Belief’s Own Ethics

by Jonathan E. Adler

• ISBN13: 9780262011921
• ISBN10: 0262011921
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2002-04-21
• Publisher: Mit Pr

Summary

The fundamental question of the ethics of belief is "What ought one to believe?" According to the traditional view of evidentialism, the strength of one's beliefs should be proportionate to the evidence. Conventional ways of defending and challenging evidentialism rely on the idea that what one ought to believe is a matter of what it is rational, prudent, ethical, or personally fulfilling to believe. Common to all these approaches is that they look outside of belief itself to determine what one ought to believe. In this book Jonathan Adler offers a strengthened version of evidentialism, arguing that the ethics of belief should be rooted in the concept of belief-that evidentialism is belief's own ethics. A key observation is that it is not merely that one ought not, but that one cannot, believe, for example, that the number of stars is even. The "cannot" represents a conceptual barrier, not just an inability. Therefore belief in defiance of one's evidence (or evidentialism) is impossible. Adler addresses such questions as irrational beliefs, reasonableness, control over beliefs, and whether justifying beliefs requires a foundation. Although he treats the ethics of belief as a central topic in epistemology, his ideas also bear on rationality, argument and pragmatics, philosophy of religion, ethics, and social cognitive psychology.

Author Biography

Jonathan E. Adler is professor of philosophy at Brooklyn college and the graduate school, Cuny.

Table of Contents

Preface	p. xiii
Introduction	p. 1
Intrinsic vs. Extrinsic Approaches	p. 1
The Instability of Moderate Evidentialism	p. 3
Methodological Preliminaries:
Abstraction, Assertion, Modesty, and First-Person Methodology	p. 5
Chapter Summaries	p. 14
Your Questions and a Guide to Locating My Answers	p. 20
Getting Off the Wrong Track	p. 25
The Intrinsic Ethics of Belief	p. 26
From the Subjective Principle to Evidentialism	p. 26
The Incoherence Test	p. 29
Who Am I to Say What You Can Believe?	p. 32
Adequate Reasons	p. 36
Full and Partial Belief	p. 40
Extrinsic Ethics of Belief	p. 43
Critique of Four Extrinsic Doctrines	p. 43
Assertion and an Everyday Bridge between First- and Second-Order Judgments	p. 49
Summary: The Traditional and the Conceptual Approaches to Evidentialism	p. 51
Can One Will to Believe?	p. 55
Voluntarism and Williams's Argument	p. 56
Nonvoluntarism Does Not Imply Nonresponsibility	p. 64
The Possibility of Weakness of Will for Belief	p. 67
More Extreme Cases	p. 70
Normative Epistemology: The Deceptively Large Scope of the Incoherence Test	p. 73
Objection: Intrinsic Ethics of Belief Is Too Weak	p. 73
The Inherent Irrationality of Self-Deception	p. 75
Negligence and Believing the Unbelievable	p. 80
Distraction and the Unbelievable	p. 83
Just Be Explicit	p. 86
Internal Commitments	p. 91
Further Defense and Applications	p. 92
Recommending Explicitness Selectively	p. 96
Full Awareness and Limits on Practicality	p. 99
Evading Evidentialism and Exploiting "Possibility": Strategies of Ignorance, Isolation, and Inflation	p. 103
Arguments from Ignorance	p. 104
"Possibility" and Arguments from Ignorance	p. 104
Selective Relevance and Some Pragmatics for "Possibility"	p. 112
William James and Willing to Believe	p. 116
Isolation and Testability	p. 120
Testability and Burdens of Proof	p. 121
Dodging Testability	p. 123
Inflation as Distraction	p. 129
Testimony: Background Reasons to Accept the Word of Others	p. 135
The Problem of Testimony	p. 135
Clarifications	p. 137
Knowledge and Trust	p. 139
Summary and the Problem of Justification	p. 141
Entitlement and an A Priori Argument	p. 144
Arguing from Preponderance	p. 146
The Empirical Background for the Default Position	p. 147
The Default Rule: A Closer Look	p. 153
Conclusion: The Problem of Testimony Deflated	p. 157
Afterword: The Belief-Assertion Parallel	p. 159
Tacit Confirmation and the Regress	p. 163
Basic Beliefs as a Challenge to Evidentialism	p. 163
Empirical Support for Our Background Beliefs: Tacit Confirmation	p. 164
The "Too Sophisticated" Objection	p. 167
Tacit Confirmation and the Endless Chain of Reasons	p. 173
Traditional Responses to the Regress	p. 178
Conversation and Regress	p. 181
Puzzling Assimilations and the Ordinarily Uncriticizable	p. 183
Appendix: Background Beliefs, Stability, and Obedience to Authority	p. 186
Three Paradoxes of Belief	p. 193
Transparency and Moore's Paradox	p. 193
The Pseudo-Moore's Paradox	p. 197
The Impotence of Rejecting the Conjunction Rule	p. 198
A Positive Proposal	p. 201
The Assertion Parallel and the Pseudo-Preface Paradox	p. 203
Evidence and the Generality Constraints	p. 204
First-Person Methodology	p. 207
Constraints on Us to Fully Believe	p. 211
An Example and a Challenge to Evidentialism	p. 211
A Sketchy Background on Constraints	p. 212
The Argument for Constraints on Reactive Attitude Beliefs	p. 215
Demands on Participants in Assertion, Inquiry, and Argument	p. 221
Faith	p. 223
Challenges to Evidentialism (and How to Meet Them)	p. 228
Interlude-Transparency, Full Belief, Accommodation	p. 231
Full and Partial Beliefs	p. 231
Truth and Transparency	p. 236
Contextualism and Other Forms of Accommodation	p. 238
The Compatibility of Full Belief and Doubt	p. 249
Confidence and the Directionality of Weight Fallacy	p. 250
The Task Ahead: The Difficult Transfer to Full Belief	p. 254
Fallibility, Controversy, and Mill's Pragmatist Reasoning	p. 255
The Uniformity and Focal Assumptions: Counterexamples	p. 258
Assertional Corroboration	p. 262
Competence, Constraints, and Base Rates	p. 264
Negative Clues as Tolerable Doubts: Summary of Argument	p. 267
Appendix: Outline of Assertion/Belief Parallel	p. 274
Prospects for Self-Control: Reasonableness, Self-Correction, and the Fallibility Structure	p. 279
Self-Correction: Means and Motives	p. 279
Artificial Self-Correction	p. 283
The "Each, But Some Not" or "Fallibility" Structure	p. 284
Meno's Paradox-like Problems	p. 286
Everyday Self-Corrective Impositions	p. 290
A Conundrum of Self-Criticism	p. 291
Ceding Control and Meta-Fallibility Conundrums	p. 293
Fanaticism, Self-Control, and the Emotions	p. 296
Reasonableness	p. 303
Notes	p. 307
References	p. 331
Index	p. 349
Table of Contents provided by Publisher. All Rights Reserved.