Varieties of cognitive achievement

One of the deepest ideological divides in contemporary epistemology concerns the relative importance of belief versus credence. A prominent consideration in favor of credence-based epistemology is the ease with which it appears to account for rational action. In contrast, cases with risky payoff structures threaten to break the link between rational belief and rational action. This threat poses a challenge to traditional epistemology, which maintains the theoretical prominence of belief. The core problem, we suggest, is that belief may not be enough to register all aspects of a subject's epistemic position with respect to any given proposition. We claim this problem can be solved by introducing other doxastic attitudes-genuine representations-that differ in strength from belief. The resulting alternative picture, a kind of doxastic states pluralism, retains the central features of traditional epistemology-most saliently, an emphasis on truth as a kind of objective accuracy-while adequately accounting for rational action.

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“…47 Cf. Carter et al (2015). Note also this seems contrary to the way in which James originally developed this point.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 85%

Belief without credence

2016

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“…See Carter (forthcoming) for a recent discussion of varieties of guessing, from educated guessing to blind guessing. 28 A more comprehensive account of this proposal is offered in and Carter, Jarvis, and Rubin (2015). 29 There is of course also a "subjective" sense in which a subject matter ϕ could be epistemically dangerous; for instance, ϕ might be dangerous for S1 but not for S2 and because of a difference in S1 and S2's ϕ abilities.…”

Section: Acknowledgementsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…A more comprehensive account of this proposal is offered in Carter et al () and Carter, Jarvis, and Rubin ().…”

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confidence: 99%

On behalf of controversial view agnosticism

Carter

2018

European J of Philosophy

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Controversial view agnosticism (CVA) is the thesis that we are rationally obligated to withhold judgment about a large portion of our beliefs in controversial subject areas, such as philosophy, religion, morality, and politics. Given that one's social identity is in no small part of a function of one's positive commitments in controversial areas, CVA has unsurprisingly been regarded as objectionably "spineless." That said, CVA seems like an unavoidable consequence of a prominent view in the epistemology of disagreement-conformism-according to which the rational response to discovering that someone you identify as an epistemic peer or expert about p disagrees with you vis-à-vis p is to withhold judgment. This paper proposes a novel way to maintain the core conciliatory insight without devolving into an agnosticism that is objectionably spineless. The approach offered takes as a starting point the observation that-for reasons that will be made clear -the contemporary debate has bypassed the issue of the reasonableness of maintaining, rather than giving up, representational states weaker than belief in controversial areas. The new position developed and defended here explores this overlooked space; what results is a kind of controversial view agnosticism that is compatible with the kinds of commitments that are integral to social identity. | INTRODUCTIONSuppose you believe that Marilyn Monroe was born before Queen Elizabeth II, and-as you just now find out-I believe that Queen Elizabeth II was born before Marilyn Monroe; prior to our disagreement, we each reckoned the other to be equally likely to be right on this matter-namely, we each took the other to be epistemic peers 1 on matters of 20th century celebrity birthdates. 2 A popular position in recent social epistemology insists that, in situations like the one just described, rationality requires that both parties should "move to the centre." Call here, following Lackey (2008), positions that embrace this general insight about the epistemic significance of peer disagreement conformist views and the general position embraced conformism. In a bit more detail:This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs License, which permits use and distribution in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, the use is non-commercial and no modifications or adaptations are made. ? These issues continue to be explored, 10 though in what follows I will be taking a different tack. I will argue that controversial view agnosticism-or at least, a version of it-is true, but that facts about expert (rather than peer) disagreement ultimately provide the most compelling kind of support for the position. I will then proceed to show how the version of controversial view agnosticism I think we should accept is not as objectionable as we would initially be let to think. In order to get the argument up and running, it is important to first look more closely at some of the assumptions lurking in the background of ...

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“…Whereas, in baseball, such a method need only be 30% reliable to qualify as a competence, an archery competence may require a more reliable method, though not an infallible method. For discussion seeCarter et al (2015) andCarter (2019).…”

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confidence: 99%

On behalf of a bi-level account of trust

Carter

2019

Philos Stud

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A bi-level account of trust is developed and defended, one with relevance in ethics as well as epistemology. The proposed account of trust-on which trusting is modelled within a virtue-theoretic framework as a performance-type with an aim-distinguishes between two distinct levels of trust, apt and convictive, that take us beyond previous assessments of its nature, value, and relationship to risk assessment. While Sosa (A virtue epistemology: apt belief and reflective knowledge, volume I, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2009; Judgment and agency, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2015; Epistemology, University Press, Princeton, 2017), in particular, has shown how a performance normativity model may be fruitfully applied to belief, my objective is to apply this kind of model in a novel and principled way to trust. I conclude by outlining some of the key advantages of the performance-theoretic bi-level account of trust defended over more traditional univocal proposals.

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Varieties of cognitive achievement

Cited by 30 publications

References 50 publications

Belief without credence

Belief without credence

On behalf of controversial view agnosticism

On behalf of a bi-level account of trust

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