1st Edition

Epistemic Duties New Arguments, New Angles

Edited By Kevin McCain, Scott Stapleford Copyright 2021
    314 Pages
    by Routledge

    314 Pages
    by Routledge

    There are arguably moral, legal, and prudential constraints on behavior. But are there epistemic constraints on belief? Are there any requirements arising from intellectual considerations alone? This volume includes original essays written by top epistemologists that address this and closely related questions from a variety of new, sometimes unexpected, angles. It features a wide variety of positions, ranging from arguments for and against the existence of purely epistemic requirements, reductions of epistemic requirements to moral or prudential requirements, the biological foundations of epistemic requirements, extensions of the scope of epistemic requirements to include such things as open-mindedness, eradication of implicit bias and interpersonal duties to object, to new applications such as epistemic requirements pertaining to storytelling, testimony, and fundamentalist beliefs. Anyone interested in the nature of responsibility, belief, or epistemic normativity will find a range of useful arguments and fresh ideas in this cutting-edge anthology.

    Chapter 14 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license. 

    Introductory Note

    Kevin McCain and Scott Stapleford

    Part I: The Nature of Epistemic Duty

    1 Epistemic Duty, Justified Belief, and Voluntary Control

    Matthias Steup

    2 Believing Badly: Doxastic Duties are not Epistemic Duties

    Miriam Schleifer McCormick

    3 Evading the Doxastic Puzzle by Deflating Epistemic Normativity

    Luis Oliveira

    4 Epistemic Tension and Epistemic Duty: A Rossian Account

    Mark T. Nelson

    5 Intellectual Responsibility and the Scope of the Will

    Robert Audi

    6 We Are Like American Robins

    Ema Sullivan-Bissett

    Part II: Epistemic Duties of Individuals

    7 Bound by the Evidence

    Scott Stapleford and Kevin McCain

    8 Epistemic Duty and Implicit Bias

    Lindsay Rettler and Bradley Rettler

    9 Robust Justification

    Jonathan Matheson

    10 Ought to Believe vs. Ought to Reflect

    Anthony Robert Booth

    11 Wisdom, Open-Mindedness, and Epistemic Duty

    Sharon Ryan

    12 On What We Should Believe (And When (and Why) We Should Believe What We Know We Should Not Believe)

    Clayton Littlejohn

    13 The Normative Ground of the Evidential Ought

    Anne Meylan

    Part III: Social Epistemic Duties

    14 Responsibility for Fundamentalist Belief

    Rik Peels

    15 Trust, Testimony, and Reasons for Belief

    Rebecca Wallbank and Andrew Reisner

    16 When the Personal Becomes Political: How Do We Fulfil Our Epistemic Duties Relative to the Use of Autobiographical Stories in Public Debates?

    Lisa Bortolotti and Sophie Stammers

    17 Dialectical Responsibility and Regress Skepticism

    Scott Aikin

    18 Epistemic Duties Regarding Others

    Jennifer Lackey

    Biography

    Kevin McCain is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. His published works include: Evidentialism and Epistemic Justification (Routledge, 2014), The Nature of Scientific Knowledge: An Explanatory Approach (2016), and with Kostas Kampourakis Uncertainty: How It Makes Science Advance (2019).

    Scott Stapleford is Professor of Philosophy at St. Thomas University, Fredericton. He is the author of Kant’s Transcendental Arguments: Disciplining Pure Reason (2008), coauthor (with Tyron Goldschmidt) of Berkeley’s Principles: Expanded and Explained (Routledge, 2016) and Hume’s Enquiry: Expanded and Explained (Routledge, forthcoming), and coauthor (with Lorne Falkenstein and Molly Kao) of Logic Works: A Rigorous Introduction to Formal Logic (Routledge, forthcoming).