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Epistemically blameworthy belief

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Brown2019_Article_EpistemicallyBlameworthyBelief.pdf (278.5Kb)
Date
14/12/2019
Author
Brown, Jessica Anne
Keywords
Assertion
Belief
Epistemic norms
Blameworthy belief
Blame
B Philosophy (General)
T-NDAS
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Abstract
When subjects violate epistemic standards or norms, we sometimes judge them blameworthy rather than blameless. For instance, we might judge a subject blameworthy for dogmatically continuing to believe a claim even after receiving evidence which undermines it. Indeed, the idea that one may be blameworthy for belief is appealed to throughout the contemporary epistemic literature. In some cases, a subject seems blameworthy for believing as she does even though it seems prima facie implausible that she is morally blameworthy or professionally blameworthy. Such cases raise the question of whether one can be blameworthy for a belief in a specifically epistemic sense rather than in some already recognised sense, such as being morally or professionally blameworthy. A number of authors have recently argued that there is a moral or social sense in which one ought to conform one’s beliefs to the evidence (e.g. Goldberg, Graham, Vanderheiden). In this paper, I argue that even while accepting that there are moral and social norms governing belief, there are cases in which a subject is blameworthy for a belief but isn’t plausibly morally or socially blameworthy. If this latter view is correct, then we may need to develop a new account of blame which can be applied to beliefs which are not morally or socially blameworthy.
Citation
Brown , J A 2019 , ' Epistemically blameworthy belief ' , Philosophical Studies , vol. First Online . https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-019-01384-z
Publication
Philosophical Studies
Status
Peer reviewed
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-019-01384-z
ISSN
0031-8116
Type
Journal article
Rights
Copyright © The Author(s) 2019. Open Access. This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.
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  • University of St Andrews Research
URI
http://hdl.handle.net/10023/19150

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