Akratic (epistemic) modesty
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Akratic (epistemic) modesty David Christensen1
Accepted: 1 September 2020 Ó Springer Nature B.V. 2020
Abstract Theories of epistemic rationality that take disagreement (or other higher-order evidence) seriously tend to be ‘‘modest’’ in a certain sense: they say that there are circumstances in which it is rational to doubt their correctness. Modest views have been criticized on the grounds that they undermine themselves—they’re self-defeating. The standard Self-Defeat Objections depend on principles forbidding epistemically akratic beliefs; but there are good reasons to doubt these principles—even New Rational Reflection, which was designed to allow for certain special cases that are intuitively akratic. On the other hand, if we construct a Self-Defeat Objection without relying on antiakratic principles, modest principles turn out not to undermine themselves. In the end, modesty should not be seen as a defect in a theory of rational belief. Keywords Epistemic rationality Akrasia Higher-order evidence Disagreement Self-defeat Conciliationism
1 Introduction Epistemologists are fond of formulating, and defending, principles characterizing rational belief.1 The principles are supposed to be general, covering beliefs on all sorts of topics—including, of course, beliefs about what principles characterize rational belief. This reflexive aspect of epistemic theorizing has led to some 1
The notion of rationality I’m interested in here is a distinctively epistemic one. If there are principles governing which beliefs it’s pragmatically rational to have (or, perhaps more plausibly, to try to get oneself to have), they are a separate matter. On the notion under discussion, it may be rational for a father
& David Christensen [email protected] 1
Brown University, Providence, RI, USA
123
D. Christensen
perplexity lately, in discussions of epistemic principles which entail that agents in some circumstances are rationally required to doubt the correctness of those very principles. Let’s call such principles ‘modest’.2 Much of the perplexity has arisen in the literature on disagreement, in discussions of Conciliatory views about rational belief. On these views, the disagreement of apparent epistemic peers can dramatically lower the credence it’s rational to have on the controversial topic. Critics have objected to Conciliationism along roughly the following lines: Given the controversy over Conciliationism among qualified epistemologists, adherents of the view cannot believe their own view—they must have strong doubts that believing Conciliatorily is rational. So if they continue to abide by Conciliationism, they’ll be believing in a way they strongly suspect to be irrational: they’ll be epistemically akratic. Since this cannot be a rational way of believing, Conciliationism must be defective. Let’s call this the ‘Self-Defeat Objection’.3 Defenders of modest principles have pointed out that this sort of self-defeat applies way beyond Conciliationist views of disagreement. It applies to almost all current
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