RESEARCH

Veritists maintain that true belief and only true belief is of fundamental epistemic value. They very often go on to derive epistemic norms based on considerations about what promotes this value. A standard objection is that many truths are insignificant: there is no value in believing them. In response, veritists often distinguish between significant and insignificant truths, holding that the former are much more valuable (perhaps even incomparably more valuable) than the latter. But critics cry foul: veritists who say this give up on their claim that it is true belief per se that is of fundamental epistemic value. In this paper I evaluate this dispute by comparing it to the well known dispute over J.S. Mill’s doctrine of higher and lower pleasures. I conclude that the veritist can escape the objection, but that the escape route breeds a new, and different problem.

Sometimes we are interested in how groups are doing epistemically in aggregate. For instance, we may want to know the epistemic impact of a change in school curriculum or the epistemic impact of abolishing peer review in the sciences. Being able to say something about how groups are doing epistemically is especially important if one is interested in pursuing a consequentialist approach to social epistemology of the sort championed by Alvin Goldman (1999). According to this approach we evaluate social practices and institutions from an epistemic perspective based on how well they promote the aggregate level of epistemic value across a community. The aim of this paper is to investigate this concept of group epistemic value and defend a particular way of measuring it. 

A review of Jennifer Lackey's  book The Epistemology of Groups, Oxford University Press, 2021, 200pp., $70.00 (hbk), ISBN: 9780199656608.

Critics have recently argued that reliabilists face trade-off problems, forcing them to condone intuitively unjustified beliefs when they generate lots of true belief further downstream. What these critics overlook is that reliabilism entails that there are side-constraints on belief-formation, on account of which there are some things you should not believe, even if doing so would have very good epistemic consequences. However, we argue that by embracing side-constraints the reliabilist faces a dilemma: she can either hold on to reliabilism, and with it aforementioned side-constraints, but then needs to explain why we should allow the pursuit of justification to get in the way of the acquisition of true belief; or she can deny that there are side-constraints – and in effect give up on reliabilism. We'll suggest that anyone moved by the considerations that likely attract people to reliabilism in the first place – the idea the true belief is good, and as such should be promoted – should go for the second horn, and instead pursue a form of epistemic utilitarianism. (Co-authored with Kristoffer Ahlstrom-Vij)

Many countenance the idea that certain groups can have beliefs. If groups can have beliefs, the question of whether such beliefs are justified immediately arises. Alvin Goldman (2014) has considered what a reliability-based account of justified group belief might look like. In this paper I consider his account and find it wanting, and so propose a modified reliability-based account of justified group belief. Jennifer Lackey (2016) has also criticized Goldman’s proposal, but for very different reasons than I do. Some of her objections, however, can be lodged against the modified account that I propose here. I also respond to these objections. Finally, I note how some formal and experimental work is relevant to those who are attracted to the kind of reliability-based account of justified group belief I develop here.

Fallis & Lewis (2016) have recently argued against many popular scoring rules (such as the Brier score) as genuine measures of accuracy for degrees of belief. I respond to this argument, in part by noting that it fails to account for verisimilitude–that certain false hypotheses might be closer to the truth than other false hypotheses. Along the way I address Oddie’s (forthcoming) recent arguments that no proper score can account for verisimilitude.

Epistemic consequentialism maintains that epistemic norms are genuine norms in virtue of the way in which they are conducive to epistemic value, whatever epistemic value may be. So, for example, the epistemic consequentialist might say that it is a norm that beliefs should be consistent, in that holding consistent beliefs is the best way to achieve the epistemic value of accuracy. Thus epistemic consequentialism is structurally similar to the family of consequentialist views in ethics. This volume presents new work on this topic in both formal and traditional epistemology, by authors that are sympathetic to the view and those who are critical of it. Contributors include: Kristoffer Ahlstrom-Vij, Amanda Askell, Michael Caie, Julia Driver, Jeffrey Dunn, Sophie Horowitz, James Joyce, Hilary Kornblith, Clayton Littlejohn, Christopher Meacham, Alejandro Pérez Carballo, Richard Pettigrew, Nancy Snow, and Ralph Wedgwood.

I argue that if we adopt a version of epistemic consequentialism then there are realistic cases of epistemic free-riding. These are cases where each member of a group pursuing the goal of individual accuracy leads the group to overall be less accurate.

Consequentialists in ethics famously face certain sorts of seemingly objectionable trade-offs (e.g., killing one healthy patient to save five who will otherwise die). Some have alleged that epistemic consequentialists face similar sorts of objectionable trade-offs. Some of these same people have alleged that reliabilism about justification is a form of epistemic consequentialism. Hence, reliabilists face objectionable trade-offs. We argue that this conclusion is too quick and indeed equivocates on ‘consequentialism’. (With Kristoffer Ahlstrom-Vij.)

Consequentialism is the view that, in some sense, rightness is to be understood in terms conducive to goodness. Much of the philosophical discussion concerning consequentialism has focused on moral rightness. But there is plausibly also epistemic rightness. Epistemic rightness is often denoted with talk of justification, rationality, or by merely indicating what should be believed. The epistemic consequentialist claims, roughly, that these kinds of facts about epistemic rightness depend solely on facts about the goodness of the consequences. In slogan form, such a view holds that the epistemic good is prior to the epistemic right. This peer-reviewed encyclopedia entry surveys consequentialist approaches in epistemology.

We often evaluate belief-forming processes, agents, or entire belief states for reliability. This is normally done with the assumption that beliefs are all-or-nothing. How does such evaluation go when we’re considering beliefs that come in degrees? I argue that a natural answer to this question is incorrect, and propose in its place an alternative answer that is based on the notion of calibration.

Epistemic consequentialists maintain that the epistemically right (e.g. the justified) is to be understood in terms of conduciveness to the epistemic good (e.g. true belief). In a recent paper, Selim Berker has provided arguments that allegedly lead to a ‘rejection’ of epistemic consequentialism. In the present paper we show that reliabilism—the most prominent form of epistemic consequentialism, and one of Berker’s main targets—survives Berker’s arguments unscathed. (With Kristoffer Ahlstrom-Vij.)

Can a proposition that you infer be evidence for you? Williamson’s E=K thesis says that it can. However, I show that the standard Bayesian framework is inconsistent with such inferential evidence. Since Williamson adopts this framework, this reveals an inconsistency in his view. I conclude by considering the wider ramifications of this inconsistency and note two ways one might respond.

Consider the multi-user virtual worlds of online games such as EVE and World of Warcraft, or the multi-user virtual world of Second Life. Suppose a player performs an action in one of these worlds, via his or her virtual character, which would be wrong, if the virtual world were real. What is the moral status of this virtual action? In this paper I consider this question.

In “What Is Justified Belief?” Alvin Goldman proposed a simple form of reliabilism about justification. In Epistemology and Cognition, Goldman offered a more complicated version of reliabilism, which he has endorsed as superior to the simple version. In this paper I clarify both versions of reliabilism, and argue that the simpler model is preferable.

When and under what conditions is a proposition P evidence for some agent A? Nicholas Silins has recently argued that any answer must be a version of Evidential Internalism: necessarily, if A and B are internal twins, then A and B have the same evidence. I argue against this and draw some conclusions about evidence.

Adam Elga presents a problem for Lewis’s account of the truth-conditions of counterfactuals. This paper offers a Lewisian response, making key use of special science laws.

Mark Johnston offers a direct realist account of hallucination. I argue that it is either not a direct realist account or that it does not sufficiently take account of hallucination.