Open Collections

Pearson, Phyllis

University of British Columbia

Much recent work in epistemology assumes that externalist frameworks are needed to best capture how moral, political, and social factors shape our epistemic lives. Externalist frameworks hold that what matters most epistemically is securing a veridical or truth-conducive relationship to the world. I challenge this trend by arguing against factive theories of justification—theories that hold that only true beliefs can be justified. Though once confined to the fringes of epistemology, factive theories have surged in popularity. I argue that we should resist a turn towards factive theories of justification because such theories imply implausible verdicts about epistemic agency. In particular, they imply implausible verdicts about the agency of those who are deceived. To make this case, I first motivate the intuition that there is something disrespectful about factive theories of justification and suggest that this is because they mistakenly imply that deceived believers suffer a substantial diminishment of epistemic agency. I then analyze the notion of epistemic agency to substantiate this hypothesis. By and large, existing accounts of epistemic agency understand the notion as a kind of control we exercise over our epistemic lives. I argue that these accounts do not adequately elucidate the notions of control they propose. As an alternative, I propose that epistemic agency centrally concerns the ability to justify our beliefs, which in turn is underwritten by two more basic abilities, the ability to set epistemic contexts and the ability to conditionalize on our evidence. Next, I illustrate how this alternative account can shed insight on cases in which epistemic agency is compromised by providing an analysis of how gaslighting occurs. I then conclude by connecting these insights to other normative domains. I argue that epistemic normativity might call for a distinct structure from other kinds of normativity and demonstrate this by providing an externalist account of the aesthetic normativity of cultural appropriation.

Text

2024-07-10

Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International

http://hdl.handle.net/2429/88607

Philosophy

University of British Columbia

UBCV

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/