chrisman ). On (ii): CVE's explanation of knowledge's superior value to that of mere true belief depends on the claim that knowledge is a kind of achievement, and so depends on the outcome of the aforementioned debate over (i); moreover, given the great extent to which even achievements are subject to luck, it's unclear whether simply classifying knowledge as an achievement can fully explain the great width of the “value gap” between knowledge and mere true belief.…”