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Summary

The motto of pragmatic encroachment is "the practical encroaches on the epistemic".  This pragmatic approach is exemplified by those who argue that there are practical conditions on knowing.  However, proponents of pragmatic encroachment differ in terms of their explanations of how the pragmatic encroaches on knowledge.  For example, it has been proposed that there are practical conditions on believing, on evidence and evidential support, and most prominently, on having knowledge-level justification.  Arguments for this pragmatic view of knowledge have primarily been grounded in the ordinary use of ‘knows’ as well as the epistemic norms governing action and deliberation.  These pragmatic views have been used to address issues related to skepticism, knowledge closure principles, and the value of knowledge.

Key works The recent discussion of pragmatic encroachment began with Fantl & McGrath 2002 and were then followed by extended discussions in Hawthorne 2004Stanley 2005, DeRose 2009, Fantl & McGrath 2009, and Weatherson 2012.  Arguments for and against pragmatic accounts of knowledge that focus on knowledge ascriptions are found in Derose 2004, DeRose 2005, Schaffer 2006Pinillos 2011Sripada & Stanley 2012, Buckwalter & Schaffer 2015, and Kim 2016.  Arguments for and against the pragmatic account that focus on the epistemic norms of action are found in Hawthorne & Stanley 2008Brown 2008Reed 2010Fantl & McGrath 2012Brown 2011, and Brown 2013.  Discussions of practical conditions on believing are found in Weatherson 2005, Armendt 2010, and Ross & Schroeder 2014.  Historical predecessors to the contemporary discussion are found in the debate about the ethics of belief (James 1997Clifford 1999) and the value-ladenness of science (Rudner 1953, Levi 1960).
Introductions Fantl & McGrath 2009, Kim 2017
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  1. Pragmatic Arguments in the Qur'an for Belief.M. Shahid Alam - manuscript
  2. Practical Reasons for Pragmatism.Paul Forrester - manuscript
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  3. The Ethics of Belief (from a Philosophical Perspective).Jonathan Ichikawa - manuscript
    This chapter surveys a few of the central questions about philosophical perspectives on the ethics of belief, focusing especially on (1) questions about whether doxastic involuntarism is consistent with the normative approach to epistemology characteristic of any ethics of belief; (2) the status and interpretation of William Clifford's famous injunction against belief on "insufficient" evidence, and broader questions about the role of negative versus positive doxastic norms; (3) whether norms governing belief are distinctively epistemic norms, or are instead moral or (...)
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  4. (1 other version)Knowledge: A Human Interest Story.Brian Weatherson - manuscript
    Over the years I’ve written many papers defending an idiosyncratic version of interest-relative epistemology. This book collects and updates the views I’ve expressed over those papers. -/- Interest-relative epistemologies all start in roughly the same way. A big part of what makes knowledge important is that it rationalises action. But for almost anything we purportedly know, there is some action that it wouldn’t rationalise. I know what I had for breakfast, but I wouldn’t take a bet at billion to one (...)
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  5. Do Your Homework! A Rights-Based Zetetic Account of Alleged Cases of Doxastic Wronging.J. Spencer Atkins - forthcoming - Ethical Theory and Moral Practice:1-28.
    This paper offers an alternate explanation of cases from the doxastic wronging literature. These cases violate what I call the degree of inquiry right—a novel account of zetetic obligations to inquire when interests are at stake. The degree of inquiry right is a moral right against other epistemic agents to inquire to a certain threshold when a belief undermines one’s interests. Thus, the agents are sometimes obligated to leave inquiry open. I argue that we have relevant interests in reputation, relationships, (...)
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  6. There is no such thing as doxastic wrongdoing.David Enoch & Levi Spectre - forthcoming - Philosophical Perspectives.
    People are often offended by beliefs, expect apologies for beliefs, apologize for their own beliefs. In many mundane cases, people are morally criticized for their beliefs. Intuitively, then, beliefs seem to sometimes wrong people. Recently, the philosophical literature has picked up on this theme, and has started to discuss it under the heading of doxastic wrongdoing. In this paper we argue that despite the strength of such initial intuitions, at the end of the day they have to be rejected. If (...)
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  7. Varieties of Pragmatic Encroachment.Jie Gao - forthcoming - In Kurt Sylvan, Ernest Sosa, Jonathan Dancy & Matthias Steup (eds.), The Blackwell Companion to Epistemology, 3rd edition. Wiley Blackwell.
    According to pragmatic encroachment, whether an epistemic attitude towards p has some positive epistemic status (e.g., whether a belief is epistemically rational or justified, or it amounts to knowledge) partially depends on practical factors such as the costs of being wrong or the practical goals of the agent. Pragmatic encroachment comes in many varieties. This survey article provides an overview of different kinds of pragmatic encroachment. It focuses on three dimensions under which kinds of pragmatic encroachment differ: the type of (...)
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  8. Credal sensitivism: threshold vs. credence-one.Jie Gao - forthcoming - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy.
    According to an increasingly popular view in epistemology and philosophy of mind, beliefs are sensitive to contextual factors such as practical factors and salient error possibilities. A prominent version of this view, called credal sensitivism, holds that the context-sensitivity of belief is due to the context-sensitivity of degrees of belief or credence. Credal sensitivism comes in two variants: while credence-one sensitivism (COS) holds that maximal confidence (credence one) is necessary for belief, threshold credal sensitivism (TCS) holds that belief consists in (...)
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  9. (1 other version)Small Stakes Give You the Blues: The Skeptical Costs of Pragmatic Encroachment.Clayton Littlejohn - forthcoming - Manuscrito: Revista Internacional de Filosofía.
    According to the fallibilist, it is possible for us to know things when our evidence doesn't entail that our beliefs are correct. Even if there is some chance that we're mistaken about p, we might still know that p is true. Fallibilists will tell you that an important virtue of their view is that infallibilism leads to skepticism. In this paper, we'll see that fallibilist impurism has considerable skeptical consequences of its own. We've missed this because we've focused our attention (...)
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  10. Subject sensitive invariantism and epistemic contextualism.Ahmad Reza Hemmati Moghaddam - forthcoming - Philosophical Investigations.
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  11. A Permissivist Alternative to Encroachment.Z. Quanbeck & Alex Worsnip - forthcoming - Philosophers' Imprint.
    As a slew of recent work in epistemology has brought out, there is a range of cases where there's a strong temptation to say that prudential and (especially) moral considerations affect what we ought to believe. There are two distinct models of how this can happen. On the first, “reasons pragmatist” model, the relevant prudential and moral considerations constitute distinctively practical reasons for (or against) belief. On the second, “pragmatic encroachment” model, the relevant prudential and moral considerations affect what one (...)
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  12. The Epistemology of Attention.Catharine Saint-Croix - forthcoming - In Kurt Sylvan, Ernest Sosa, Jonathan Dancy & Matthias Steup (eds.), The Blackwell Companion to Epistemology, 3rd edition. Wiley Blackwell.
    Root, branch, and blossom, attention is intertwined with epistemology. It is essential to our capacity to learn and decisive of the evidence we obtain, it influences the intellectual connections we forge and those we remember, and it is the cognitive tool whereby we enact decisions about inquiry. Moreover, because it is both an epistemic practice and a site of agency, attention is a natural locus for questions about epistemic morality. This article surveys the emerging epistemology of attention, reviewing the existing (...)
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  13. Instrumentalism, Moral Encroachment, and Epistemic Injustice.Asbjørn Steglich-Petersen - forthcoming - Philosophical Topics.
    According to the thesis of pragmatic encroachment, practical circumstances can affect whether someone is in a position to know or rationally believe a proposition. For example, whether it is epistemically rational for a person to believe that the bank will be open on Saturdays, can depend not only on the strength of the person’s evidence, but also on how practically important it is for the person not to be wrong about the bank being open on Saturdays. In recent years, philosophers (...)
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  14. Presuppositional Epistemic Contextualism and Non-ideal Contexts.William Tuckwell - forthcoming - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy.
    Conversational contextualists claim that the truth-conditions of knowledge claims depend upon the dynamics of the conversation in which the knowledge claim is made. However, they have failed to appreciate the ways in which conversational dynamics are influenced by unjust distributions of power. What would the implications be for conversational contextualism if its proponents were not guilty of this oversight? I ask this question for Blome-Tillmann’s presuppositional epistemic contextualism (PEC), perhaps the most sophisticated form of conversational contextualism. The investigation turns up (...)
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  15. Beyond Evidence in Epistemology: Introduction.Marie Van Loon, Anne Meylan & Sebastian Schmidt - forthcoming - Philosophical Topics.
    This special issue arises from the observation that an exploration of the role of non-evidential considerations in epistemology through a broader lens is missing from the current landscape of philosophical research. The present collection of contributions fills this research gap by bringing together three central and much-discussed epistemological topics for which non-evidential considerations become relevant.
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  16. Knowledge and Action: What Depends on What?Itamar Weinshtock Saadon - forthcoming - Oxford Studies in Epistemology.
    Some philosophers think that knowledge or justification is both necessary and sufficient for rational action: they endorse knowledge-action or justification-action biconditionals. This paper offers a novel, metaphysical challenge to these biconditionals, which proceeds with a familiar question: What depends on what? If you know that p iff it is rational for you to act on p, do you know that p partly because it is rational for you to act on p, or is it rational for you to act on (...)
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  17. Are Folks Purists or Pragmatic Encroachers? New Discoveries of Relation between Knowledge and Action from Experimental Philosophy.Su Wu - forthcoming - Episteme:1-29.
    The relation between knowledge and action has been a lengthy debate in philosophy which traces back to Descartes and Locke. Purism holds that the practical factors related to action are fundamentally independent of the standard of knowledge, while pragmatic encroachment argues that practical considerations about action can impact judgments about knowledge. This traditional debate was put front and center recently by discussions on some knowledge attribution cases and relevant empirical studies. This paper reports three empirical studies based on three pairs (...)
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  18. Morality Does Not Encroach.Zachary Goodsell & John Hawthorne - 2025 - In Juan Comesaña & Matthew McGrath (eds.), Knowledge and rationality: essays in honor of Stewart Cohen. Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge.
    Moral encroachment is the thesis that morality has an effect---unrecognized by traditional epistemology---on which doxastic states are epistemically appropriate. The thesis is increasingly popular among those who, in opposition to Gendler (2011), desire harmony between epistemic and moral demands on belief. This paper has three main goals. First, drawing on attractive structural principles concerning belief and justification, it is shown that a thoroughgoing harmony between moral and epistemic demands is implausible. This weakens the motivation for positing moral encroachment, but a (...)
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  19. Morality Does Not Encroach.Zachary Goodsell & John Hawthorne - 2025 - In Juan Comesaña & Matthew McGrath (eds.), Knowledge and rationality: essays in honor of Stewart Cohen. Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge.
    Moral encroachment is the thesis that morality has an effect---unrecognized by traditional epistemology---on which doxastic states are epistemically appropriate. The thesis is increasingly popular among those who, in opposition to Gendler (2011), desire harmony between epistemic and moral demands on belief. This paper has three main goals. First, drawing on attractive structural principles concerning belief and justification, it is shown that a thoroughgoing harmony between moral and epistemic demands is implausible. This weakens the motivation for positing moral encroachment, but a (...)
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  20. Suspensive Wronging.Chris Ranalli - 2025 - In Verena Wagner & Zinke Alexandra (eds.), Suspension in epistemology and beyond. New York, NY: Routledge.
    According to the thesis of doxastic wronging, we can wrong people in virtue of having certain beliefs about them. In this chapter, I motivate and defend a similar view, the thesis of suspensive wronging, that we can wrong people in virtue of bearing an indecision attitude towards certain questions that bear on certain people. I explore the extent to which the thesis of suspensive wronging fits with certain prominent conceptions of suspension of judgment, including the sui generis attitude, higher-order, and (...)
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  21. Doxastic Voluntarism.Mark Boespflug & Elizabeth Jackson - 2024 - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
    Doxastic voluntarism is the thesis that our beliefs are subject to voluntary control. While there’s some controversy as to what “voluntary control” amounts to (see 1.2), it’s often understood as direct control: the ability to bring about a state of affairs “just like that,” without having to do anything else. Most of us have direct control over, for instance, bringing to mind an image of a pine tree. Can one, in like fashion, voluntarily bring it about that one believes a (...)
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  22. Pragmatism, truth, and cognitive agency.Cameron Boult - 2024 - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 67 (6):1811-1824.
    The main objection to pragmatism about knowledge is that it entails that truth-irrelevant factors can make a difference to knowledge. Blake Roeber [2018. “Anti-Intellectualism.” Mind: A Quarterly Review of Philosophy 127: 437–466] has recently argued that this objection fails. I agree with Roeber. But in this paper, I present another way of thinking about the dispute between purists and pragmatists about knowledge. I do so by formulating a new objection to pragmatism about knowledge. This is that pragmatism about knowledge entails (...)
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  23. How to lose your memory without losing your money: shifty epistemology and Dutch strategies.Darren Bradley - 2024 - Synthese 203 (4):1-15.
    An objection to shifty epistemologies such as subject-sensitive invariantism is that it predicts that agents are susceptible to guaranteed losses. Bob Beddor (Analysis, 81, 193–198, 2021) argues that these guaranteed losses are not a symptom of irrationality, on the grounds that forgetful agents are susceptible to guaranteed losses without being irrational. I agree that forgetful agents are susceptible to guaranteed losses without being irrational– but when we investigate why, the analogy with shifty epistemology breaks down. I argue that agents with (...)
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  24. Moral Encroachment and Positive Profiling.Lisa Cassell - 2024 - Erkenntnis 89 (5):1759-1779.
    Some claim that moral factors affect the epistemic status of our beliefs. Call this _the moral encroachment thesis_. It’s been argued that the moral encroachment thesis can explain at least part of the wrongness of racial profiling. The thesis predicts that the high moral stakes in cases of racial profiling make it more difficult for these racist beliefs to be justified or to constitute knowledge. This paper considers a class of racial generalizations that seem to do just the opposite of (...)
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  25. Reasons and belief.Daniel Fogal - 2024 - Philosophical Issues 34 (1):323-348.
    Much recent work in epistemology has concerned the relationship between the epistemic and the practical, with a particular focus on the question of how, if at all, practical considerations affect what we ought to believe. Two main positive accounts have been proposed: reasons pragmatism and pragmatic encroachment. According to reasons pragmatism, practical (including moral) considerations can affect what we ought to believe by constituting distinctively practical (i.e., non‐epistemic) reasons for or against belief. According to pragmatic encroachment, practical considerations bear on (...)
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  26. Belief, Knowledge and Practical Matters.Jie Gao - 2024 - Hangzhou: Zhejiang University Press.
    This book takes purism about knowledge as the default position and defends it from the challenges of pragmatic encroachment. The book is divided into two parts, a negative and a positive one. The negative part critically examines existing purist strategies in response to pragmatic encroachment. The positive part provides a new theory of how practical factors can systematically influence our confidence and explores some implications of such influence.
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  27. Bank Cases, Stakes and Normative Facts.Ángel Pinillos - 2024 - In Shaun Nichols & Joshua Knobe (eds.), Oxford Studies in Experimental Philosophy, Volume 5. Oxford University Press.
  28. Kierkegaard on the Relationship Between Practical and Epistemic Reasons for Belief.Z. Quanbeck - 2024 - Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 105 (2):233-266.
    On the dominant contemporary accounts of how practical considerations affect what we ought to believe, practical considerations either encroach on epistemic rationality by affecting whether a belief is epistemically justified, or constitute distinctively practical reasons for belief which can only affect what we ought to believe by conflicting with epistemic rationality. This paper argues that Søren Kierkegaard offers a promising alternative view on which practical considerations can affect what we ought to believe without either encroaching on or (necessarily) conflicting with (...)
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  29. Can Beliefs Be Unethical? W. K. Clifford’s The Ethics of Belief.Mark Satta - 2024 - The Philosophy Teaching Library.
    Often, when we think about living an ethical life, we think about which of our actions are ethical or unethical. Philosopher and mathematician W. K. Clifford thought that ethics was about more than just actions. He also thought that ethical living required aligning one’s beliefs with one’s evidence. Specifically, he argued that it was always wrong to believe something based on insufficient evidence. This article provides an overview of the first section of Clifford’s essay “The Ethics of Belief,” in which (...)
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  30. An instrumentalist explanation of pragmatic encroachment.Asbjørn Steglich-Petersen - 2024 - Analytic Philosophy 65 (3):374-392.
    Many have found it plausible that practical circumstances can affect whether someone is in a position to know or rationally believe a proposition. For example, whether it is rational for a person to believe that the bank will be open tomorrow can depend not only on the person's evidence but also on how practically important it is for the person not to be wrong about the bank being open tomorrow. This supposed phenomenon is known as “pragmatic encroachment” on knowledge and (...)
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  31. Lambert on Moral Certainty and the Justification of Induction.Aaron Wells - 2024 - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 2024.
    I reconstruct J. H. Lambert’s views on how practical grounds relate to epistemic features, such as certainty. I argue, first, that Lambert’s account of moral certainty does not involve any distinctively practical influence on theoretical belief. However, it does present an interesting form of fallibilism about justification as well as a denial of a tight link between knowledge and action. Second, I argue that for Lambert, the persistence principle that underwrites induction is supported by practical reasons to believe; this indicates (...)
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  32. Knowledge-Action Principles and Threshold-Impurism.Ru Ye - 2024 - Erkenntnis 89 (6):2215-2232.
    Impurism says that practical factors encroach on knowledge. An important version of impurism is called ‘Threshold-Impurism,’ which says that practical factors encroach on the threshold that rational credence must pass in order for one to have knowledge. A prominent kind of argument for Threshold-Impurism is the so-called ‘principle-based argument,’ which relies on a principle of fallibilism and a knowledge-action principle. This paper offers a new challenge against Threshold-Impurism. I attempt to show that the two principles Threshold-Impurists are committed to—KJ and (...)
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  33. Knowledge and Asymmetric Loss.Alexander Dinges - 2023 - Review of Philosophy and Psychology 14 (3):1055-1076.
    This paper offers a novel account of practical factor effects on knowledge attributions that is consistent with the denial of contextualism, relativism and pragmatic encroachemt. The account goes as follows. Knowledge depends on factors like safety, reliability or probability. In many cases, it is uncertain just how safe, how reliably formed or how probable the target proposition is. This means that we have to estimate these quantities in order to form knowledge judgements. Such estimates of uncertain quantities are independently known (...)
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  34. Should credence be sensitive to practical factors? A cost–benefit analysis.Jie Gao - 2023 - Mind and Language 38 (5):1238-1257.
    According to evidentialist views, credence in a proposition p should be proportional to the degree of evidential support that one has in favor of p. However, empirical evidence suggests that our credences are systematically sensitive to practical factors. In this article, I provide a cost–benefit analysis of credences' practical sensitivity. The upshot of this analysis is that credences sensitive to practical factors fare better than practically insensitive ones along several dimensions. All things considered, our credences should be sensitive to practical (...)
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  35. The structure of moral encroachment.Jaakko Hirvelä - 2023 - Philosophical Studies 180 (5-6):1793-1812.
    According to moral encroachment facts about epistemic justification can vary with moral factors that are unrelated to the truth of the belief. Most of the literature on this topic has focused on how beliefs can wrong, and whether the data that moral encroachers offer in support of their view can be explained within a purist framework. A largely neglected question has been what kind of consequences moral encroachment would have for epistemic justification if the thesis were true. Here I remedy (...)
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  36. Pragmatic infallibilism.Brian Kim - 2023 - Asian Journal of Philosophy 2 (2):1-22.
    Infallibilism leads to skepticism, and fallibilism is plagued by the threshold problem. Within this narrative, the pragmatic turn in epistemology has been marketed as a way for fallibilists to address the threshold problem. In contrast, pragmatic versions of infallibilism have been left unexplored. However, I propose that going pragmatic offers the infallibilist a way to address its main problem, the skeptical problem. Pragmatic infallibilism, however, is committed to a shifty view of epistemic certainty, where the strength of a subject’s epistemic (...)
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  37. Pode uma crença imoral ser epistemicamente racional?Gustavo Oliva de Oliveira - 2023 - Revista Opinião Filosófica 14 (2):1-15.
    Among the many ways to evaluate the rationality and adequacy of belief, the relationship between two dimensions is of particular interest: the epistemic dimension and the moral dimension. A belief is epistemically rationalwhen it is supported by the evidence and it is morally adequatewhen its formation and holding is sensitive to moral features of the situation. According to the traditional view, known as purism, the moral domain does not directly impact the epistemic domain. However, there is debate in the literature (...)
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  38. Belief, blame, and inquiry: a defense of doxastic wronging.Z. Quanbeck - 2023 - Philosophical Studies 180 (10-11):2955-2975.
    According to the thesis of doxastic wronging, our beliefs can non-derivatively wrong others. A recent criticism of this view claims that proponents of the doxastic wronging thesis have no principled grounds for denying that credences can likewise non-derivatively wrong, so they must countenance pervasive conflicts between morality and epistemic rationality. This paper defends the thesis of doxastic wronging from this objection by arguing that belief bears distinctive relationships to inquiry and blame that can explain why beliefs, but not credences, can (...)
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  39. On the Epistemic Costs of Friendship: Against the Encroachment View.Catherine Rioux - 2023 - Episteme 20 (2):247-264.
    I defend the thesis that friendship can constitutively require epistemic irrationality against a recent, forceful challenge, raised by proponents of moral and pragmatic encroachment. Defenders of the “encroachment strategy” argue that exemplary friends who are especially slow to believe that their friends have acted wrongly are simply sensitive to the high prudential or moral costs of falsely believing in their friends’ guilt. Drawing on psychological work on epistemic motivation (and in particular on the notion of “need for closure”), I propose (...)
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  40. Reasons, attenuators, and virtue: A novel account of pragmatic encroachment.Eva Schmidt - 2023 - Analytic Philosophy:1-22.
    In this paper, I explicate pragmatic encroachment by appealing to pragmatic considerations attenuating, or weakening, epistemic reasons to believe. I call this the ‘Attenuators View’. I will show that this proposal is better than spelling out pragmatic encroachment in terms of reasons against believing – what I call the ‘Reasons View’. While both views do equally well when it comes to providing a plausible mechanism of how pragmatic encroachment works, the Attenuators View does a better job distinguishing practical and epistemic (...)
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  41. Merely statistical evidence: when and why it justifies belief.Paul Silva - 2023 - Philosophical Studies 180 (9):2639-2664.
    It is one thing to hold that merely statistical evidence is _sometimes_ insufficient for rational belief, as in typical lottery and profiling cases. It is another thing to hold that merely statistical evidence is _always_ insufficient for rational belief. Indeed, there are cases where statistical evidence plainly does justify belief. This project develops a dispositional account of the normativity of statistical evidence, where the dispositions that ground justifying statistical evidence are connected to the goals (= proper function) of objects. There (...)
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  42. Understanding as Usability and Context-Sensitivity to Interests.Andreas Søndergaard - 2023 - Philosophia 51 (5):2603-2623.
    Is understanding subject to a factivity constraint? That is, must the agent’s representation of some subject matter be accurate in order for her to understand that subject matter? ‘No’, I argue in this paper. As an alternative, I formulate a novel manipulationist account of understanding. Rather than correctly representing, understanding, on this account, is a matter of being able to manipulate a representation of the world to satisfy contextually salient interests. This account of understanding is preferable to factivism, I argue, (...)
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  43. A "purist" feminist epistemology?Emily Tilton - 2023 - Dissertation, University of British Columbia
    An intuitive conception of objectivity involves an ideal of neutrality—if we’re to engage in objective inquiry, we must try to sideline our prejudices, values, and politics, lest these factors taint inquiry and unduly influence our results. This intuition underlies various “purist” epistemological frameworks, which grant epistemic significance only to “epistemic factors” like evidence or the truth of a belief. Feminist epistemologists typically condemn purist frameworks as inimical to feminist aims. They argue that purist epistemology is divorced from the ineliminably social (...)
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  44. Moral Encroachment, Symmetry, and Believing Against the Evidence.Caroline von Klemperer - 2023 - Philosophical Studies (7).
    It is widely held that our beliefs can be epistemically faultless despite being morally flawed. Theories of moral encroachment challenge this, holding that moral considerations bear on the epistemic status of our attitudes. According to attitude-based theories of moral encroachment, morality encroaches upon the epistemic standing of our attitudes on the grounds that we can morally injure others with our epistemic practices. In this paper, I aim to show that current attitude-based theories have asymmetric mechanisms: moral features only make it (...)
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  45. A Defense of Impurist Permissivism.Jenny Yi-Chen Wu - 2023 - Episteme:1-21.
    One famous debate in contemporary epistemology considers whether there is always one unique, epistemically rational way to respond to a given body of evidence. Generally speaking, answering “yes” to this question makes one a proponent of the Uniqueness thesis, while those who answer “no” are called “permissivists”. Another influential recent debate concerns whether non-truth-related factors can be the basis of epistemic justification, knowledge, or rational belief. Traditional theories answer “no”, and are therefore considered “purists”. However, more recently many theorists have (...)
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  46. A Remark on the Bank Cases.Wolfgang Barz - 2022 - Acta Analytica 37 (4):519-529.
    Since their formulation by Keith DeRose (1992), the so-called bank cases have played a major role in the discussion about whether knowledge depends on practical factors. According to the proponents of pragmatic encroachment, the proper conclusion to be drawn from the bank cases and similar examples is that knowledge of a proposition _p_ does not supervene on one’s evidence for or against _p_. In my view, this conclusion is ill-founded. The reason is that the bank cases and similar examples suffer (...)
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  47. Encroachment on Emotion.James Fritz - 2022 - Episteme 19 (4):515-533.
    This paper introduces a novel form of pragmatic encroachment: one that makes a difference to the status of emotion rather than the status of belief. I begin by isolating a distinctive standard in terms of which we can evaluate emotion – one sometimes called “subjective fittingness,” “epistemic justification,” or “warrant.” I then show how this standard for emotion could face a kind of pragmatic encroachment importantly similar to the more familiar encroachment on epistemic standards for belief. Encroachment on warranted emotion (...)
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  48. Knowledge and the Many Norms on Action.James Fritz - 2022 - Erkenntnis 87 (3):1191-1210.
    If there is pragmatic encroachment in epistemology, whether a person knows that p can vary with normative facts about her actions—including facts that do not bear on the truth or likelihood of p. This paper raises an underappreciated question for defenders of pragmatic encroachment: which of the many norms on action are distinctively connected to knowledge? To the extent that contemporary defenders of pragmatic encroachment address this question, they do so by citing norms of ‘practical rationality.’ I show that this (...)
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  49. Attunement: On the Cognitive Virtues of Attention.Georgi Gardiner - 2022 - In Mark Alfano, Jeroen De Ridder & Colin Klein (eds.), Social Virtue Epistemology. Routledge.
    I motivate three claims: Firstly, attentional traits can be cognitive virtues and vices. Secondly, groups and collectives can possess attentional virtues and vices. Thirdly, attention has epistemic, moral, social, and political importance. An epistemology of attention is needed to better understand our social-epistemic landscape, including media, social media, search engines, political polarisation, and the aims of protest. I apply attentional normativity to undermine recent arguments for moral encroachment and to illuminate a distinctive epistemic value of occupying particular social positions. A (...)
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  50. Shadowboxing with Social Justice Warriors. A Review of Endre Begby’s Prejudice: A Study in Non-Ideal Epistemology.Alex Madva - 2022 - Philosophical Psychology.
    Endre Begby’s Prejudice: A Study in Non-Ideal Epistemology engages a wide range of issues of enduring interest to epistemologists, applied ethicists, and anyone concerned with how knowledge and justice intersect. Topics include stereotypes and generics, evidence and epistemic justification, epistemic injustice, ethical-epistemic dilemmas, moral encroachment, and the relations between blame and accountability. Begby applies his views about these topics to an equally wide range of pressing social questions, such as conspiracy theories, misinformation, algorithmic bias, discrimination, and criminal justice. Through it (...)
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