This paper proposes a novel answer to the question of what attitude agents should adopt when they receive misleading higher-order evidence that avoids the drawbacks of existing views. The answer builds on the independently motivated observation that there is a difference between attitudes that agents form as conclusions of their reasoning, called terminal attitudes, and attitudes that are formed in a transitional manner in the process of reasoning, called transitional attitudes. Terminal and transitional attitudes differ both in their descriptive and (...) in their normative properties. When an agent receives higher-order evidence that they might have reasoned incorrectly to a belief or credence towards p, then their attitude towards p is no longer justified as a terminal attitude towards p, but it can still be justified as a transitional attitude. This view, which I call the unmooring view, allows us to capture the rational impact of misleading higher-order evidence in a way that integrates smoothly with a natural picture of epistemic justification and the dynamics of deliberation. (shrink)

We call attention to certain cases of epistemic akrasia, arguing that they support belief-credence dualism. Belief-credence dualism is the view that belief and credence are irreducible, equally fundamental attitudes. Consider the case of an agent who believes p, has low credence in p, and thus believes that they shouldn’t believe p. We argue that dualists, as opposed to belief-firsters (who say credence reduces to belief) and credence-firsters (who say belief reduces to credence) can best explain features of akratic cases, including (...) the observation that akratic beliefs seem to be held despite possessing a defeater for those beliefs, and that, in akratic cases, one can simultaneously believe and have low confidence in the very same proposition. (shrink)

ABSTRACT In this paper I argue that there are possible cases in which the demands of justice and the norms of epistemology cannot be simultaneously satisfied. I will bring out these normative clashes in terms of the now-familiar phenomenon of testimonial injustice (Fricker 2007). While the resulting argument is very much in the spirit of two other sorts of argument that have received sustained attention recently – arguments alleging epistemic partiality in friendship, and arguments that motivate the hypothesis of moral (...) encroachment on the epistemic – I suggest how the argument from epistemic injustice differs from, and is stronger than, both of those arguments. The implications of the present argument are several: we must (i) reconceive the role of identity-prejudice in testimonial injustice, (ii) modify the way we think about how justice and epistemology bear on testimonial transactions, and (iii) understand the mutuality of speech exchanges in ways that do not privilege any particular participant’s epistemic perspective. (shrink)

While the epistemic significance of disagreement has been a popular topic in epistemology for at least a decade, little attention has been paid to logical disagreement. This monograph is meant as a remedy. The text starts with an extensive literature review of the epistemology of (peer) disagreement and sets the stage for an epistemological study of logical disagreement. The guiding thread for the rest of the work is then three distinct readings of the ambiguous term ‘logical disagreement’. Chapters 1 and (...) 2 focus on the Ad Hoc Reading according to which logical disagreements occur when two subjects take incompatible doxastic attitudes toward a specific proposition in or about logic. Chapter 2 presents a new counterexample to the widely discussed Uniqueness Thesis. Chapters 3 and 4 focus on the Theory Choice Reading of ‘logical disagreement’. According to this interpretation, logical disagreements occur at the level of entire logical theories rather than individual entailment-claims. Chapter 4 concerns a key question from the philosophy of logic, viz., how we have epistemic justification for claims about logical consequence. In Chapters 5 and 6 we turn to the Akrasia Reading. On this reading, logical disagreements occur when there is a mismatch between the deductive strength of one’s background logic and the logical theory one prefers (officially). Chapter 6 introduces logical akrasia by analogy to epistemic akrasia and presents a novel dilemma. Chapter 7 revisits the epistemology of peer disagreement and argues that the epistemic significance of central principles from the literature are at best deflated in the context of logical disagreement. The chapter also develops a simple formal model of deep disagreement in Default Logic, relating this to our general discussion of logical disagreement. The monograph ends in an epilogue with some reflections on the potential epistemic significance of convergence in logical theorizing. (shrink)

This article examines the central epistemological issues tied to the recognition of disagreement.