Knowledge norms of belief and belief formation: When the time is ripe to actualize one's epistemic potential

Ratio ◽  
2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Frank Hofmann
2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hakwan Lau

I introduce an empirically-grounded version of a higher-order theory of conscious perception. Traditionally, theories of consciousness either focus on the global availability of conscious information, or take conscious phenomenology as a brute fact due to some biological or basic representational properties. Here I argue instead that the key to characterizing the consciousness lies in its connections to belief formation and epistemic justification on a subjective level.


2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alex Dontoh ◽  
Joshua Ronen ◽  
Bharat Sarath

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Pascal Kieren ◽  
Jan Müller-Dethard ◽  
Martin Weber

Author(s):  
Timothy Williamson

This chapter develops and refines the analogy between knowledge and action in Knowledge and its Limits. The general schema is: knowledge is to belief as action is to intention. The analogy reverses direction of fit between mind and world. The knowledge/belief side corresponds to the inputs to practical reasoning, the action/intention side to its outputs. Since desires are inputs to practical reasoning, the desire-as-belief thesis is considered sympathetically. When all goes well with practical reasoning, one acts on what one knows. Belief plays the same local role as knowledge, and intention as action, in practical reasoning. This is the appropriate setting to understand knowledge norms for belief and practical reasoning. Marginalizing knowledge in epistemology is as perverse as marginalizing action in the philosophy of action. Opponents of knowledge-first epistemology are challenged to produce an equally systematic and plausible account of the relation between the cognitive and the practical.


Author(s):  
Sanford C. Goldberg

Chapter 3 deals with the first issue one faces in the task of articulating the explicit epistemic criteria for belief: the problem of the criterion. It is tempting to suppose that a belief can be normatively proper from the epistemic point of view only if the believer can certify for herself the reliability of every belief-forming process on which she relied. But insisting on this quickly leads to the threat of an infinite regress. This chapter defends a foundationalist response to this problem, according to which we enjoy a default (albeit defeasible) permission to rely on certain cognitive processes in belief-formation. These are processes that satisfy what the author calls the Reliabilist Rationale. Importantly, our permissions here are social: any one of us is permitted to rely on any token process that satisfies this rationale, whether the token process resides in one’s own mind/brain or that of another epistemic subject.


Author(s):  
Mikkel Gerken

Chapter 6 concerns the normative relationship between action and knowledge ascriptions. Arguments are provided against a Knowledge Norm of Action (KNAC) and in favor of the Warrant-Action norm (WA). According to WA, S must be adequately warranted in believing that p relative to her deliberative context to meet the epistemic requirements for acting on p. WA is developed by specifying the deliberative context and by arguing that its explanatory power exceeds that of knowledge norms. A general conclusion is that the knowledge norm is an important example of a folk epistemological principle that does not pass muster as an epistemological principle. More generally, Chapter 6 introduces the debates about epistemic normativity and develops a specific epistemic norm of action.


Author(s):  
Jonathan Jenkins Ichikawa

This chapter defends a connection between knowledge and practical reasoning, according to which one’s reasons for action constitute all and only that which one knows. A variety of intuitive objections to such principles are considered and rejected—a central theme is that objectors to knowledge norms often make tacit but substantive ethical assumptions about which reasons, if held, would justify which actions. Absent broader ethical theorizing, the proposed counterexamples are inconclusive. The chapter sketches possible approaches to such theories, and indicates reason for optimism about knowledge norms. It also considers the degree to which knowledge norms imply externalism about rational action, suggesting that many internalist intuitions and verdicts may be accommodated and explained by knowledge norms.


2021 ◽  
Vol 0 (0) ◽  
Author(s):  
James David Campbell

Abstract In this paper I model a decision maker who forms beliefs and opinions using a dialectic heuristic that depends on their degree of skepticism or credulity. In an application to political spin, two competing parties choose how to frame commonly observed evidence. If the receiver is sufficiently credulous, equilibrium spin is maximally extreme and generates short, superficial news cycles. When receivers vary in their skepticism, there is partisan sorting by skepticism parameter: the more credulous group systematically favors one party and displays hostility to evidence and a media they see as biased. In behavioral applications in which the frames arise from the decision maker’s internal deliberation, a decision maker with the same credulous nature would display known behavioral anomalies in forming beliefs and forming decision weights from stated probabilities. The dialectic model therefore captures a simple psychological mechanism and matches closely some stylized facts across these three disparate applications.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document