For many epistemologists, and for many philosophers more broadly, it is axiomatic that rationality requires you to take the doxastic attitudes that your evidence supports. Yet there is also another current in our talk about rationality. On this usage, rationality is a matter of the right kind of coherence between one's mental attitudes. Surprisingly little work in epistemology is explicitly devoted to answering the question of how these two currents of talk are related. But many implicitly assume that evidence-responsiveness guarantees coherence, so that the rational impermissibility of incoherence will just fall out of the putative requirement to take the attitudes that one's evidence supports, and so that coherence requirements do not need to be theorized in their own right, apart from evidential reasons. In this paper, I argue that this is a mistake, since coherence and evidenceresponsiveness can in fact come into conflict. More specifically, I argue that in cases of misleading higher-order evidence, there can be a conflict between believing what one's evidence supports and satisfying a requirement that I call "inter-level coherence". This illustrates why coherence requirements and evidential reasons must be separated and theorized separately.
In discussions of whether and how pragmatic considerations can make a difference to what one ought to believe, two sets of cases feature. The first set, which dominates the debate about pragmatic reasons for belief, is exemplified by cases of being financially bribed to believe (or withhold from believing) something. The second set, which | 533 WORSNIP 2 | PRAGMATIC ENCROACHMENT, AND REASONS VS. THRESHOLD PRAGMATISMAs I mentioned, moderate pragmatism tends to be the favored view of advocates of the "pragmatic encroachment" thesis. According to this thesis, pragmatic considerations make a difference to what one ought to believe tout court via making a difference to what one epistemically ought to believe, or is justified in believing. 5 As a matter of logic, there's nothing inconsistent about combining pragmatic encroachment with what I'm calling hard pragmatism. But pragmatic encroachers face strong pressure to be moderate pragmatists. For it seems wild to suggest that in a case like Bribe, my offer of money to you to withhold belief makes a difference to what you're epistemically justified in believing. Thus, pragmatic encroachers incur the explanatory burden of explaining how to keep their pragmatism moderate. 6 It may seem initially puzzling how pragmatic considerations could make a difference to what one epistemically ought to believe, as pragmatic encroachers hold. If pragmatic considerations are reasons for or against belief, the character of those reasons does not seem to be epistemic in any good sense. A natural and popular answer to this challenge is to hold that pragmatic considerations do not make a difference to what one ought to believe by constituting reasons for or against belief at all (as they would on a view that we can reasons pragmatism), but rather by serving as what we might call "threshold-shifting considerations" (let's call this latter view threshold pragmatism). In particular, pragmatic considerations determine how much evidence is required for (epistemically) justified belief. 7 They thus play a different role to evidential considerations, which serve as reasons. I like to think of this using an illustration that I'll call the "beaker of reasons":5 My formulation of pragmatic encroachment makes it a view about justified belief, whereas many of its advocates (especially its early advocates) make it a view about knowledge (Hawthorne, 2004; Stanley, 2005). I find the view about justified belief more instructive for my purposes here, where I want to compare moderate pragmatism with hard pragmatism, where neither of those views are about knowledge. Most advocates of pragmatic encroachment on knowledge also embrace pragmatic encroachment on justified belief (see, e.g., Fantl & McGrath, 2002, 2009 Schroeder, 2012a: 268). Moss (2018) constitutes an exception to this, at least when it comes to credences. 6 One can imagine a view that accepts pragmatic encroachment in cases like Risks, as well as accepting pragmatism (but not pragmatic encroachment) in cases like Bribe. This would square pra...
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Philosophers have recently been increasingly attentive to “coherence requirements,” with heated debates about both the content of such requirements and their “normativity” (i.e., whether there is necessarily reason to obey them). Yet there is little work on the metanormative status of coherence requirements. Metaphysically: what is it for two or more mental states to be jointly incoherent, such that they are banned by a coherence requirement? In virtue of what are some putative requirements genuine and others not? Epistemologically: how are we to know which requirements are genuine and which are not? This chapter offers an account that tries to answer these questions. On this account, the incoherence of a set of attitudes is a matter of its being constitutive of the attitudes in question that any agent who holds these attitudes jointly is disposed, when conditions of full transparency are met, to give at least one of them up.
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