Performance normativity and here-and-now doxastic agency
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Performance normativity and here-and-now doxastic agency Matthew Chrisman1
Received: 20 February 2017 / Accepted: 18 November 2017 © The Author(s) 2017. This article is an open access publication
Abstract Sosa famously argues that epistemic normativity is a species of “performance normativity,” comparing beliefs to archery shots. However, philosophers have traditionally conceived of beliefs as states, which means that they are not dynamic or telic like performances. A natural response to this tension is to argue that belief formation rather than belief itself is the proper target of epistemic normativity. This response is rejected here on grounds of the way it obscures the “here and now” exercise of cognitive agency that I view as central to any account of epistemic normativity and doxastic agency. Although the etiology of a belief can be relevant to its normative status, often so much more is relevant and more centrally so. This generates a dilemma for anyone following Sosa in pursuing the idea that epistemic normativity is a species of performance normativity. Keywords Epistemology · Performance normativity · Ethics of belief · Sosa
1 Introduction Genuine norms, many philosophers assume, are prescriptive in that they tell us primarily what we ought to do. Of course, some ‘ought’s tell us how things ought to be, but it is widely assumed that these ‘ought’s must connect somehow to what someone ought to do, in order to have genuine normative force. In epistemology we are interested in norms of belief. Indeed, if norms of action are the primary concern of ethics, then maybe norms of belief should be the primary concern of epistemology. But believing
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Matthew Chrisman [email protected] School of Philosophy, Psychology and Language Sciences, University of Edinburgh, Dugald Stewart Building, 3 Charles Street, Edinburgh EH8 9AD, Scotland, UK
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Synthese
is not a special kind of acting, so thinking of normative epistemology as the “ethics of belief” is problematic. Belief is a paradigmatic mental state; believing that p is a way of being, not something one counts as actively doing. So there is a tension at the heart of normative epistemology between the idea that norms are primarily prescriptive and the idea that epistemology should be primarily concerned with norms of belief. There are several ways to resolve this tension. We could reject the first thought leading to it, arguing that not all norms are prescriptive, not even indirectly or implicitly so.1 Or we could reject the second thought leading to the tension, arguing that believing is indeed a kind of doing rather than being. Less revisionary than both of these options, however, would be to argue that norms of belief are prescriptive but only indirectly or implicitly so. In saying that someone ought to believe that p, perhaps we are implicitly committing to norms governing something like the performance of forming a belief. That is something which is both active and whose normative status is clearly relevant to epistemology. There is something a
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