Call the norms of inquiry zetetic norms. How are zetetic norms related to epistemic norms? At first glance, they seem quite closely connected. Aren't epistemic norms norms that bind inquirers qua inquirers? And isn't epistemology the place to look for a normative theory of inquiry? While much of this thought seems right, this paper argues that the relationship between the epistemic and the zetetic is not as harmonious as one might have thought and liked. In particular, this paper argues that (...) some familiar contemporary epistemic norms are in tension with, and even in conflict with, central zetetic norms. (shrink)

In this paper I argue that suspension of judgment is intimately tied to inquiry and in particular that one is suspending judgment about some question if and only if one is inquiring into that question.

In this paper I look at belief and degrees of belief through the lens of inquiry. I argue that belief and degrees of belief play different roles in inquiry. In particular I argue that belief is a “settling” attitude in a way that degrees of belief are not. Along the way I say more about what inquiring amounts to, argue for a central norm of inquiry connecting inquiry and belief and say more about just what it means to have an (...) inquiry or question settled. (shrink)

Abstract In this paper I undertake an in-depth examination of an oft mentioned but rarely expounded upon state: suspended judgment. While traditional epistemology is sometimes characterized as presenting a “yes or no” picture of its central attitudes, in fact many of these epistemologists want to say that there is a third option: subjects can also suspend judgment. Discussions of suspension are mostly brief and have been less than clear on a number of issues, in particular whether this third option should (...) be thought of as an attitude or not. In this paper I argue that suspended judgment is (or at least involves) a genuine attitude. Content Type Journal Article Pages 1-17 DOI 10.1007/s11098-011-9753-y Authors Jane Friedman, St Catherine’s College, University of Oxford, Oxford, OX1 3UJ UK Journal Philosophical Studies Online ISSN 1573-0883 Print ISSN 0031-8116. (shrink)

In this paper I argue that there is a class of attitudes that have questions (rather than propositions or something else) as contents.

There has been much discussion about whether traditional epistemology's doxastic attitudes are reducible to degrees of belief. In this paper I argue that what I call the Straightforward Reduction - the reduction of all three of believing p, disbelieving p, and suspending judgment about p, not-p to precise degrees of belief for p and not-p that ought to obey the standard axioms of the probability calculus - cannot succeed. By focusing on suspension of judgment (agnosticism) rather than belief, we can (...) see why the Straightforward Reduction is bound to fail. I argue that, in general, suspending about p is not just a matter of having some specified standard credence for p, and in the end I suggest some ways to extend the arguments that will put pressure on other credence-theoretic accounts of belief and suspension of judgment as well. (shrink)

In this paper I revisit Gilbert Harman's arguments for a "clutter avoidance" norm. The norm -- which says that we ought to avoid cluttering our minds with trivialities -- is widely endorsed. I argue that it has some fairly dramatic consequences for normative epistemology.

Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, EarlyView.

In this paper I explore the contours of a picture of normative epistemology that speaks centrally to the question of how to inquire rather than just the question of what to believe. What if normative epistemology were expanded to encompass inquiry in full? I argue that while a 'zetetic epistemology' builds on traditional normative epistemology in many appealing ways, it also faces some challenges.

It is typically thought that some epistemic states are valuable—knowing, truly or accurately believing, understanding. These are states it’s thought good to be in and it’s also said that we aim or want to be in them. It is then sometimes claimed that these sorts of thoughts about epistemic goods or values ground or explain our epistemic norms. For instance, we think subjects should follow their evidence when they form their beliefs. But why should they? Why not believe against the (...) evidence or ignore it completely in deciding what to believe? Here’s a compelling sort of answer: because epistemic subjects are or ought to be trying to know more and following their evidence is a means to that end or to fulfilling that obligation. In this paper I argue that this compelling thought cannot be right. Subjects who are trying to know more will regularly fail to conform to some of our most familiar epistemic norms. (shrink)

“The Nature of Belief Systems” sets forth a Hobson's choice between rule by the politically ignorant masses and rule by the ideologically constrained—which is to say, the doctrinaire—elites. On the one hand, lacking comprehensive cognitive structures, such as ideological “belief systems,” with which to understand politics, most people learn distressingly little about it. On the other hand, a spiral of conviction seems to make it difficult for the highly informed few to see any aspects of politics but those that confirm (...) the cognitive structures that organize their political perceptions. This is a troubling situation for any consequentialist democratic political theory, according to which what is crucial is the electorate's (and subsidiary decision makers') ability to make informed policy judgments, not their possession of willful but uninformed political “attitudes.” Any political theorist who does not take democracy to be an end in itself (regardless of its consequences) should be concerned about Converse's findings. (shrink)

_Pathologies of Rational Choice Theory_, a book written by Donald Green and Ian Shapiro and published in 1994, excited much controversy among political scientists and promoted a dialogue among them that was printed in a double issue of the journal Critical Review in 1995. This new book reproduces thirteen essays from the journal written by senior scholars in the field, along with an introduction by the editor of the journal, Jeffrey Friedman, and a rejoinder to the essays by Green and (...) Shapiro. The scholars—who include John Ferejohn, Morris P. Fiorina, Stanley Kelley, Jr., Robert E. Lane, Peter C. Ordeshook, Norman Schofield, and Kenneth A. Shepsle—criticize, agree with, or build on the issues raised by Green and Shapiros critique. Together the essays provide an interesting and accessible way of focusing on competing approaches to the study of politics and the social sciences. (shrink)

Karl Popper's methodology highlights our scientific ignorance: hence the need to institutionalize open‐mindedness through controlled experiments that may falsify our fallible theories about the world. In his endorsement of “piecemeal social engineering,” Popper assumes that the social‐democratic state and its citizens are capable of detecting social problems, and of assessing the results of policies aimed at solving them, through a process of experimentation analogous to that of natural science. But we are not only scientifically but politically ignorant: ignorant of the (...) facts that underpin political debate, which are brought to our attention by theories that, as Max Weber emphasized, can be tested only through counterfactual thought experiments. Public‐opinion and political‐psychology research suggest that human beings are far too unaware, illogical, and doctrinaire to conduct the rigorous theorizing that would be necessary to make piecemeal social engineering work. F.A. Hayek realized that the public could not engage, specifically, in piecemeal economic regulation but failed to draw the conclusion that this was due to a specific type of political ignorance: ignorance of economic theory. (shrink)

In “Popper, Weber, and Hayek,” I claimed that the economic and political world governed by social democracy is too complex to offer hope for rational social‐democratic policy making. I extrapolated this conclusion from the claim, made by Austrian‐school economists in the 1920s and 30s, that central economic planning would face insurmountable “knowledge problems.” Israel Kirzner's Reply indicates the need to keep the Austrians’ cognitivist argument conceptually distinct from more familiar incentives arguments, which can tacitly reintroduce the assumption of omniscience against (...) which the Austrian economists rebelled. Callahan's Reply illustrates the need to keep in mind the hypothetical, conditional nature of economic arguments. Notturno's Reply changes the subject by asserting the intrinsic value of social‐democratic participation, regardless of its outcomes—even while, like Talisse's Reply, ignoring the evidence that public ignorance and elite dogmatism probably can't be mitigated by more information or by appeals to be open minded. And Hill focuses on the very real imperfections of market and other private‐sphere decision making, without weighing the shortcomings of the political alternatives. Markets and other private‐sphere decision arenas don't have to be perfect for them to improve upon public‐sector processes. In the latter, cognitive demands tend to be much greater, because of the divergence of modern social problems from the conditions that would have faced the hunter‐gatherers whose cognitive apparatus we have inherited. (shrink)

ABSTRACT An intellectually charitable understanding of populism might begin by recognizing that, since populist citizens tend to be politically uninformed and lacking in higher education, populist ideas are likely to be inarticulate reproductions of the tacit assumptions undergirding non-populist or “mainstream” culture rather than stemming from explicit theoretical constructs, such as an apotheosis of the unity or the will of “the people.” What features of our ambient culture, then, could explain the simplistic and combative approach that populists seem to take (...) to politics and policy, their impatience with political debate and deliberation, their willingness to set aside democratic legal forms and political norms, their nationalism, their personalization of politics, their inclination toward conspiracy theorizing, their fondness for fringe sources of information, and their suspicion of political, scientific, and media elites? Using focus group and survey data, we can understand these populist traits as reflections of the culture of “democratic technocracy”: a regime in which we, the people, are assumed capable of rendering sound judgments about how to solve our social and economic problems. Whether or not this assumption is warranted, its cultural dominance seems likely to generate the ideas that populist citizens apparently take for granted. (shrink)

This volume brings Cassirer s work into the arena of contemporary debates both within and outside of philosophy. All articles offer a fresh and contemporary look at one of the most prolific and important philosophers of the 20th century. The papers are authored by a wide array of scholars working in different areas, such as epistemology, philosophy of culture, sociology, psychopathology, philosophy of science and aesthetics.".

Seminal work in moral neuroscience by Joshua Greene and colleagues employed variants of the well-known trolley problems to identify two brain networks which compete with each other to determine moral judgments. Greene interprets the tension between these brain networks using a dual process account which pits deliberative reason against automatic emotion-driven intuitions: reason versus passion. Recent neuroscientific evidence suggests, however, that the critical tension that Greene identifies as playing a role in moral judgment is not so much a tension between (...) reason and passion, but a tension between distinct forms of deliberative reasoning: analytic versus empathetic. In this paper we present results from several new studies supporting this alternative hypothesis. (shrink)

Bryan Caplan’s The Myth of the Rational Voter treats several immensely important and understudied topics—public ignorance of economics, political ideology, and their connection to policy error—from an orthodox economic perspective whose applicability to these topics is overwhelmingly disproven by the available evidence. Moreover, Caplan adds to the traditional and largely irrelevant orthodox economic notion of rational public ignorance the claim that when voters favor counterproductive economic policies, they do so deliberately, i.e., knowingly. This leads him to assume (without any evidence) (...) that “emotion or ideology” explain mass economic error. Straightforward, unchosen mass ignorance of economic principles—neither “rational” nor “irrational,” but simply mistaken—is a more coherent explanation for economic error, and it is backed up by the vast body of public‐opinion research. (shrink)

The financial crisis was caused by the complex, constantly growing web of regulations designed to constrain and redirect modern capitalism. This complexity made investors, bankers, and perhaps regulators themselves ignorant of regulations previously promulgated across decades and in different “fields” of regulation. These regulations interacted with each other to foster the issuance and securitization of subprime mortgages; their rating as AA or AAA; and their concentration on the balance sheets (and off the balance sheets) of many commercial and investment banks. (...) As a practical matter, it was impossible to predict the disastrous outcome of these interacting regulations. This fact calls into question the feasibility of the century-old attempt to create a hybrid capitalism in which regulations are supposed to remedy economic problems as they arise. (shrink)

ABSTRACTNormative political epistemologists, such as epistemic democrats, study whether political decision makers can, in principle, be expected to know what they need to know if they are to make wise public policy. Empirical political epistemologists study the content and sources of real-world political actors' knowledge and interpretations of knowledge. In recent years, empirical political epistemologists have taken up the study of the ideas of political actors other than voters, such as bureaucrats and politicians. Normative political epistemologists could follow this lead (...) if they were to focus on the technocratic orientation of nearly all political actors in the West: that is, on their desire to solve social and economic problems. Since most technocratic policy is made by political elites, the reliability of elites' knowledge of the causes of and cures for social and economic problems is a natural topic for normative political epistemology. (shrink)

The Tulis thesis becomes even more powerful when the constitutional revolution he describes is put in its Progressive‐Era context. The public had long demanded social reforms designed to curb or replace laissez‐faire capitalism, which was seen as antithetical to the interests of ordinary working people. But popular demands for social reform went largely unmet until the 1910s. Democratizing political reforms, such as the rhetorical presidency, were designed to facilitate “change” by finally giving the public the power to enact social reforms. (...) The resulting political order has created systemic pressure for policy demagoguery in place of rational deliberation. Mass political mobilization seems to be better achieved by contests of grand principle that pit the well‐meaning supporters of obviously needed reforms against “villains and conspirators,” than by technical discussions of the possibly counterproductive effects of those reforms. (shrink)

ABSTRACT The financial crisis was caused by the complex, constantly growing web of regulations designed to constrain and redirect modern capitalism. This complexity made investors, bankers, and perhaps regulators themselves ignorant of regulations promulgated across decades and in different “fields” of regulation. These regulations interacted with each other to foster the issuance and securitization of subprime mortgages; their rating as AA or AAA; and previously their concentration on the balance sheets (and off the balance sheets) of many commercial and investment (...) banks. As a practical matter, it was impossible to predict the disastrous outcome of these interacting regulations. This fact calls into question the feasibility of the century‐old attempt to create a hybrid capitalism in which regulations are supposed to remedy economic problems as they arise. (shrink)

The debate over Green and Shapiro's Pathologies of Rational Choice Theory sustains their contention that rational choice theory has not produced novel, empirically sustainable findings about politics?if one accepts their definition of empirically sustainable findings. Green and Shapiro show that rational choice research often resembles the empirically vacuous practices in which economists engage under the aegis of instrumentalism. Yet Green and Shapiro's insistence that theoretical constructs should produce accurate predictions may inadvertently lead to instrumentalism. Some of Green and Shapiro's critics (...) hint at a better approach, which would eschew predictive testing in favor of testing the applicability of the theory to particular cases. (shrink)

Fukuyama's argument that we have recently reached ?The End of History?; is defended against writers who fail to appreciate the Hegelian meaning of Fukuyama's ?Endism,?; but is criticized for using simplistic dichotomies that evade the economic and ideological convergence of East and West. Against Fukuyama, the economic critique of socialism, revisionist scholarship on early Soviet economic history, and the history of the libertarian ideas of Rousseau, Kant, Hegel and Marx are deployed to show that history ?ended?; years ago: the creeds (...) of the First and Second Worlds sprang from common assumptions; and even before Eastern European reform movements, both sides of the Iron Curtain had moved to economies that are neither capitalist nor socialist. (shrink)

A discussion of L.A. Paul's 'Transformative Experience' from an Author Meets Critics session at the 2015 Pacific APA.

A political epistemology that enables us to determine if political actors are likely to know what they need to know must be rooted in an ontology of the actors and of the human objects of their knowledge; that is, a political anthropology. The political anthropology developed in Power Without Knowledge envisions human beings as creatures whose conscious actions are determined by their interpretations of what seem to them to be relevant circumstances; and whose interpretations are, in turn, determined by webs (...) of belief built from somewhat heterogeneous streams of incoming ideas. This anthropology, then, has two components. Ideational heterogeneity undermines the aspiration of technocracy to predict human behavior and the aspiration of social science to arrive at lawlike generalizations about it. Ideational determinism, however, which is less important than ideational heterogeneity to the critique of technocracy, may be more important to generating epistemological approaches to other forms of politics, all of which involve the actions of human beings who, as such, are largely at the mercy of the fallible ideas to which they have been exposed. (shrink)

The goal of the left has been predominantly libertarian: the realization of equal individual freedom. But now, with the demise of leftist hope for radical change that has followed the collapse of ?really existing?; socialism, the world is converging on a compromise between capitalism and the leftist impulse. This compromise is the democratic, interventionist welfare state, which has gained new legitimacy by virtue of combining a ?realistic?; acceptance of the unfortunate need for the market with an attempt to libertarianize capitalism (...) as much as possible, by intervening in its operation and redistributing the wealth it produces. Since the neoliberal economic critique of socialism seems to have been borne out by the events of 1989, neoliberal economists might now be expected to provide a similar critique of the new interventionist consensus. Yet there are few signs of their interest in doing so. This might be due to their acceptance of an erroneous interpretation of liberty which equates it with capitalist property relations, and which, they believe, provides an overarching moral justification for their opposition to state intervention in the market. Acceptance of this moralistic, ?libertarian?; version of neoliberalism may obscure the need for a synthetic critique of the new consensus which would integrate the many extant consequentialist arguments against it. Before reviewing the libertarian motives behind both socialism and intervention?ism, criticisms of moralistic neoliberal ?libertarianism?; are offered. These are intended to clear the way for a consequentialist critique of the interventionist welfare state. Finally, it is suggested that the problems with such a critique point toward a different project: a critique of the culture that gives rise to interventionism. (shrink)

Economists tend to view ignorance as ?rational,? neglecting the possibility that ignorance is unintentional. This oversight is reflected in economists? model of ?information search,? which can be fruitfully contrasted with ?information browsing.? Information searches are designed to discover unknown knowns, whose value is calculable ex ante, such that this value justifies the cost of the search. In this model of human information acquisition, there is no primal or ?radical? ignorance that might prevent people from knowing which information to look for, (...) lacking omniscience. Unlike ignorance that is rationally chosen on the basis of an accurate cost/benefit calculation, radical ignorance can explain human error. An account of error as grounded in radical ignorance bypasses the need to appeal to irrationality in order to explain economic (and other) mistakes. (shrink)

ABSTRACTHow can political actors identify which putative expert is truly expert, given that any putative expert may be wrong about a given policy question; given that experts may therefore disagree with one another; and given that other members of the polity, being non-expert, can neither reliably adjudicate inter-expert disagreement nor detect when a consensus of experts is misguided? This would not be an important question if the problems dealt with by politics were usually simple ones, in the sense that the (...) answer to them is self-evident. But to the extent that political problems are complex, expertise is required to answer them—although if such expertise exists, we are unlikely to know who has it. This conundrum is illustrated by the financial crisis. The consensus views of financial regulators prior to the crisis appear to have been mistaken, in that the regulators not only failed to anticipate a crisis of the type that occurred, but adopted regulations that may have encouraged the concentration of mortgage risk in financial institutions. Similarly, once the crisis broke, academic financial experts, financial regulators, and journalists—who communicate information from one branch of the division of epistemic labor to another—converged on a narrative of the crisis that, once again, may plausibly be described as inaccurate, but that nonetheless has come to shape the understanding of the crisis shared by the rest of the polity. (shrink)

Taber and Lodge's 2006 paper provides powerful evidence that one's prior beliefs shape one's reception of new evidence in a manner that can best be described as “inadvertently dogmatic.” This is especially true for people who are well informed, which dovetails with findings going back to Converse (1964) showing political beliefs to be ideologically constrained (rigid) among the relatively well informed. What may explain the coincidence of dogmatism and knowledgeability is the very process of learning about politics, which must use (...) theories, schemas, ideologies, or Lippmannesque “stereotypes” to target certain political information as germane by putting it into an interpretive framework. This interpretive process is likely to create for each of us a growing database of information that is congruent with our extant convictions but that excludes incongruent information: in light of the data we have already processed, incongruent information seems increasingly implausible (if not incomprehensible), and is therefore rationally ignored or dismissed. But this does not necessarily mean, as Taber and Lodge follow Robert Abelson in suggesting, that people are “motivated” to be dogmatic rather than being unintentionally closed minded as a result of the plausibility they involuntarily accord to their priors. Recognizing the inadvertent (unmotivated) nature of dogmatism is essential if political science is to take seriously political actors' beliefs—and to assess the gravity of the problem posed by dogmatism. (shrink)

Postlibertarianism means abandoning defenses of the intrinsic justice of laissez?faire capitalism, the better to investigate whether the systemic consequences of interfering with capitalism are severe enough to justify laissez?faire. Any sound case for laissez?faire is likely to build on postlibertarian research, for the conviction that laissez?faire is intrinsically just rests upon unsound philosophical assumptions. Conversely, these assumptions, if sound, would make empirical studies of capitalism by libertarian scholars superfluous. Moreover, postmodern approaches to ?libertarianism? perpetuate the same assumptions, in the guise (...) of a critique of the rationalist hubris that has supposedly led to the tragedies of the twentieth century. The ?libertarian? and postmodernist critics of postlibertarianism either ignore the assumptions undergirding their views, or they contend that these assumptions are not necessary when ?freedom? and ?morality? are properly defined. The latter contention amounts to an attempt to define the challenge to ?libertarianism? out of existence. (shrink)

“Postmodernism” denotes efforts to replace foundationalist philosophy with contextu‐alist, immanentist forms of reason. “Postlibertarianism” denotes efforts to transcend contemporary minimal statism, questioning both its “libertarian” moral superstructure and its underlying consequentialist claims and seeking to determine whether the latter can be generalized in a way that displaces the former. Efforts to reach minimal‐statist conclusions by postmodern means seem bound to aggravate the problem that plagues contemporary minimal statism: its failure to be true to its consequentialist foundations, reflected in its long‐standing (...) devotion to dubious arguments for the intrinsic good of laissez‐faire capitalism. For postmodernism fosters the illusion that one can do without any foundations at all. Rather than recovering its consequentialist roots, therefore, postmodern minimal statism tends to rely unquestioningly on the normative foundations already accepted by the libertarian “speech community,” neither responding to alternative interpretations of the value of liberty, nor transcending the arid conversation of “liberty” in favor of investigations of the real world of contemporary capitalism and the welfare state. (shrink)

Deontological (as opposed to consequentialist) liberals treat freedom of action as an end in itself, not a means to other ends. Yet logically, when one makes a deliberate choice, one treats freedom of action as if it were not an end in itself, for one uses this freedom as a means to the ends one hopes to achieve through one's action. The tension between deontology and the logic of choice is reflected in the paradoxical nature of the ?right to do (...) wrong?; and in Rawls's unsuccessful attempts to justify to acting agents their interest in such a right, embodied in his conception of agents as ?self-validating sources of claims.? A self-validating source of claims is akin to God as envisioned by voluntarist theologians such as Ockham. Leibniz's critique of voluntarism, then, is applicable to the Rawlsian subject: like the voluntarist God, she would be unable to act if it were indeed the case that her action validated itself. (shrink)

Hayek developed two contradictory epistemologies. The epistemology for which he is famous attributed dispersed knowledge to economic actors and credited the price system for aggregating and communicating this knowledge. The other epistemology attributed to human and non-human organisms alike the error-prone interpretation of stimuli, which could never truly be said to be “knowledge.” Several of the paradoxes of Hayek's economic and political thought that are explored in this symposium can be explained by the triumph of the first epistemology over the (...) second, including his historical interpretation of socialism as a planning mentality; his tendentious definitions of “liberty” and “justice”; and his opposition to economic redistribution even as he endorsed all manner of economic and social regulations. (shrink)

In a certain sense, voluntary communities and market relationships are relatively less coercive than democracy and bureaucracy: they offer more positive freedom. In that respect, they are more like romantic relationships or friendships than are democracies and bureaucracies. This tends to make voluntary communities and markets not only more pleasant forms of interaction, but more effective ones—contrary to Weber's confidence in the superior rationality of bureaucratic control.

Montague [7] translates English into a tensed intensional logic, an extension of the typed -calculus. We prove that each translation reduces to a formula without -applications, unique to within change of bound variable. The proof has two main steps. We first prove that translations of English phrases have the special property that arguments to functions are modally closed. We then show that formulas in which arguments are modally closed have a unique fully reduced -normal form. As a corollary, translations of (...) English phrases are contained in a simply defined proper subclass of the formulas of the intensional logic. (shrink)

Liberalism sanctifies the values chosen by the sovereign individual. This tends to rule out criticisms of an individual's “preference” for one value over another by, ironically, establishing a deterministic view of the self that protects the self's desires from scrutiny. Similarly, rational choice approaches to social theory begin with previously determined individual preferences and focus on the means by which they are pursued, concentrating on the results rather than the sources of people's values.A striking new attempt to go behind the (...) liberal and rational‐choice starting point in order to understand political preferences is found in Aaron Wildavsky's Cultural Theory. Yet Cultural Theory does not facilitate the criticism of preferences, because its understanding of them is fundamentally liberal. Even while rejecting methodological individualism, Cultural Theory's monocausally social theory of preference formation retains in a new guise the liberal preservation of preferences from criticism by reestablishing a deterministic view of the formation of values, leading it to share with liberalism an a historical view of their origins. (shrink)

Environmental issues imperil the libertarian utopia of a society in which the individual is completely sovereign over his or her private domain. Taken seriously, this aspiration would lead to an environmentalism so extreme that it would preclude human life, since most human activity entails incursions against the sovereign realms of other human beings. The fallback position many libertarians have adopted?free?market environmentalism?retreats from libertarian ideals by permitting some of the physical aggression of pollution to continue. Free?market environmentalism does embody the postlibertarian (...) insight that collective decisions in mass democracies tend to be inferior to individual decisions in market economies. But so far, free?market environmentalism has stopped short of carrying this insight to its logical conclusion by proposing the complete depoliticization of environmental decision making. A thought experiment in environmental depoliticization reveals the practical limits of free?market environmentalism. The upshot is that neither libertarianism nor free?market environmentalism can culminate in anything close to the abolition of the modern state; they can, however, by problematizing certain aspects of that state, allow us a clearer understanding of political and cultural life. (shrink)