How Doxastic Justification Helps Us Solve the Puzzle of Misleading Higher‐Order Evidence

Silva, Paul

doi:10.1111/papq.12173

Cited by 17 publications

(14 citation statements)

References 43 publications

(55 reference statements)

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“…8 This leaves us in an uncomfortable position: it seems like whatever attitude agents adopt upon receiving misleading higher-order evidence, their attitude won't be doxastically justified. This is precisely the conclusion reached by Silva (2017): He argues that our agents find themselves in a dilemma, in the sense that there is no attitude they can adopt that is doxastically justified. Van Wietmarschen (2013), Palmira (2019) and Titelbaum (2019) also notice this apparent dead end.…”

Section: Two Types Of Justification and The Dynamics Of Deliberationmentioning

confidence: 71%

Transitional attitudes and the unmooring view of higher‐order evidence

Staffel

2021

Nous

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This paper proposes a novel answer to the question of what attitude agents should adopt when they receive misleading higher-order evidence that avoids the drawbacks of existing views. The answer builds on the independently motivated observation that there is a difference between attitudes that agents form as conclusions of their reasoning, called terminal attitudes, and attitudes that are formed in a transitional manner in the process of reasoning, called transitional attitudes. Terminal and transitional attitudes differ both in their descriptive and in their normative properties. When an agent receives higher-order evidence that they might have reasoned incorrectly to a belief or credence towards p, then their attitude towards p is no longer justified as a terminal attitude towards p, but it can still be justified as a transitional attitude. This view, which I call the unmooring view, allows us to capture the rational impact of misleading higher-order evidence in a way that integrates smoothly with a natural picture of epistemic justification and the dynamics of deliberation.

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Section: Two Types Of Justification and The Dynamics Of Deliberationmentioning

confidence: 71%

Transitional attitudes and the unmooring view of higher‐order evidence

Staffel

2021

Nous

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“…Rather, after she learns about the pill and thereby acquires a dispossessing defeater, believing the original conclusion is both ex ante and ex post impermissible for Jane. In this way, my account of self‐doubt cases does not involve introducing conflicts between ex ante and ex post permissibility, or between propositional and doxastic justification, as happens in proposals like Wietmarschen's (), Smithies's () or Silva's (). According to these views, due to the presence of the misleading higher‐order evidence the agent is not in a position to stick to the original first‐order attitude justifiedly (i.e.…”

Section: Solving the Puzzle Of Misleading Self‐doubtmentioning

confidence: 93%

“…So, Reasons Responsiveness may be about an attitude that the agent never gets to adopt. If we understand justification in terms of permission, the idea is that Reasons Responsiveness, as presented here, deals with propositional, rather than doxastic, justification (for discussion of the relevance of this distinction in the present context, see Wietmarschen 2013;Smithies 2015;Silva 2017).…”

Section: Misleading Self-doubt Reasons Responsiveness and Coherencementioning

confidence: 99%

Dispossessing Defeat

Salas

2019

Philos Phenomenol Research

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Higher-order evidence can make an agent doubt the reliability of her reasoning. When this happens, it seems rational for the agent to adopt a cautious attitude towards her original conclusion, even in cases where the higher-order evidence is misleading and the agent's original reasons were actually perfectly good. One may think that recoiling to a cautious attitude in the face of misleading self-doubt involves a failure to properly respond to one's reasons. My aim is to show that this is not so. My proposal is that (misleading) higher-order evidence can undermine the agent's possession of her first-order reasons, constituting what I call a dispossessing defeater. After acquiring the higher-order evidence, the agent is no longer in a position to rely competently on the relevant first-order considerations as reasons for her original conclusion, so that such reasons stop being available to her (even if they remain as strong as in the absence of the higher-order evidence). In this way, an agent with misleading higher-order evidence can adopt a cautious stance towards her original conclusion, while properly responding to the set of reasons that she possesses-a set that is reduced due to the acquisition of higher-order dispossessing defeaters. Reasons Responsiveness (Permission): It is permissible for S to φ if and only if, on balance, S's possessed normative reasons sufficiently support φ-ing.

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“…See Dorst (forthcoming b),Dorst, Fitelson, and Husic (forthcoming), and Williamson (forthcoming) for discussion of level-connecting principles.19 This idea was inspired by DiPaolo (2018) andSilva (2017). They do not endorse DE-CONFIRMATION, but we thought this work might help fend off one kind of objection.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Defeaters as Indicators of Ignorance

Dutant¹,

Littlejohn²

2021

Reasons, Justification, and Defeat

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In this paper, we propose a new theory of rationality defeat. We propose that defeaters are indicators of ignorance, evidence that we’re not in a position to know some target proposition. When the evidence that we’re not in a position to know is sufficiently strong and the probability that we can know is too low, it is not rational to believe. We think that this account retains all the virtues of the more familiar approaches that characterize defeat in terms of its connection to reasons to believe or to confirmation but provides a better approach to higher-order defeat. We also think that a strength of this proposal is that it can be embedded into a larger normative framework. On our account the no-defeater condition is redundant. We can extract our theory of defeat from our theory of what makes it rational to believe—it is rational to believe when it is sufficiently probable that our belief would be knowledge. Thus, our view can provide a monistic account of defeat, one that gives a unifying explanation of the toxicity of different defeaters that is grounded in a framework that either recognizes knowledge as the norm of belief or identifies knowledge as the fundamental epistemic good that full belief can realize.

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How Doxastic Justification Helps Us Solve the Puzzle of Misleading Higher‐Order Evidence

Cited by 17 publications

References 43 publications

Transitional attitudes and the unmooring view of higher‐order evidence

Transitional attitudes and the unmooring view of higher‐order evidence

Dispossessing Defeat

Defeaters as Indicators of Ignorance

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