Collection
Article Symposium: Facts about incoherence as non-evidential epistemic reasons (Eva Schmidt).
Eva Schmidt: Facts about incoherence as non-evidential epistemic reasons.
Abstract: This paper presents a counterexample to the principle that all epistemic reasons for doxastic attitudes towards p are provided by evidence concerning p. I begin by motivating and clarifying the principle and the associated picture of epistemic reasons, including the notion of evidence concerning a proposition, which comprises both first- and second-order evidence. I then introduce the counterexample from incoherent doxastic attitudes by presenting three example cases. In each case, the fact that the subject’s doxastic attitudes are incoherent is an epistemic reason to suspend, which is not provided by evidence. I argue that this incoherence fact is a reason for the subject to take a step back and reassess her evidence for her conflicting attitudes, and thus a reason to suspend all of them. Suspending judgment enables the subject to revise attitudes where appropriate and thus (typically) to arrive at a set of coherent and well-supported attitudes. I then address a dilemma for my proposal and, in conclusion, briefly suggest a picture of epistemic reasons on which they are to be understood against the background of the subject’s virtuous intellectual conduct.
Critics: Aleks Knoks (University of Luxembourg), Sebastian Schmidt (University of Zurich), Keshav Singh (University of Alabama at Birmingham), Conor McHugh (University of Southampton).
Editors
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Jie Gao
Jie Gao is Zhejiang University 100 Young Professor in Humanities and Social Science at the School of Philosophy, Zhejiang University. She is a co-founder of the Asian Epistemology Network and an associate editor of the Asian Journal of Philosophy. Her research mainly concerns connections between epistemology and the philosophy of mind.
