Pointless epistemic norms

Synthese 205 (2):1-17 (2025)
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Abstract

You ought to believe in accordance with available evidence. This evidential norm, as widely recognized, can be implausibly demanding by requiring you to hold pointless beliefs. In this paper, I first consider some seemingly promising versions of the positive evidential requirement to form beliefs in accordance with your evidence and argue that they either fail to avoid the problem of pointlessness or fail to bind you independently of practical requirements. I then show that even the negative requirement not to believe against your evidence falls prey to the same problem: either it enjoins pointlessness or its binding force depends essentially on practical norms. This is puzzling, as our epistemic practice seems to presuppose evidential standards that are independent of practical rationality. I suggest that the alleged evidential “norms” are evaluative ‘ought’-statements about what it would be epistemically ideal for you to do, which, on their own, do not issue any genuine prescriptions or demands. (*published with open access)

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Wooram Lee
Seoul National University

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References found in this work

Epistemology and cognition.Alvin I. Goldman - 1986 - Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Accuracy and the Laws of Credence.Richard Pettigrew - 2016 - New York, NY.: Oxford University Press UK.
The Normativity of Rationality.Benjamin Kiesewetter - 2017 - Oxford: Oxford University Press.
The Epistemic and the Zetetic.Jane Friedman - 2020 - Philosophical Review 129 (4):501-536.

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