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While epistemologists routinely employ disbelief talk, it is not clear that they really mean it, given that they often equate disbelieving p with believing ¬p. I argue that this is a mistake-disbelief is a doxastic attitude of rejection and is distinct from belief (and withholding). I first clarify this claim and its opposition, then show that we must distinguish disbelieving p from believing ¬p in order to account for the fact that we continue to hold doxastic attitudes toward propositions that we reject. After defending this argument against some possible objections, I examine several cases that reveal disbelieving p to be not only non-identical to believing ¬p, but independent of that attitude as well. Finally, I sketch some immediate and potential consequences of recognizing disbelief as a distinct doxastic attitude, particularly for work on epistemic rationality.
While epistemologists routinely employ disbelief talk, it is not clear that they really mean it, given that they often equate disbelieving p with believing ¬p. I argue that this is a mistake-disbelief is a doxastic attitude of rejection and is distinct from belief (and withholding). I first clarify this claim and its opposition, then show that we must distinguish disbelieving p from believing ¬p in order to account for the fact that we continue to hold doxastic attitudes toward propositions that we reject. After defending this argument against some possible objections, I examine several cases that reveal disbelieving p to be not only non-identical to believing ¬p, but independent of that attitude as well. Finally, I sketch some immediate and potential consequences of recognizing disbelief as a distinct doxastic attitude, particularly for work on epistemic rationality.
In 'Reversibility or Disagreement' (this journal), we posed a dilemma for invariantists about epistemic expressions-that is, for those who claim that expressions such as 'might' and 'probably' make a contextinvariant contribution to the truth conditions of the utterances to which they belong. The crux of our dilemma is simple: invariantists, we argued, cannot make sense of a phenomenon that we dubbed reversibility without sacrificing the claims about disagreement to which they appeal in arguing for their position over the contextualist alternative. In 'Disagreement and Attiudinal Relativism' (this journal), Jack Spencer claims to have 'found a path between the horns of Ross and Schroeder's dilemma' (p. 33). He argues that by adopting a position that he calls 'attitudinal relativism,' the invariantist can account for reversibility 'and for the disagreements that go missing under contextualism' (p. 4). He writes:Ross and Schroeder claim to 'cast doubt on the putative data about disagreement' that is often used to motivate invariantism. In my view, however, no doubt has been cast. The Argument from Lost Disagreement withstands the scrutiny to which Ross and Schroeder subject it (p. 33).In this reply, we will argue that Spencer's attempt to avoid the two horns of our dilemma is unsuccessful.To this aim, we will begin with a review of the dilemma that Spencer aims to resolve. We will then explain how attitudinal relativism is meant to resolve it. And we will conclude by showing that this solution fails.
The past decade has seen a protracted debate over the semantics of epistemic modals. According to contextualists, epistemic modals quantify over the possibilities compatible with some contextually determined group's information. Relativists often object that contextualism fails to do justice to the way we assess utterances containing epistemic modals for truth or falsity. However, recent empirical work seems to cast doubt on the relativist's claim, suggesting that ordinary speakers' judgments about epistemic modals are more closely in line with contextualism than relativism (Knobe & Yalcin 2014;Khoo 2015). This paper furthers the debate by reporting new empirical research revealing a previously overlooked dimension of speakers' truth-value judgments concerning epistemic modals. Our results show that these judgments vary systematically with the question under discussion in the conversational context in which the utterance is being assessed. We argue that this 'QUD effect' is difficult to explain if contextualism is true, but is readily explained by a suitably flexible form of relativism.
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