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ABSTRACT

The New Evil Demon Problem presents a serious challenge to externalist theories of epistemic justification. In recent years, externalists have developed a number of strategies for responding to the problem. A popular line of response involves distinguishing between a belief’s being epistemically justified and a subject’s being epistemically blameless for holding it. The apparently problematic intuitions the New Evil Demon Problem elicits, proponents of this response claim, track the fact that the deceived subject is epistemically blameless for believing as she does, not that she is justified for so believing. This general strategy—which I call the “unjustified-but-blameless maneuver”—is motivated, in part, by the assumption that the distinction between epistemic justification and blamelessness is merely an extension of the familiar distinction between moral justification and blamelessness. In this paper, I consider three ways of drawing the distinction between justification and blamelessness familiar from the moral domain: the first in terms of a connection with reactive attitudes, the second in terms of the distinction between wrongness and wronging, and the third in terms of reasons-responsiveness. All three ways of drawing the distinction, I argue, make it difficult to see how an analogous distinction in the epistemic domain could help externalists explain away the intuitions which underwrite the New Evil Demon Problem. Motivating the unjustified-but-blameless maneuver, I conclude, is a much less straightforward task than its proponents tend to assume.

ABSTRACT

Contemporary epistemologists tend to work with a highly idealized picture of the human mind. This makes it difficult to understand how the strictures of rationality epistemologists prescribe might apply to actual human thinkers. My dissertation develops a theory how the doxastic (or “belief-like”) attitudes fit into an empirically-informed picture of the mind which builds on a robust but largely overlooked set of empirical findings concerning our ability to handle uncertainty in reasoning. The result is a novel and, in many ways, surprising picture, one on which degreed states of confidence (what philosophers call “credences”) play a more marginal role in our mental economy than many epistemologists have supposed. Not only does this pave way for a more realistic theory of rationality, but it also sheds light on number of puzzling descriptive issues, including: the difference between “implicit” and “explicit” representations of uncertainty, the role of Bayesian models in cognitive science, and the mechanisms underlying certain widespread and puzzling forms of human irrationality.