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.

Preface

xiii

Introduction

1

(248)

1 Intrinsic vs. Extrinsic Approaches

1

(2)

2 The Instability of Moderate Evidentialism

3

(2)

3 Methodological Preliminaries: Abstraction, Assertion, Modesty, and First-Person Methodology

5

(9)

4 Chapter Summaries

14

(6)

5 Your Questions and a Guide to Locating My Answers

20

(5)

1 Getting Off the Wrong Track

25

(30)

I The Intrinsic Ethics of Belief

26

(17)

1 From the Subjective Principle to Evidentialism

26

(3)

2 The Incoherence Test

29

(3)

3 Who Am I to Say What You Can Believe?

32

(4)

4 Adequate Reasons

36

(4)

5 Full and Partial Belief

40

(3)

II Extrinsic Ethics of Belief

43

(12)

6 Critique of Four Extrinsic Doctrines

43

(6)

7 Assertion and an Everyday Bridge between First- and Second-Order Judgments

49

(2)

8 Summary: The Traditional and the Conceptual Approaches to Evidentialism

51

(4)

2 Can One Will to Believe?

55

(18)

1 Voluntarism and Williams's Argument

56

(8)

2 Nonvoluntarism Does Not Imply Nonresponsibility

64

(3)

3 The Possibility of Weakness of Will for Belief

67

(3)

4 More Extreme Cases

70

(3)

3 Normative Epistemology: The Deceptively Large Scope of the Incoherence Test

73

(30)

1 Objection: Intrinsic Ethics of Belief Is Too Weak

73

(2)

2 The Inherent Irrationality of Self-Deception

75

(5)

3 Negligence and Believing the Unbelievable

80

(3)

4 Distraction and the Unbelievable

83

(3)

5 Just Be Explicit

86

(5)

6 Internal Commitments

91

(1)

7 Further Defense and Applications

92

(4)

8 Recommending Explicitness Selectively

96

(3)

9 Full Awareness and Limits on Practicality

99

(4)

4 Evading Evidentialism and Exploiting "Possibility": Strategies of Ignorance, Isolation, and Inflation

103

(32)

I Arguments from Ignorance

104

(16)

1 "Possibility" and Arguments from Ignorance

104

(8)

2 Selective Relevance and Some Pragmatics for "Possibility"

112

(4)

3 William James and Willing to Believe

116

(4)

II Isolation and Testability

120

(9)

4 Testability and Burdens of Proof

121

(2)

5 Dodging Testability

123

(6)

III Inflation as Distraction

129

(6)

5 Testimony: Background Reasons to Accept the Word of Others

135

(28)

1 The Problem of Testimony

135

(2)

2 Clarifications

137

(2)

3 Knowledge and Trust

139

(2)

4 Summary and the Problem of Justification

141

(3)

5 Entitlement and an A Priori Argument

144

(2)

6 Arguing from Preponderance

146

(1)

7 The Empirical Background for the Default Position

147

(6)

8 The Default Rule: A Closer Look

153

(4)

9 Conclusion: The Problem of Testimony Deflated

157

(2)

10 Afterword: The Belief-Assertion Parallel

159

(4)

6 Tacit Confirmation and the Regress

163

(30)

1 Basic Beliefs as a Challenge to Evidentialism

163

(1)

2 Empirical Support for Our Background Beliefs: Tacit Confirmation

164

(3)

3 The "Too Sophisticated" Objection

167

(6)

4 Tacit Confirmation and the Endless Chain of Reasons

173

(5)

5 Traditional Responses to the Regress

178

(3)

6 Conversation and Regress

181

(2)

7 Puzzling Assimilations and the Ordinarily Uncriticizable

183

(3)

Appendix: Background Beliefs, Stability, and Obedience to Authority

186

(7)

7 Three Paradoxes of Belief

193

(18)

1 Transparency and Moore's Paradox

193

(4)

2 The Pseudo–Moore's Paradox

197

(1)

3 The Impotence of Rejecting the Conjunction Rule

198

(3)

4 A Positive Proposal

201

(2)

5 The Assertion Parallel and the Pseudo–Preface Paradox

203

(1)

6 Evidence and the Generality Constraints

204

(3)

7 First-Person Methodology

207

(4)

8 Constraints on Us to Fully Believe

211

(20)

1 An Example and a Challenge to Evidentialism

211

(1)

2 A Sketchy Background on Constraints

212

(3)

3 The Argument for Constraints on Reactive Attitude Beliefs

215

(6)

4 Demands on Participants in Assertion, Inquiry, and Argument

221

(2)

5 Faith

223

(5)

6 Challenges to Evidentialism (and How to Meet Them)

228

(3)

9 Interlude—Transparency, Full Belief, Accommodation

231

(18)

1 Full and Partial Beliefs

231

(5)

2 Truth and Transparency

236

(2)

3 Contextualism and Other Forms of Accommodation

238

(11)

10 The Compatibility of Full Belief and Doubt

249

(30)

1 Confidence and the Directionality of Weight Fallacy

250

(4)

2 The Task Ahead: The Difficult Transfer to Full Belief

254

(1)

3 Fallibility, Controversy, and Mill's Pragmatist Reasoning

255

(3)

4 The Uniformity and Focal Assumptions: Counterexamples

258

(4)

5 Assertional Corroboration

262

(2)

6 Competence, Constraints, and Base Rates

264

(3)

7 Negative Clues as Tolerable Doubts: Summary of Argument

267

(7)

Appendix: Outline of Assertion/Belief Parallel

274

(5)

11 Prospects for Self-Control: Reasonableness, Self-Correction, and the Fallibility Structure

279

(28)

1 Self-Correction: Means and Motives

279

(4)

2 Artificial Self-Correction

283

(1)

3 The "Each, But Some Not" or "Fallibility" Structure

284

(2)

4 Meno's Paradox–like Problems

286

(4)

5 Everyday Self-Corrective Impositions

290

(1)

6 A Conundrum of Self-Criticism

291

(2)

7 Ceding Control and Meta-Fallibility Conundrums

293

(3)

8 Fanaticism, Self-Control, and the Emotions

296

(7)

9 Reasonableness

303

(4)

Notes

307

(24)

References

331

(18)

Index

349

What is included with this book?

The New copy of this book will include any supplemental materials advertised. Please check the title of the book to determine if it should include any access cards, study guides, lab manuals, CDs, etc.

The Used, Rental and eBook copies of this book are not guaranteed to include any supplemental materials. Typically, only the book itself is included. This is true even if the title states it includes any access cards, study guides, lab manuals, CDs, etc.

Amazon no longer offers textbook rentals. We do!

Amazon no longer offers textbook rentals. We do!

We're the #1 textbook rental company. Let us show you why.

Belief's Own Ethics

9780262511940

0262511940

Supplemental Materials

Summary

Table of Contents

Supplemental Materials

Rewards Program