scholarly journals Normative Reasons without (Good) Reasoning

Ethics ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 130 (2) ◽  
pp. 208-210
Author(s):  
Artūrs Logins
Author(s):  
J.D. Trout

In early epistemology, philosophers set standards on how to reason and on what counts as knowledge. These normative standards still form a core of work in contemporary epistemology, but much objectively excellent reasoning still doesn’t meet these epistemological standards, and sometimes these standards lead reasoning astray. Improving decisions about health and happiness may require developing even better reasoning strategies than are now available through contemporary epistemology. One naturalistic theory of good reasoning—Strategic Reliabilism—holds that excellent reasoning efficiently allocates cognitive resources to robustly reliable reasoning strategies, all applied to significant problems. This contrasts with the traditional normative theories in epistemology that drew their inspiration from intuitions.


Author(s):  
Clayton Littlejohn

On a standard way of thinking about the relationships between evidence, reasons, and epistemic justification, a subject’s evidence consists of her potential reasons for her beliefs, these reasons constitute the normative reasons that bear on whether to believe, and justification is taken to result from relations between a subject’s potential reasons for her beliefs and those beliefs. This chapter argues that this view makes a number of mistakes about the rational roles of reasons and evidence and explores some parallels between practical and theoretical reasons. Just as justified action is unobjectionable action, justified belief is unobjectionable belief. Just as you cannot object to someone deciding to do something simply on the grounds that their reasons for acting didn’t give them strong reason to act, you cannot object to someone believing something simply on the grounds that they didn’t believe for reasons that gave their beliefs strong evidential support.


Author(s):  
Tim Henning

It is suggested that parentheticalism obviates the need to think of rationality as a distinct normative category, different from the category of support by normative reasons. So-called structural requirements are discussed as a potential obstacle to this proposal. It is shown that a parentheticalist account of the antecedents of rationality conditionals can explain away the impression that there are structural requirements of rationality. This account also solves the bootstrapping problem without introducing wide-scope oughts or the like. A notion of pseudo-detachment is introduced to describe the inferential behavior of the relevant conditionals. It is also explained how parentheticalism can capture the elusive idea of taking the subject’s point of view.


Erkenntnis ◽  
2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sebastian Schmidt

AbstractThe normative force of evidence can seem puzzling. It seems that having conclusive evidence for a proposition does not, by itself, make it true that one ought to believe the proposition. But spelling out the condition that evidence must meet in order to provide us with genuine normative reasons for belief seems to lead us into a dilemma: the condition either fails to explain the normative significance of epistemic reasons or it renders the content of epistemic norms practical. The first aim of this paper is to spell out this challenge for the normativity of evidence. I argue that the challenge rests on a plausible assumption about the conceptual connection between normative reasons and blameworthiness. The second aim of the paper is to show how we can meet the challenge by spelling out a concept of epistemic blameworthiness. Drawing on recent accounts of doxastic responsibility and epistemic blame, I suggest that the normativity of evidence is revealed in our practice of suspending epistemic trust in response to impaired epistemic relationships. Recognizing suspension of trust as a form of epistemic blame allows us to make sense of a purely epistemic kind of normativity the existence of which has recently been called into doubt by certain versions of pragmatism and instrumentalism.


2021 ◽  
pp. 146144482110240
Author(s):  
Alexander JAM van Deursen ◽  
Jan AGM van Dijk

Cognitive intelligence is rarely discussed in the context of digital inequality for practical and normative reasons: substantial difficulties around measurements and the fact that it cannot (easily) be changed. In the current contribution, cognitive intelligence is studied in relation to resources and appropriation theory which explains digital inequality as a process of four successive phases of Internet access: motivational, material, skills, and usage. For the measurement of cognitive intelligence, we build on considerable efforts devoted to developing alternatives to cumbersome intelligence quotient (IQ) tests of intelligence. We conducted a two-wave online survey in the Netherlands, resulting in a sample of 1733 respondents. The importance of IQ was confirmed with direct positive effects on education, economic, social, and cultural resources, and on Internet attitude and skills. The results reveal several details that can enhance our understanding of the specific mechanisms through which IQ and education operate in digital inequalities.


Noûs ◽  
2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniel Fogal ◽  
Olle Risberg
Keyword(s):  

Philosophia ◽  
2008 ◽  
Vol 37 (2) ◽  
pp. 227-243 ◽  
Author(s):  
Toni Rønnow-Rasmussen
Keyword(s):  

Author(s):  
John Brunero

This chapter assesses analyses of normative reasons that appeal to the concepts of evidence or explanation along with some other normative concept. One influential analysis holds that some fact is a reason for an agent to ϕ if and only if that fact is evidence she ought to ϕ. I argue that, despite the many advantages of this proposal, there are cases of facts which are reasons to ϕ but aren’t evidence one ought to ϕ, and cases of facts which are evidence one ought to ϕ but aren’t reasons to ϕ. Others have analyzed reasons in terms of explanations: perhaps a reason for an agent to ϕ is a fact which explains why she ought to ϕ, or a fact which figures in a “weighing explanation,” or a fact which explains why her ϕ-ing would be good in some respect. There are difficulties facing all three of these proposals.


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