Toward a Lockean Unification of Formal and Traditional Epistemology

Lee, Matthew Brandon; Silva, Paul

doi:10.1017/epi.2020.11

Cited by 4 publications

(4 citation statements)

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“…(Foley 1993, ch. 4;Locke 2014;Shear and Fitelson 2019;Dorst 2019;Lee and Silvia forthcoming defend the Lockean thesis.) Dualists can consistently either affirm or deny the Lockean thesis.…”

Section: Objectionsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Dilemmas, Disagreement, and Dualism

Jackson¹

2021

Epistemic Dilemmas

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What should we do when someone who is smart and well-informed disagrees with us? Should we change our opinion, or hold fast to our previous viewpoint? This question has divided epistemologists, and those working in the epistemology of disagreement have spilled much ink defending various answers. 1 One concept that's been central to the disagreement debate is an epistemic peer. An epistemic peer is roughly someone who is epistemically "on a par" with you-they have similar evidence to you, and are approximately equally reliable, epistemically virtuous, and free from bias about the matter in question. While later, I'll argue that epistemic peerhood need not play a central role in the epistemology of disagreement, it's important for understanding the debate thus far. For now, we'll understand the central question of peer disagreement as: should one alter their opinion when they knowingly encounter a disagreeing epistemic peer?In this chapter, following Buchak (2021), I argue that this central question of peer disagreement presents us with a dilemma; we have good reason to answer both "yes" and "no" to this question. I then offer and motivate a particular solution to that dilemma. This solution revolves around what I call belief-credence dualism, the view that we have two attitudes-beliefs and credencesand neither reduces to the other. In particular, I'll argue that we should alter our credences, but not our beliefs, when encountering an epistemic peer.This chapter proceeds as follows. In Section 13.2, I explain how peer disagreement leads to an epistemic dilemma. That is, there's good reason to think that we should both revise and not revise our opinions in response to peer disagreement. In Section 13.3, I offer a solution to this dilemma: if belief-credence dualism is true, this allows for the possibility that we should modify our credences, but not our beliefs, in response to peer disagreement. In Sections 13.4 and 13.5, I motivate this solution; my first motivation relates to the nature of contents and attitudes, and the second relates to epistemic peerhood. In Section 13.6, I address some worries about the view I've proposed, and in Section 13.7, I conclude.

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“…(Foley 1993, ch. 4;Locke 2014;Shear and Fitelson 2019;Dorst 2019;Lee and Silvia forthcoming defend the Lockean thesis.) Dualists can consistently either affirm or deny the Lockean thesis.…”

Section: Objectionsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Dilemmas, Disagreement, and Dualism

Jackson¹

2021

Epistemic Dilemmas

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“…Some go even further and reduce desires to beliefs about the good (Price 1989; Gregory forthcoming). Still others reduce beliefs to high credences (Eriksson & Hájek 2007;Lee & Silva 2020). Reducing everything to a small number of attitude-types is challenging, however, because there are many candidate sui generis mental states-including imaginings, intentions, and emotions (although some reduce intentions to beliefs and emotions to beliefs; see Marušić & Schwenkler 2018 for the former and Roberts 1998 for the latter).…”

Section: Mental Fundamentalitymentioning

confidence: 99%

Faith, Hope, and Justification1

Jackson¹

2022

Propositional and Doxastic Justification

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“…Dualism denies the popular view that belief reduces to credence: either maximal credence or credence above a certain threshold (call this the “credence‐first” view: see, among many others, Wedgwood 2012, Greco 2015‐a, Weatherson 2005, Douven & Williamson 2006, Lee & Silvia Forthcoming). Dualism also denies the view that credences reduce to beliefs, in particular beliefs with probabilistic or modal content (call this the “belief‐first” view: see, e.g., Holton 2008, Easwaran 2015, Moon 2018, Moon & Jackson 2020).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Epistemic Akrasia and Belief‐Credence Dualism

Jackson

Tan

2021

Philos Phenomenol Research

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Paradigmatically, epistemic akrasia occurs when a subject believes some proposition p and simultaneously believes that her belief that p is irrational (Horowitz 2014). This characterization is broad enough to admit of further precisification of a subject's possible mental states. For example, if a subject believes p despite taking p to be highly unlikely, she may take this low credence to suggest that her belief is irrational. Then she too counts as akratic. In this paper, we wish to call attention to cases like these. Let's consider a particular example.Taylor believes that her close friends and family think ill of her. She knows that this is an irrational thing for her to believe, especially since she knows her only apparent evidence is that she and they have been speaking less lately. This lack of communication, she admits to herself, is easily and plausibly explained by the fact that she has just moved to a new country to start a demanding job. Thus, she has a low credence that they think ill of her. Still, she believes it, despite her low confidence that it is true. Taylor's case is one of epistemic akrasia: she believes p, but knows she ought not believe p.

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Toward a Lockean Unification of Formal and Traditional Epistemology

Cited by 4 publications

References 41 publications

Dilemmas, Disagreement, and Dualism

Dilemmas, Disagreement, and Dualism

Faith, Hope, and Justification1

Epistemic Akrasia and Belief‐Credence Dualism

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