Epistemic repugnance four ways
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Epistemic repugnance four ways Brian Talbot1 Received: 8 April 2020 / Accepted: 14 October 2020 © Springer Nature B.V. 2020
Abstract Value-based epistemology sees epistemic norms as explained by or grounded in distinctively epistemic values. This paper argues that, no matter what epistemic value is, credences or beliefs about some topics have at most infinitesimal amounts of this value. This makes it hard to explain why epistemic norms apply at all to credences or beliefs on these topics. My argument is inspired by a recent series of papers on epistemic versions of Parfit’s Repugnant Conclusion. The discussion in those papers parallels work in ethics, because it focuses on an epistemic value—accuracy—that shares features with ethical values like well-being. I argue that, because of this focus, this discussion is inconclusive and only relevant to accounts of epistemic value that share those features. My argument is more general and more conclusive. It uses four types of problem cases that have no parallel in ethics. It applies to all extant accounts of the value of individual beliefs or credences and all extant accounts of the value of total doxastic states. Keywords Epistemology · Epistemic utility · Epistemic value · Accuracy · Epistemic consequentialism
1 Introduction Many philosophers take a value-based approach to epistemology, claiming that there are distinctively epistemic values which explain or ground norms on belief. For example, one popular form of epistemic consequentialism explains epistemic norms by showing how conformity with them leads to more accurate beliefs or credences, which are claimed to be epistemically valuable (see e.g. Joyce 1998; Pettigrew 2016). This paper is for philosophers attracted to value-based epistemology. I argue that, if individual beliefs or credences are bearers of epistemic value, then credences or beliefs about some topics either have no, or at most infinitesimal, positive value. If we explain
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Brian Talbot [email protected] University of Colorado, Boulder, USA
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or ground epistemic norms by appeal to epistemic value, then epistemic norms may have nothing to say about credences or beliefs on these topics. My argument starts with a problem discussed in a recent series of papers by Jennifer Carr (2015), Richard Pettigrew (2018), and myself (Talbot 2019). These papers discuss one particular type of consequentialist epistemology—accuracy-first epistemology—whose details I’ll explain later. These papers show that accuracy-first epistemology faces a problem much like one faced by ethical consequentialism: the Repugnant Conclusion. The Repugnant Conclusion in ethics is the conclusion that a world with a sufficiently vast number of people, each of whose life just barely has positive value, would be better than a world with a smaller, but still large, number of people with amazing lives (Parfit 1984). In epistemology, the Repugnant Conclusion is that an overall credal state with a sufficiently vast number of credences, each of which just barely has positive
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