For many, epistemology is a normative discipline in much the same sense as ethics. According to the analogy, just as ethics is about what we should do and how we should live our lives, epistemology is about what we should believe and how we should go about forming our beliefs. What complicates the analogy, however, is that believing things is also a part of living life. Our beliefs aren’t only evaluable with respect to whether they are credible, true, or amount to knowledge, but also with respect to whether they are useful, beneficial, or contribute to our happiness and wellbeing. The analogy implies that epistemic considerations (like evidence, truth, or knowledge) settle questions about what we should believe just as ethical considerations (like duty, goodness, or virtue) settle questions about what we should do and how we should live. The present work is an attempt to challenge this general picture of the subject matter of epistemology. Specifically, I argue that the normative assessment of belief cannot be understood in isolation from the broader social practices and human activities in virtue of which what we believe is ethically and practically significant. Chapter I introduces the central issues and raises a challenge to views that distinguish between epistemic and ethical assessment in terms of reasons for belief and reasons for action, respectively. The conclusion of this chapter is that there must be some conceptual link between the norms of belief and the norms of action. Chapter II builds upon this challenge by spelling out that conceptual link: reasons for belief entail reasons for action, and vice versa. The main conclusion of chapters I and II is that epistemology cannot settle questions about what we should believe without also settling questions about what we should do, and ethics cannot settle questions about what we should do without also settling questions about what we should believe. Chapters III and IV provide novel answers to two significant challenges to abandoning the analogy: providing plausible accounts of the relationship between reasons and rational motivation and the normative comparison of epistemic considerations and practical reasons for belief.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:bu.edu/oai:open.bu.edu:2144/42048 |
| Date | 13 February 2021 |
| Creators | Shmidt, Adam Benjamin |
| Contributors | Star, Daniel |
| Source Sets | Boston University |
| Language | en_US |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis/Dissertation |
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