Abstract
This paper brings together two lines of thought. The first is the broadly contextualist idea that what is takes to satisfy central epistemic concepts such as the concept of knowledge or that of objectively justified belief may vary with the stakes faced in settings or contexts. Attributions of knowledge, for example, certify an agent to those who might treat them as a source on which to rely. Henderson and Horgan write of gate-keeping for an epistemic community. The second line of thought turns on the idea that such central epistemic concepts are keyed to the conformity with epistemic norms for the fitting fixation of belief—and that the epistemic norms function in important ways as social norms by which folk regulate their epistemic lives as members of communities of interdependent agents. The two lines of thought are practically made for one another! I develop the connections and show how the results both vindicate and reinforce a form of contextualist epistemology, but refine and limit the range of contextual variation one should envision.
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Notes
In this paper I have chosen to numerate the distinctive epistemic good veritistically—as true beliefs. Others might prefer to think of it as understandings or degrees of understanding. I am open to the alternative suggestion. Plausibly not all epistemic value is to be accounted for in flat veritistic terms. Presumably, as long as one could get a handle on the metric for degrees of understanding, one would want to elaborate the account given here so as to include this epistemic good in thinking about the choices confronting epistemic agents both individually and in communities. Quite plausibly, this would complement or enrich, rather than supplant, the veritistic accounting used in this paper. Thus, readers should understand my writing of the narrow epistemic project (and later of the narrow epistemic game) as the stipulation of a simplified heuristic framework—one that is intended to let certain ideas stand out, subject to refinement.
A telling line of work by Tomasello and his collaborators point to the way in which extant practice can readily be taken up as a presumptively good way of pursuing some project, and given a normative force (See Tomasello 2014 for an overview of some of this work).
Compare this with Bicchieri’s (2006) characterization of what she calls “descriptive norms” as opposed to her narrowly characterized “social norms.” However, on the acknowledgedly partial picture developed to this point, such state-of-the-art sensibilities are not descriptive norms, as they do not seem to select between multiple Nash equilibria—and they are would seem to be better understood as what Bicchieri (2017) terms customs.
However, in addition to epistemic norms functioning as customary state-of-the-art ways of pursuing epistemic goods, there would seem to be a place for coordination norms in connection with our narrowly epistemically motivated joint pursuits. This is clear when one notes that there is a basis there for developing epistemic divisions of labor to coordinate our joint epistemic pursuits. Plausibly, in principle, there might be multiple equally productive ways of dividing up our joint epistemic chores—coordinating—and normative sensibilities connected with this matter might serve to select between multiple Nash equilibria. Such norms would then function as what Bicchieri terms descriptive norms. This point was urged on me by Terry Horgan.
I am clearly ignoring several significant complications. Even with the purest and strongest of epistemic motivations, there might be several reasons we would yet need to regulate our epistemic communities—evaluating others and according differential status. Agents may be at various stages in their learning of even customary state-of-the-art practices, for example. Further, even supposing a uniform understanding of the associated normative understandings, agents might differ in their abilities to fully conform to those standards.
For a useful discussion of various types of games, see Camerer and Fehr (2004).
I am setting aside interesting questions about the group good that might arise by way of certain mixes of cognitive styles and processes within the group context.
This view of epistemic norms as a form of social norms, motivated by interdependencies, has strong affinities with Goldberg’s (2018) view in which one’s epistemic duties have importantly to do with “what we owe each other” in an epistemic community.
Tomasello (2009) makes the case by comparing humans with their nearest primate relatives.
Of course, agents within one community may sometimes adopt a normative practice and associated normative sensibilities from another community—as it might become evident that the other’s practices are yielding higher epistemic payoffs. What happens here is not a simple matter of “my way or the highway”.
Talk of “epistemic communities” (plural) is fitting insofar as there may be communities that devote themselves to different domains—statistics, for example, and molecular genetics—and one might be involved with both. More on this will follow.
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Henderson, D. The place of non-epistemic matters in epistemology: norms and regulation in various communities. Synthese 199, 3301–3323 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-020-02935-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-020-02935-2