Epistemic permissiveness
Philosophical Perspectives 19 (1):445–459 (2005)
| Abstract | A rational person doesn’t believe just anything. There are limits on what it is rational to believe. How wide are these limits? That’s the main question that interests me here. But a secondary question immediately arises: What factors impose these limits? A first stab is to say that one’s evidence determines what it is epistemically permissible for one to believe. Many will claim that there are further, non-evidentiary factors relevant to the epistemic rationality of belief. I will be ignoring the details of alternative answers in order to focus on the question of what kind of rational constraints one’s evidence puts on belief. Our main question concerns how far epistemic permission and obligation can come apart.1 Suppose I am epistemically permitted to believe P, i.e., it would not be irrational for me to believe it. Am I thereby obliged to believe P, or are other options rationally available to me?2 Might I be equally rational in remaining agnostic about P, or even believing not-P? Or could even a slightly stronger or weaker degree of confidence be just as reasonable? | |||||||||
| Keywords | No keywords specified (fix it) | |||||||||
| Categories | ||||||||||
| Options |
|
|||||||||
Download options| PhilPapers Archive |
Upload a copy of this paper Check publisher's policy on self-archival Papers currently archived: 5,709 |
| External links |
  Try with proxy. |
| Through your library | Configure |
Similar books and articlesLara Buchak (forthcoming). Can It Be Rational to Have Faith? In Jacob Chandler & Victoria Harrison (eds.), Probability in the Philosophy of Religion. Oxford University Press.
Mark Vorobej (2011). Distant Peers. Metaphilosophy 42 (5):708-722.
Ram Neta (2008). What Evidence Do You Have? British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 59 (1):89-119.
Andrew Chignell, The Ethics of Belief. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
Richard Foley (1993). Working Without a Net: A Study of Egocentric Epistemology. Oxford University Press.
Kay Mathiesen (2006). The Epistemic Features of Group Belief. Episteme 2 (3):161-175.
Allen Coates (2012). Rational Epistemic Akrasia. American Philosophical Quarterly 49 (2):113-24.
Analytics
Monthly downloads |
Added to index2009-01-28Total downloads218 ( #1,051 of 549,769 )Recent downloads (6 months)3 ( #25,807 of 549,769 )How can I increase my downloads? |
My notes
Discussion
