Making Up Our Minds: Ethical Norms in Epistemic Inquiry

From our limited perspectives, there are many ways the world could be. We could all be brains in vats, and the "zebra" at the local zoo could be no zebra at all but a mule cleverly disguised to look like one. Much more troublingly, at least for the average person and for philosophers outside of their studies, your unfavorable opinion of a colleague's work could be the product of your own biases, and your memory of a disagreement with a friend could be distorted by a self-serving lens./nWhen presented with a possibility that you cannot rule out, there are two reactions you might have. You could dismiss the possibility, assuming that it does not obtain. Or, you could take the possibility seriously, treating it as a threat to your claims of knowledge. Which possibilities a person takes seriously is a matter of ethical as well as epistemic importance. In certain circumstances, for instance, cleaving to an unfavorable opinion of a colleague, despite not being able to rule out the possibility that it is biased, is not only unreasonable but also mean-spirited and self-indulgent./nWhat is it to take a possibility seriously, and how should we decide when to do it? The few existing philosophical treatments of this question largely ignore the ethical dimensions of the phenomenon. My dissertation offers a fresh approach to the question of which possibilities to take seriously, one that is fully attentive to the interactions between the ethical and epistemic norms that guide us as we construct our pictures of reality./nOn my view, our decisions about which possibilities to take seriously are not first-order epistemic decisions about what to believe, but second-order epistemic decisions about how to decide what to believe, and they are properly based upon pragmatic and ethical considerations. As epistemic inquirers, then, we are not just faced with the question of what to believe given our evidence. We also face the prior, second-order question of what standards to use as we answer first-order questions of what to believe./nI show how this view refreshes longstanding philosophical debates over evidentialism, the view that only evidence can be a reason for belief. I also explain how it can be used to give satisfying accounts of several important and puzzling phenomena concerning assessment of one's own epistemic achievements, including self-gaslighting. This last topic has recently received considerable attention in popular discussions of gendered injustice, but it has not yet been explored in the philosophical literature. Self-gaslighting is a form of self-doubt that is often identified as one of the harms that women face under sexism. But it is difficult to say what the harm could consist in, especially since self-gaslighting seems like a perfectly rational exercise of epistemic self-regulation. I argue that the harm of self-gaslighting is not rooted in any epistemic mistake, but rather in the fact that it involves a coerced change in the way that the subject structures inquiry concerning her own beliefs. Thus, my project not only addresses traditional topics in epistemology and the ethics of belief, but can also be fruitfully applied to new questions in feminist philosophy.

Advisor: MacFarlane, John
Wallace, R. Jay