Abstract
Pluralist pragmatists claim that there are both practical and epistemic reasons for belief, but should they also claim that there are both kinds of reasons for action? I argue that the pluralist pragmatist faces a puzzle here. If she accepts that there are epistemic reasons for action, she must explain a striking asymmetry between action and belief: while epistemic reasons play a large role in determining which beliefs one all-things-considered ought to have, they don’t play much of a role in determining which action one all-things-considered ought to perform. But if the pluralist pragmatist denies that there are epistemic reasons for action, she has trouble explaining why there are no such reasons. After motivating this puzzle, I propose a solution to it. I argue that the pluralist can accept that there are epistemic reasons for action while nonetheless explaining why they don’t matter much to how we all-things-considered ought to act because, if there are epistemic reasons for action, they are so ubiquitous that in most choice situations we have equally strong epistemic reasons for doing anything, which makes any action epistemically permitted, but not required.
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Notes
I use examples to illustrate the differences between epistemic and practical reasons rather than offer definitions because what distinguishes epistemic and practical reasons is highly controversial and theory-laden. And as will become clear later, what exactly epistemic reasons are is precisely what is at issue in this paper.
This example is a bit more controversial because it implies that not all epistemic reasons are evidence (see Schroeder (2012) for discussion).
See James (1897/1979), Feldman (2000), Marušić (2013), Reisner (2008), (2009), Howard (2020), and Leary (2017, 2020). While all these authors defend the view that there are both practical and epistemic reasons for belief, some of them disagree about whether these two kinds of reasons are comparable in the first place, and if so, how exactly they together determine what one all-things-considered-ought to believe (more on this in § 2).
This question doesn’t arise for the robust pragmatist because she presumably takes all apparent epistemic reasons for action to be simply practical reasons for action similar to the practical reason for belief in (6).
Whether there are authoritatively normative epistemic reasons for action is hardly discussed in the literature because most philosophers seem to simply assume that all epistemic reasons (whether they’re authoritatively normative or not) are reasons for doxastic attitudes. Booth (2006) and Aronowitz & Singer (forthcoming) explicitly defend the view that there are epistemic reasons for action, but it’s unclear whether they take them to be authoritatively normative.
I float this view in Leary (2020, p. 148) without committing myself to it. I take it to be at least an initially appealing view of epistemic reasons because it allows that some epistemic reasons are not evidence (like (3) above) and it doesn’t imply that all epistemic reasons are reasons in virtue of promoting true beliefs and thus avoids Berker’s (2013) criticisms of teleological accounts of epistemic reasons.
In what follows, I don’t assume any definition of epistemic reasons for action, but instead simply assume that epistemic reasons for action are reasons to do some action that have something to do with getting at the truth and avoiding error, even when the relevant subject matter has no practical import. I do this because, if epistemic and practical reasons are individuated by their grounds, then what exactly epistemic reasons for action are in the first place depends on what the grounds of epistemic reasons are, which is a substantive, controversial question about which I wish to remain as neutral as possible.
This case is inspired by Kelly (2002).
Following Howard (2020), I don’t consider credences as relevant doxastic alternatives in these cases, but it seems like his account could easily be applied to credences too.
One might think that there are many cases in which this asymmetry doesn’t hold because there are plenty of cases in which one oughtATC to gather more evidence about some important subject matter. But recall that in cases where the relevant subject matter has some practical import, there are presumably practical reasons to gather evidence too. So, while it might be that one oughtATC to gather evidence in such cases, this is plausibly because of one’s practical reasons for doing so. Even in these cases, then, the epistemic reasons are playing no role in determining what one oughtATC to do. This is why I focus on cases in which one has no practical reasons to do the relevant action that there are allegedly epistemic reasons to do, so that we can more clearly see the asymmetry.
Thanks to Caroline Monahan for this point.
I follow Howard & Leary (forthcoming) in characterizing RKRs in terms of fittingness.
This sort of worry is what motivates Howard & Leary (forthcoming) to argue that the best defense of the view that RKRs are authoritatively normative is to claim that RKRs have to do with fittingness and that fittingness is distinct from constitutive correctness.
By objective probability, I mean the probability that something is true, given some set of background facts, regardless of any particular agent’s subjective perspective.
Thanks to Jean-Francois Rioux for this objection.
Thanks to Bob Beddor for suggesting this response.
I’m assuming here that the total strength of one’s epistemic reasons to do some action depends on the mere number of propositions that the action would yield evidence about either directly or indirectly via logical inferences. An anonymous reviewer suggested that one might think, instead, that the total strength of epistemic reasons to do some action depends on the number of propositions that the action would yield direct evidence about. For example, even if library A and library B ultimately yield evidence about an infinite number of propositions, one might think that there’s nonetheless stronger epistemic reason to go to library A because, since it contains more books than B, going to library A would yield evidence that directly supports a greater number of distinct propositions. I think this alternative model of the strength of epistemic reasons for action is less plausible because its practical analogue is implausible. When some action would cause some good (or bad) consequences to be brought about, the total strength of these consequence-based practical reasons in favor (or against) doing the action does not depend solely on the immediate good (or bad) effects of the action, but it depends on both the immediate and long-term effects of the action. So, similarly, if epistemic reasons for action are generated by the fact that the action would yield evidence about some propositions, both propositions that are directly and indirectly supported by the relevant evidence should be relevant to the weight of those epistemic reasons.
I borrow the term “permissive balancing” and the above library example from Berker (2018, p. 458), which he uses to point out that epistemic reasons for action balance like practical reasons for action, rather than epistemic reasons for belief. Berker points out that this is something that the pluralist ultimately needs to explain. So, one might worry that the explanation of The Action-Belief Asymmetry I’m offering here ultimately just moves the explanatory bump in the rug. But I think there’s a good explanation of Different Balancing on offer. As I argue in Leary (2020), it can be explained by the fact that epistemic reasons for belief are interdependent, while epistemic reasons for action are not: i.e., epistemic reasons for believing p are necessarily reasons against believing not-p, while epistemic reasons for doing an action A are not necessarily reasons against doing not-A. And the Truth-Commitment View can even explain this further difference between epistemic reasons for belief and epistemic reasons for action: it’s because “having two contradictory beliefs regarding p cannot simultaneously show commitment to the truth regarding p (since p and not-p cannot both be true), while two incompatible actions (like going to library A and going to library B… can simultaneously show commitment to the truth regarding p”(Leary, 2020, p. 149). Moreover, explaining the different balancing behaviors of different kinds of reasons is everyone’s problem (not just the pluralist’s). As Berker and I note, even if there are no epistemic reasons for action and no practical reasons for belief, we still need to explain why, when there are equally strong epistemic reasons for believing p as there are for disbelieving p, both are prohibited and one ought to instead suspend judgment, but when there are equally strong practical reasons for doing action A as there are for doing not-A, both are permitted and one ought to do one or the other. So, I don’t think it’s a problem that my solution here appeals to a further difference between epistemic reasons for action and belief that requires further explanation.
Thanks to an anonymous reviewer for bringing up this question.
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Acknowledgements
Thanks to the participants of the 2019 Dimensions of Rationality Conference at Goethe University, the 2019 Ohio State/Maribor/Rijeka Conference in Moral Epistemology, and the students in my Fall 2019 Ethics Seminar at McGill University for their very helpful feedback and discussion of the ideas in this paper. Special thanks to Bob Beddor, Daniel Fogal, Chris Howard, Zoë Johnson King, Alex King, Daniel Wodak, and Alex Worsnip for comments on earlier drafts. This research was supported in part by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.
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Leary, S. Epistemic reasons for action: a puzzle for pragmatists. Synthese 200, 248 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-022-03686-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-022-03686-y