Abstract
It is typically thought that some epistemic states are valuable—knowing, truly or accurately believing, understanding (to name a few). 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.
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15 October 2019
In Section 3 of the original version, the Weak Evidentialist Norm is given as follows: ‘For every S, p and t, S’s coming to know p at t is permissible’.
Notes
For a nice accounting of this thread in its many different forms see Talbot (2014, p. 602).
One sort of place in which this thought comes out: virtually every theory of justification aims to have it be the case that justified beliefs are more likely (in some sense of ‘likely’) to be true than, say, lucky guesses.
For some explanation for this focus see David (2001).
More recently, a teleological account of the norms of probabilistic coherence has become popular as well (largely inspired by Joyce (1998)). In this case the relevant goal or value is credal accuracy. I don’t think that the arguments I make here bear directly on these sorts of views. I’m focused here on norms for belief rather than the sorts of norms for credences that are the focus of those discussions.
An important articulation of the teleological structure of normative epistemology comes to us from Williams James who famously claimed that we had twin goals as rational epistemic subjects: getting to truth and avoiding error. James (1896) was explicit about the thought that the truth goal is the goal of knowing the truth.
On ‘bound’: I want to say that a norm binds a subject so long as it applies to the subject. Sometimes it’s said that only requirement norms bind and others apply in other ways, but I’m not making that distinction here.
Foley (1987) explicitly endorses a picture like this. According to Foley epistemic rationality is a matter of our properly pursuing our global epistemic goal. Foley describes the goal as, “concerned with now believing those propositions that are true and now not believing those propositions that are false.” See p. 8.
See Feldman (2000) for a defence of evidentialism in this spirit.
Crucially, n here must be a ‘pure permissibility’ norm—one that doesn’t itself contain certain kinds of limitations or provisos, e.g., ceteris paribus clauses. I take it that this is exactly how we should be thinking of WKN and the other norms in E. Those norms say that whenever one is in the relevant epistemic circumstances or conditions then believing is epistemically permissible. They don’t say that that coming to know or believing on the evidence (etc.) are epistemically permissible except for cases in which other things aren’t equal. Again, these are purely epistemic norms which make very general claims about the epistemic permissibility of believing in certain kinds of circumstances. The norms in E that we’re thinking about here are all pure permissibility norms in this sense.
These sorts of cases can be found in a number of spots in the epistemology literature. They go back at least to Roderick Firth in e.g., Firth (1981).
One might try to argue that these cases don’t get us quite this far. Perhaps they show that there’s a norm in T that says that when not believing p will ultimately lead to more knowledge acquisition than believing p, don’t believe p. If this norm were in T alongside WKN this would leave T inconsistent, which is problematic. Moreover, these sorts of counterexamples seem to me to work in the direct way I’m claimed that they do. If some norm n is in T then it should always be permissible for someone in pursuit of knowledge to do what n permits. But these sorts of examples show that it won’t always be permissible for subjects in pursuit of knowledge to do what some of our traditional epistemic norms permit.
I hope that it’s clear why the teleologist is pushed towards demanding the relevant kind of value maximization. In general once we’re thinking of subjects as in pursuit of something of value or that they value then it’s natural to think that they should get as much of it as they can (other things equal). I think this is true for the epistemic instrumentalist as well as the epistemic consequentialist. For the instrumentalist I think the pressure to maximize with respect to one’s knowledge acquisition comes in part from the demand to take the best means to one’s end. If one’s end is knowing more in general, then the best means to that end at any given time is knowing as much as one can.
For instance, recall Foley’s claim in footnote 9—it’s about “now” believing what’s true. For some discussion of these sorts of temporal issues and their relation to epistemic consequentialism in particular see Percival (2002).
Here and throughout I assume that ‘ought’ and ‘permit’ are duals, i.e., that one ought to ϕ iff one is not permitted not to ϕ. Alternatively one could take the demand to maximize as a prohibition against not maximizing and largely avoid the duality assumption.
While I’m going to stay focused on this way of thinking about how much knowledge is available in a k-case, I think the sort of argument I am making here could be make if one favoured some other measure instead.
The ‘just that’ here is important. For now the only claim I’m making is that coming to know any of these strictly weaker propositions without also coming to know what one is required to come to know in these cases is impermissible. I’m going to say more about some of the subtleties here in the next section.
I ran this argument assuming that the demand to maximize that’s in T was a demand to immediately maximize, but I hope that it’s clear that the argument certainly does not rely on restricting the demand to maximize in this way.
I’ve been largely assuming a picture according to which subjects are choosing between making different single judgments at a time. But I take it that it’s possible to make multiple judgments at the same time. Allowing for subjects to make multiple judgments at once though won’t change the conclusions here. For instance, one might try to argue that in the case just described the subject is permitted to come to know p at t so long as they also come to know (q & r) at the same time. But part of the point of the class of cases being described here is that there is a limit on how much of the “available” information the relevant subjects can come to know at once. In these sorts of cases coming to know some things at the relevant time will make it that one cannot come to know some other things at that time. This isn’t because we cannot in general make multiple judgments at a time though.
Of course it remains to be seen whether a picture like this could ground our epistemic norms. My suspicion is that the picture of epistemology that results, although very interesting, would be at least somewhat revisionary. For instance, while perhaps it does go some way towards grounding the sorts of permissibility norms discussed in this paper, on this sort of picture it looks as though epistemology, on its own, doesn’t really give us reasons to form or have beliefs. Rather it just gives us advice about which beliefs to form or have on some subject matter if we’re going to form or have any. It’s interesting to think about how well this sort of picture comports with the general thought that knowledge is valuable as well. We’ll have to save that for another time, unfortunately.
See Grimm (2009) for some of this debate.
Moreover, as I said earlier in the paper in discussing global versus local forms of epistemic instrumentalism, the epistemic norms the teleologistk wants to explain or ground are very general: they permit or require or justify believing things on any subject matter or topic. How could a restricted goal like acquiring knowledge on only some subject matters ground (say) a permission to believe whatever one’s evidence supported?
In fact see Kolodny (2005) for the thought that all rational requirements are “process requirements”.
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Friedman, J. Teleological epistemology. Philos Stud 176, 673–691 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-018-1033-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-018-1033-7