Belief's Own Ethics

by
Edition: 1st
Format: Paperback
Pub. Date: 2006-03-01
Publisher(s): MIT PRESS
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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.

Table of Contents

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

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