The Conflict of Evidence and Coherence

Abstract

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.

Bottom Up Justification, Asymmetric Epistemic Push, and the Fragility of Higher Order Justification

“…2 My discussion concerns the details of Integration. According to Top Down, justified higher order beliefs affect the justification or rational credence of 2 For further views on akratic conflicts, see see (Titelbaum 2013;Christensen 2013;Worsnip 2015) 5 first order belief. But according to Bottom Up, first order success may directly affect the level of justification of certain higher order belief.…”

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

“…Many epistemologists have regarded it as a platitude of epistemic rationality that it requires one's doxastic attitude towards a proposition – henceforth ‘D(p)’ – to track one's total evidence . Here's Worsnip's (forthcoming) way of capturing this thought: Evidential Requirement (ER) If S's total evidence supports D(p), then rationality requires of S that she takes D(p) …”

“…But defenses of (ILC) often appeal to the intuitive incoherence of thinkers actually taking akratic combinations of attitudes . For example, contrasting practical akrasia with the kind of epistemic akrasia involved in violating (ILC), Worsnip (forthcoming, section III) says that:

… the state of believing that one's evidence does not support believing p, but nevertheless believing p, is harder to make sense of, at least from a first‐personal perspective. It amounts to saying ‘I have nothing that gives any adequate indication to me that p is the case; nevertheless, p is the case’... First‐personally, these states do not seem capable of withstanding serious reflection .

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“…‘D(p)’ is taken to range only over the coarse‐grained attitudes of belief, disbelief, and suspension. As Worsnip (forthcoming) points out, this way of setting things up allows us to avoid unnecessary and distracting technicalities in the assessment of the core philosophical problems to follow. See section I of his paper for further caveats and cautionary notes.…”

“…See section I of his paper for further caveats and cautionary notes. Additionally, it should be noted that while many have introduced the puzzle I'm about to discuss in various ways, it has been elegantly presented by Worsnip (forthcoming). My introduction of the puzzle is greatly indebted to his work.…”