Epistemic Reasons and Epistemic Values: A New Consequentialist Account

The purpose of this project is to develop a new, naturalistically motivated theory of epistemic rationality: Epistemic Reasons Consequentialism (ERC).

ERC is uniquely able to meet the following four desiderata: (1) it retains a crucial role for reasons, (2) it does not over-idealize our cognitive capacities, (3) it is able to accommodate the idea that truth is not the only fundamental epistemic value, and (4), it can explain how we can rationally transition between mental states commonly held to be of different attitude types (such as perception, emotion, and belief).ERC is a hybrid of evidentialist and reliabilist accounts of justification and knowledge.

From evidentialism, it takes the idea that rational beliefs must be based on good epistemic reasons.

And from reliabilism, ERC takes the idea that the way in which rational beliefs are formed must be conducive to the production of epistemic value.

In short, ERC claims that our beliefs are epistemically rational just in case they were arrived at by using our reasons in ways that best promote epistemic value.The project has 3 parts.

Part 1 (6 months) motivates the search for a consequentialist alternative to the dominant deontic view of epistemic rationality.

Part 2 (18 months) works out the details of ERC as a fully general account of epistemic rationality and implements value pluralism.

Part 3 (12 months) applies ERC to perception and emotion.Our methods will be those of empirically informed analytic philosophy.