Philosophy

Sometimes it is epistemically beneficial to form a belief on authority. When you do, what happens to other reasons you have for that belief? Linda Zagzebski’s total-preemption view says that these reasons are ‘‘preempted’’: you still have them, but you do not use them to support your belief. I argue that this situation is problematic, because having reasons for a belief while not using them forfeits you doxastic justification. I present an alternative account of belief on authority, the proper-basing view, which enables the agent to base her belief on as many reasons as she has. A salient result is that the notion of a preemptive reason, useful though it may be in accounting for acting on authority, does not have any place in an account of believing on authority or in epistemology more generally.

The theory-ladenness of observation -- the view that  an agent's conceptual framework influences what she perceives -- is a staple in the philosophy of science. Recent psychological evidence suggests that not only are our perceptual experiences subject to significant top-down cognitive influence, but they are also subject to top-down affective influence, and so are our memories and other beliefs. As a result, this threefold arsenal which many philosophers call our "evidence" is prone to bias in favor of what we already believe, desire, or expect and is hence at times significantly less truth-conducive than we might think. The \textit{threat of epistemic solipsism} amounts to a confirmation bias which is particularly pernicious because it pertains not to the way we interpret evidence but to the content of our evidence itself. This threat looms over beliefs of every stripe, but beliefs which rely on large conglomerations of evidence -- including many of the beliefs which we hold dearest, such as moral, religious, and political beliefs -- are most susceptible. I'll explore the implications of this problem for mainstream epistemologies, including evidentialism, reliabilism, and safety accounts, which ascribe normative significance to truth-conduciveness.

Accounts of paradigm testimonial justication face a trilemma. They will either be too weak, opening us up to speakers' inadvertent biases; too strong, preventing us from
gaining testimonial knowledge that corrects our own biases; or they will be just the right strength but will make testimonial knowledge much harder to achieve than our heavy reliance on testimony suggests. The third horn is the correct one. The lesson is that we must broaden our social-epistemological focus away from paradigm testimony. I argue
that paradigm testimonial believing is only one of a variety of epistemically relational ways of gaining knowledge from others. Many other ways are much less susceptible to
the worries articulated in the trilemma. I discuss belief on the basis of other forms of linguistic communication, including non-literal and ctional communication, as well as
non-linguistic communication.

Epistemically transformative updates are updates in which the agent's posterior credence is one she could never have imagined holding, either because she could not grasp the proposition in question before receiving it as evidence, or because that proposition was epistemically impossible for her. Bayesian probabilism has trouble modeling epistemically transformative updates. I propose a minor tweak to Bayesianism. My account is more flexible than Bayesianism, because it can model epistemically transformative updates; and it is simpler, because it assumes less than Bayesianism.

Should religious believers proportion their religious beliefs to their evidence? They should: Religious faith is better, ceteris paribus, when the beliefs accompanying it are evidence-proportioned. I offer two philosophical arguments and a biblical argument. The philosophical arguments conclude that love and trust, two attitudes belonging to faith, are better, ceteris paribus, when accompanied by evidence-proportioned belief, and that so too is the faith in question. The biblical argument concludes that beliefs associated with faith, portrayed in the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament, are typically, and normatively, exhorted on the basis of evidence. I hope to convince religious believers and nonbelievers alike that religious beliefs should be evidence-proportioned.

Personal narratives can let us in on aspects of reality which we have not experienced for ourselves, and are thus important sources for philosophical reflection. Yet a venerable tradition in mainstream philosophy has little room for arguments which rely on personal narrative, on the grounds that narratives are particular and testimonial, whereas philosophical premises should be general and conceptual. I argue that narrative arguments are an important form of philosophical argument. Their testimonial aspects witness to novel facets of reality, but their argumentative aspects help us to understand those facets for ourselves. My argument takes the form of a case study of the exemplary narrative argument penned by Rachel Moran, a former prostitute who uses her experiences to argue that prostitution amounts to sexual abuse. We'll see that narrative arguments can even enjoy expository advantages over analytic ones.

Faith is often regarded as having a fraught relationship with evidence. Lara Buchak even argues that it entails foregoing evidence, at least when this evidence would in- fluence your decision to act on the proposition in which you have faith. I present a counterexample inspired by the book of Job, in which seeking evidence for the sake of deciding whether to worship God is not only compatible with faith, but is in fact an expression of great faith. One might still think that foregoing evidence may make faith more praiseworthy than otherwise. But I argue against this claim too, once more drawing on Job. A faith that expresses itself by a search for evidence can be more praiseworthy than a faith that sits passively in the face of epistemic adversity.

That an epistemic authority believes that p is often a good reason to believe it yourself. But the preemption view goes farther: it claims that the optimal way of responding to epistemic authority is to “replace” certain reasons of your own with the reason given by the fact that the authority believes that p. I argue that there are three salient types of epistemically authoritative situation for which preempting is either inappropriate or inapplicable. The first arises when you have an independent reason for the authority’s belief, the second when you have a reason for it which depends on the authority for its status as a reason. The third arises – perhaps most surprisingly – when you have reasons against the authority’s belief. I provide an alternative account on which the epistemically best response is to make use of all of your reasons, including but not limited to the fact that the authority believes that p.

Wegen der Globalisierung und der Säkularisierung ist heute nicht mehr selbstverständlich davon auszugehen, dass die eigenen religiösen Überzeugungen richtig sind. Wie können Gläubige darauf reagieren? Eine nachvollziehbare Reaktion wäre zu versuchen, das eigene religiöse Glaubenssystem vor aller scheinbaren Konkurrenz zu schützen, indem man religiösen Dissens innerhalb oder außerhalb der Glaubensgemeinschaft unterbindet oder unterdrückt. Die Autorin argumentiert jedoch dafür, dass die Förderung von solchem Dissens die religiöse Erkenntnis eigentlich begünstigt und zwar selbst für diejenigen, die ihr eigenes religiöses Glaubenssystem möglichst bewahren wollen.

Religious communities often discourage disagreement with religious authorities, on the grounds that allowing it would be epistemically detrimental. I argue that this attitude is mistaken, because any social position in a community -- including religious authority -- comes with epistemic advantages as well as epistemic limitations. I argue that religious communities stand to benefit epistemically by engaging in disagreement with people occupying other social positions. I focus on those at the community's margins, and argue that religious marginalization is apt to yield religiously important insights, so their disagreement with religious authorities should be encouraged.

Resolving religious disagreements is difficult, for beliefs about religion tend to come with strong biases against other views and the people who hold them. Evidence can help, but there is no agreed-upon policy for weighting it, and moreover bias affects the content of our evidence itself. Another complicating factor is that some biases are reliable and others unreliable. What we need is an evidence-weighting policy geared toward negotiating the effects of bias. I consider three evidence-weighting policies in the philosophy of religion and advocate one of them as the best for promoting the resolution of religious disagreements.

If you love someone, should you believe good things about her even if this requires disrespecting your evidence? The partiality view says that you should: love, on this view, issues norms of belief that clash with epistemic norms. The partiality view is supposedly supported by the phenomenology of love and the idea that love is a response to the beloved's positive qualities. It is also undergirded by the literary trope of the blind lover who idolizes his beloved. But I argue that the partiality view is false. Love issues a contrary doxastic norm: loving well requires respecting your evidence about your beloved. I argue this, first, by appeal to the emotional responses of love, which – when they are sensitive to what the beloved is really like – can not only make love great, but can be morally transformative; and second, by showing that caring for your beloved requires evidence-respecting beliefs about her. My view, evidentialism about love, might seem to deplete love of its mystery and suspense. On the contrary: it is precisely the journey of mutual discovery, which presupposes respect for evidence about your beloved, that makes love exciting.

Ich möchte in diesem Beitrag zeigen, dass die ontologische Lesart des unscheinbaren „is“ in ´What it is like to be a bat?´(1974) einen neuen Problemhorizont eröffnet. Interpretiert man „is“ nämlich nicht in einem ontologischen Sinne, sondern sprachphilosophisch oder epistemologisch, dann offenbart sich die zuvor verschleierte, referentielle Fehlleistung. Das ontologische Grundproblem in der Leib-Seele-Debatte, ausgedrückt in der Frage nach dem Wahrheitsgehalt der ersten Prämisse, in dem, in der deutschsprachigen Gegenwartsdiskussion zu einem gewissen Bekanntheitsgrad gereichten Bieri-Trilemma – mentale Phänomene sind nicht-physische Phänomene –, bleibt indes unangetastet.

In diesem Beitrag wird versucht, die im angelsächsischen Raum verbreiteten Bewusstseinstheorien höherer Ordnung in ihren gängigsten Ausprägungen (HOT, HOP, HOE) vorzustellen. In ihnen vereinen sich, so die Meinung des Autors, phänomenologische Sprache und analytische Herangehensweise. Dies kann als verbindendes Moment zwischen der analytischen Philosophie und der Phänomenologie verstanden werden. Vor diesem Hintergrund scheint es angebracht zu sein, sich auch im deutschsprachigen Raum einer eingehenden Analyse dieser Theorien nicht zu verschließen.

Schlüsselwörter: Philosophie des Geistes, Higher-Order Theorien des Bewusstseins, David Rosenthal, Peter Carruthers, William Lycan

Es soll in diesem Beitrag versucht werden, den Ansatz von Funtowicz und Ravetz kritisch zu hinterfragen. Dazu werden Beispiele aus unterschiedlichen Bereichen (Klimawissenschaften, Gewalt- und Intelligenzforschung) eruiert. Schlussendlich wird eine mögliche Verbindung zwischen postnormaler Wissenschaft und postmodernem Denken aufgezeigt.