The place of non-epistemic matters in epistemology: norms and regulation in various communities
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The place of non-epistemic matters in epistemology: norms and regulation in various communities David Henderson1 Received: 15 February 2019 / Accepted: 23 October 2020 © Springer Nature B.V. 2020
Abstract This paper brings together two lines of thought. The first is the broadly contextualist idea that what is takes to satisfy central epistemic concepts such as the concept of knowledge or that of objectively justified belief may vary with the stakes faced in settings or contexts. Attributions of knowledge, for example, certify an agent to those who might treat them as a source on which to rely. Henderson and Horgan write of gate-keeping for an epistemic community. The second line of thought turns on the idea that such central epistemic concepts are keyed to the conformity with epistemic norms for the fitting fixation of belief—and that the epistemic norms function in important ways as social norms by which folk regulate their epistemic lives as members of communities of interdependent agents. The two lines of thought are practically made for one another! I develop the connections and show how the results both vindicate and reinforce a form of contextualist epistemology, but refine and limit the range of contextual variation one should envision. Keywords Epistemology · Norms · Epistemic norms · Contextualism · Invariantism · Social epistemology
1 Introduction A range of recent epistemological accounts have suggested that non-epistemic matters may condition what it takes to satisfy central epistemic concepts such as the concept of knowledge or that of objectively justified belief. It is said that such matters may be “pragmatically encroached,” so that what it takes for an agent to know or have objec-
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David Henderson [email protected] Department of Philosophy, University of Nebraska, Lincoln, 315 Louise Pound Hall, PO. Box 880321, Lincoln, NE 68588-0321, USA
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tively justified belief may depend on the practical as well as epistemic stakes that that agent faces (Fantl and McGrath 2002, 2009a, b; McGrath 2015; Hawthorne 2004). Other accounts have suggested that these matters may turn on standards determined by the attributor’s context—and notably the practical and epistemic stakes faced by the attributor or the attributor’s interlocutors (DeRose 1992, 2005). I have advanced an account on which attributor are understood as “keeping epistemic gate” for a contextually salient group or community—in effect attributions of knowledge certify one as having come by their belief in a fashion that renders them qualified to contribute their belief on this matter to the contextually relevant community’s stock of beliefs (Henderson 2009, 2011; Henderson and Horgan 2015). On this account, the controlling standards for what it takes to be warranted in believing, may depend on aspects of the contextually salient community. When the contextually salient community is engaged with a specific practical endeavor, its attendant informational needs may be conditioned by non-epistemic stakes (thus by non-epistemic matter
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