The Theory Of Epistemic Rationality

The author gives a novel and provocative account of the nature of epistemic rationality.

The first textbook to explain the principles of epistemic game theory.

Action theorists and formal epistemologists often pursue parallel inquiries regarding rationality, with the former focused on practical rationality, and the latter focused on theoretical rationality. In both fields, there is currently a strong interest in exploring rationality in relation to time. This exploration raises questions about the rationality of certain patterns over time. For example, it raises questions about the rational permissibility of certain patterns of intention; similarly, it raises questions about the rational permissibility of certain patterns of belief. While the action-theoretic and epistemic questions raised are closely related, advances in one field are not always processed by the other. This volume brings together contributions by scholars in action theory and formal epistemology working on questions regarding rationality and time so that researchers in these overlapping fields can profit from each other’s insights. This book was originally published as a special issue of the Canadian Journal of Philosophy.

Simon Evnine examines various epistemic aspects of what it is to be a person. Persons are defined as finite beings that have beliefs, including second-order beliefs about their own and others' beliefs, and are agents, capable of making long-term plans. It is argued that for any being meeting these conditions, a number of epistemic consequences obtain. First, all such beings must have certain logical concepts and be able to use them in certain ways. Secondly, there are at least two principles governing belief that it is rational for persons to satisfy and are such that nothing can be a person at all unless it satisfies them to a large extent. These principles are that one believe the conjunction of one's beliefs and that one treat one's future beliefs as, by and large, better than one's current beliefs. Thirdly, persons both occupy epistemic points of view on the world and show up within those views. This makes it impossible for them to be completely objective about their own beliefs. Ideals of rationality that require such objectivity, while not necessarily wrong, are intrinsically problematic for persons. This 'aspectual dualism' is characteristic of treatments of persons in the Kantian tradition. In sum, these epistemic consequences support a traditional view of the nature of persons, one in opposition to much recent theorizing.

This title provides the first thorough defense of a naturalized virtue epistemology.

An important issue in epistemology concerns the source of epistemic normativity. 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. Recently, philosophers from both formal epistemology and traditional epistemology have shown interest in such a view. In formal epistemology, there has been particular interest in thinking of epistemology as a kind of decision theory where instead of maximizing expected utility one maximizes expected epistemic utility. In traditional epistemology, there has been particular interest in various forms of reliabilism about justification and whether such views are analogous to—and so face similar problems to—versions of consequentialism in ethics. This volume presents some of the most recent work on these topics as well as others related to epistemic consequentialism, by authors that are sympathetic to the view and those who are critical of it.

In a series of essays nine philosophers and two psychologists address three main themes: the status of norms of rationality; the precise form taken by them; and the role of norms in belief and actions.

How should thinkers cope with uncertainty? What makes their degrees of belief rational, and how should they reason about uncertain matters? In epistemology, recent research has attempted to answer these questions by developing formal models of ideally rational credences. However, we know from psychological research that perfect rationality is unattainable for human thinkers--and so this raises the question of how rational ideals can apply to human thinkers. A popular reply is that the more a thinker's imperfectly rational credences approximate compliance with norms of ideal rationality, the better. But what exactly does this mean? Why is it better to be less irrational, if we can't ever be completely rational? And what does being closer to ideally rational amount to? If ideal models of rationality are supposed to help us understand the rationality of human, imperfect thinkers, we need answers to these questions. Unsettled Thoughts breaks new ground in the study of rationality in providing these answers: we can explain why it's better to be less irrational, because less irrational degrees of belief are generally more accurate and better at guiding our actions. Moreover, the way in which approximating ideal rationality is beneficial can be made formally precise by using a variety of distance measures that track the benefits of being more rational.