You ought to have known: positive epistemic norms in a knowledge-first framework

Abstract

There are two central kinds of epistemological mistakes: believing things you shouldn't, and failing to believe things that you should. The knowledge-first program o↵ers a canonical explanation for the former: if you believe something without knowing it, you violate the norm to believe only that which you know. But the explanation does not extend in any plausible way to a story about what's wrong with suspending judgment when one ought to believe. In this paper I explore prospects for a knowledge-centering account of positive epistemic norms that describe epistemic duties to believe.

Suspension in Inquiry

“…Notice also that McGrath tends to gloss "being agnostic" as having middling credences, so I can simply run with his account here. (See, e.g., Nelson (2010) for the position that we don't have positive epistemic duties, and see, e.g., Ichikawa (2022), Lloyd (2022), and Simion (2023) for the opposite view) Thus, there seems to be a fundamental tension between our intuitions: in cases like Detective Tupper's, we don't want to say that the agent's belief is justified because they don't appreciate that it is defeated. But in cases like Detective Fletcher's, it seems natural to say that their agnostic attitude is justified if they don't yet appreciate what their evidence supports.…”