Philosophy and Phenomenological Research · 2015 · 150 citations · 27 references
HumanitiesPhilosophyEpistemologyPhilosophy Of MindPhilosophy Of ScienceBounded RationalityExplanationRational ChoiceEpistemic RationalityRational Decision-making
Rationality is often conceived as requiring sufficient evidential support, adherence to categorical norms, and alignment between first‑ and higher‑order attitudes, yet these principles appear mutually incompatible. The author presents a puzzle about epistemic rationality. The author proposes three resolutions to the tension, concluding that rejecting strong evidential support as the core of rationality is best, and identifies a special class of propositions about rationality that must be treated without rational error.
In this paper, I present a puzzle about epistemic rationality. It seems plausible that it should be rational to believe a proposition if you have sufficient evidential support for it. It seems plausible that it rationality requires you to conform to the categorical requirements of rationality. It also seems plausible that our first‐order attitudes ought to mesh with our higher‐order attitudes. It seems unfortunate that we cannot accept all three claims about rationality. I will present three ways of trying to resolve this tension and argue that the best way to do this is to reject the idea that strong evidential support is the stuff rationality is made of. In the course of doing this, I shall argue that there is a special class of propositions about the requirements of rationality that we cannot make rational mistakes about and explain how this can be.
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