Epistemic Akrasia, Higher-order Evidence, and Charitable Belief Attribution

Epistemic akrasia refers to the possibility of forming an attitude that fails to conform to one’s best judgment. In this paper, I will be concerned with the question whether epistemic akrasia is rational and I will argue that it is not. Addressing this question, in turn, raises the question of the e...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:International journal for the study of skepticism
Main Author: Vahid, Hamid (Author)
Format: Electronic Article
Language:English
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Published: Brill 2015
In: International journal for the study of skepticism
Further subjects:B epistemic akrasia higher-order evidence rationality charity normativity
Online Access: Volltext (Verlag)
Description
Summary:Epistemic akrasia refers to the possibility of forming an attitude that fails to conform to one’s best judgment. In this paper, I will be concerned with the question whether epistemic akrasia is rational and I will argue that it is not. Addressing this question, in turn, raises the question of the epistemic significance of higher-order evidence. After examining some of the views on this subject, I will present an argument to show why higher-order evidence is relevant to the epistemic status of the pertinent first-order beliefs. This helps to show why a standard argument for the rationality of epistemic akrasia does not work. Finally, I shall try to show how considerations involving Davidson’s theory of radical interpretation bear on the question of the rationality of epistemic akrasia.
ISSN:2210-5700
Contains:In: International journal for the study of skepticism
Persistent identifiers:DOI: 10.1163/22105700-05011151