This article investigates the relationship between moral judgments, fallibility, and imaginative insight. It will draw heavily from the canon of classical American philosophy, the members of which (from Ralph Waldo Emerson, to C.S. Peirce, E.L. Cabot, to Jane Addams, to John Dewey) took up this relationship as pivotally important in moral theorizing. It argues that the process of hypothesis formation—characterized as “insight” by Emerson and extended by Peirce in his notion of “abduction”—is a necessary condition of moral progress for it (...) allows individuals to think through the boundaries of social and ethical life. In a world of unexpected occurrences and uncertainty, the ability to generate novel explanatory frameworks and normative ideals is a crucial, if normally underappreciated, moral faculty. This paper attempts to respond to this relative neglect. (shrink)

An overview of a philosophical movement originating in the United States of America in the 19th century.

Unspecific evidence calls for imprecise credence. My aim is to vindicate this thought. First, I will pin down what it is that makes one's imprecise credences more or less epistemically valuable. Then I will use this account of epistemic value to delineate a class of reasonable epistemic scoring rules for imprecise credences. Finally, I will show that if we plump for one of these scoring rules as our measure of epistemic value or utility, then a popular family of decision rules (...) recommends imprecise credences. In particular, a range of Hurwicz criteria, which generalise the Maximin decision rule, recommend imprecise credences. If correct, the moral is this: an agent who adopts precise credences, rather than imprecise ones, in the face of unspecific and incomplete evidence, goes wrong by gambling with the epistemic utility of her doxastic state in too risky a fashion. Precise credences represent an overly risky epistemic bet, according to the Hurwicz criteria. (shrink)

The twin pillars of Levi’s epistemology are his infallibilism and his corrigibilism. According to infallibilism, any agent is committed to being absolutely certain about anything she fully believes. From her own perspective, there is no serious possibility that any proposition she believes is false. She takes her own beliefs to be infallible, in this sense. But this need not make her dogmatic, on Levi’s view. According to his corrigibilism, an agent might come to have good reason to change her beliefs (...) and respond accordingly. She might also recognise this possibility ex ante, despite being absolutely certain that her current beliefs are true. This brief review explores whether Levi’s infallibilism can be made to sit comfortably both with his account of rational belief change, and his account of epistemic value (or with any reasonable account of epistemic value for that matter). I argue that it cannot. (shrink)