Epistemic normativity and becoming our future selves Ted Shear - - PowerPoint PPT Presentation

Setup Nature of belief Inter-attitude coherence Intra-attitude coherence Concluding Remarks on TEs

Epistemic normativity and becoming our future selves

Ted Shear

University of California, Davis University of Queensland

Workshop: Beyond Rational Choice Project?

tedshear.com/documents/anu_slides.pdf October 13, 2016

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Setup Nature of belief Inter-attitude coherence Intra-attitude coherence Concluding Remarks on TEs

Some context: my previous work investigates various joint coherence requirements governing diachronic aspects of our doxastic attitudes. For example, I have explored issues surrounding: the joint coherence requirements governing revisions to our beliefs and credences, and the interactions between the diachronic norms governing explicit reasoning and belief revision. This has led me to the meta-normative questions that I will explore in this talk.

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Setup Nature of belief Inter-attitude coherence Intra-attitude coherence Concluding Remarks on TEs

These questions include: What is the normative domain of epistemic rationality? What is the source of its normativity? How do we square answers to these questions with the realities

• f our cognitive architecture and our broader normative situation

as agents? Aim of this talk: Sketch a basic meta-normative picture of epistemic rationality. Situate transformative experience in this picture.

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Setup Nature of belief Inter-attitude coherence Intra-attitude coherence Concluding Remarks on TEs

We’ll proceed by discussing the following:

1

Epistemic holism, epistemic normativity, and our epistemic system

2

Varieties of inter-attitude joint coherence requirements

3

Varieties of intra-attitude joint coherence requirements

4

Concluding remarks about transformative experience and dispositional norms

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Setup Nature of belief Inter-attitude coherence Intra-attitude coherence Concluding Remarks on TEs

Basic picture: We have an adapted cognitive capacity to generate, maintain, and interact with representational systems. We use these capacities in service of one such system containing information that plays a crucial functional role in our ability to navigate the world — this is what I will call our epistemic system. The ways in which we are able to interact with our epistemic system as well as the nature of the system itself are mediated by

• ur cognitive architecture, cognitive capacities, and the

functional role of the system. Since these are diverse constraints, we are faced with conflict between normative requirements that govern different parts of the system.

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Setup Nature of belief Inter-attitude coherence Intra-attitude coherence Concluding Remarks on TEs

Why do we have epistemic systems? There are things that we desire, want, or are in our interests. While, indeed, living is a difficult business, acting in accord with methods that are generally conducive to achieving our goals provides us with an avenue towards fulfillment. Belief systems present us with one a tool for doing so by providing us with a way to storage information that we may interact with through deliberations. So, systems of belief play a functional role in allowing us to satisfy the system-external normative requirements of practical rationality.

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Setup Nature of belief Inter-attitude coherence Intra-attitude coherence Concluding Remarks on TEs

What are epistemic systems? In order to properly serve their functional role, epistemic systems must be structured so as to allow us to store, acquire, and interact with the information that is available to us. But, (i) our computational resources are bounded, (ii) the information we collect is heterogeneous in type and content, and (iii) our various cognitive abilities for interacting with information are themselves bounded. Our epistemic systems must then be able to efficiently accommodate deeply variable information that is accessible and manipulable in a multitude ways. So, in whatever form our epistemic systems consist, they are able to satisfy their functional role only by solving the massively difficult engineering problem of straddling these constraints.

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Setup Nature of belief Inter-attitude coherence Intra-attitude coherence Concluding Remarks on TEs

How do we accommodate and interact with new information? Unsurprisingly, in a wide variety of ways through the use of a variety of different cognitive capacities. These capacities are themselves adapted (perhaps as efficient solutions to other not purely epistemic problems).

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Setup Nature of belief Inter-attitude coherence Intra-attitude coherence Concluding Remarks on TEs

Which of our cognitive capacities are used for (and thereby mediate) acquiring information and interacting with our epistemic systems? While largely an empirical question, there are a number of relevant capacities of which we are immediately aware and a few that I will focus on today. Whatever they are underlying, we possess the adapted cognitive capacities for natural language, mathematical thought, and imagination.

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Setup Nature of belief Inter-attitude coherence Intra-attitude coherence Concluding Remarks on TEs

How do our various doxastic attitudes fit into our epistemic system? Our doxastic attitudes provide us with (mediated) access to the information that we have collected and is stored in our underlying epistemic system. So, they serve as different tools for different ways of engaging and interacting with our information. Natural language serves as a ready vehicle for the transmission

• f qualitative information, so the use of our capacity capacity for

natural language in service of our epistemic acts may be seen as an efficient way to utilize our information. Similarly, our capacity for mathematical thought plausibly bears a similar relation to credences. Finally, our imaginative capacity seems to be especially important in our ongoing process of situating and understanding

• urselves in the world.

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Setup Nature of belief Inter-attitude coherence Intra-attitude coherence Concluding Remarks on TEs

For each type of doxastic attitude, there are three general types of normative coherence requirements: Synchronic norms governing the internal integrity of the system.

e.g. “have credences representable by a probability function”, or “have logically consistent beliefs”

Diachronic norms governing single-step diachronic behavior.

e.g. “update credences by conditionalizing on new information”,

• r “make minimally mutilating revisions that accommodate new

information”, or “make inferences that are classically sound”

Dispositional norms governing long-term or strategic types of behavior.

e.g. “rely on a single method for update/revision/inference”

These are each (internal) coherence requirements for the doxastic attitude in question.

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Setup Nature of belief Inter-attitude coherence Intra-attitude coherence Concluding Remarks on TEs

Provided with two doxastic attitudes A and A′, it is often thought that there are inter-attitude joint coherence requirements on how A and A′ should line up. For example, we might endorse the following well-known synchronic inter-attitude joint coherence requirement: (Lockean thesis) Rationality requires that an agent believes p just in case her credence in p is above some threshold, t.

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Setup Nature of belief Inter-attitude coherence Intra-attitude coherence Concluding Remarks on TEs

But, there are substantive implications for this inter-attitude coherence requirement that result from the exact contents of the internal coherence requirements of each attitude. For example, in addition to the Lockean thesis, if we accept that:

1

credences must be probabilistic and updated via conditionalization,

2

beliefs must be deductively cogent (i.e. closed under consequence and logically consistent) and updated via AGM revision, and

3

rational belief does not require certainty, then the Lockean threshold, t, must fall in [1/2,

2 1+ √ 5 ≈ 0.618].

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Setup Nature of belief Inter-attitude coherence Intra-attitude coherence Concluding Remarks on TEs

But, while each of type of internal coherence requirements of an doxastic attitude has their own normative domain, they may jointly constrain one another. e.g. “if your synchronic norm requires consistency, then your diachronic norm should not permit inconsistent posteriors” Some (like the example above) are unsurprising; however, others are notable.

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Setup Nature of belief Inter-attitude coherence Intra-attitude coherence Concluding Remarks on TEs

Earlier, I suggested that navigating and managing our epistemic systems are required functionality for our epistemic systems to function in an effective way. When it comes to belief, we engage in these activities through diachronic processes of explicit reasoning (inference) and belief revision. However, our beliefs depend on our underlying epistemic systems whose structure is unlikely in the quasi-linguistic form

• f belief.

But, in navigating our system, we may find that we need to perform maintenance. That is just to say that we are indeed capable of rational belief change

• n the basis of rational inference.

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Setup Nature of belief Inter-attitude coherence Intra-attitude coherence Concluding Remarks on TEs

But, once again the individual behavior of these capacities (each relating to the same cognitive attitude) can affect the normative facts about the functioning of the others. For example, suppose that an agent relies on the admittedly absurd belief revision procedure that is entirely accretive (i.e. it never permits her to drop a belief). Peculiarly, this implies that if we hold fixed her diachronic behavior, then it would be a truth-preserving inference for her to infer from her belief now that p that at each subsequent time she will believe p. Provided her epistemic system, this would indeed be a valid inference pattern (in the truth-preservational sense) though it is in discord with

• ur standard conception of valid inference.

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Setup Nature of belief Inter-attitude coherence Intra-attitude coherence Concluding Remarks on TEs

But, how does this all relate to transformative experience and our broader project of living? In my view, our core desires provide the content and structure of the dispositional norms that operate on our various attitudes. Unlike synchronic and diachronic norms that are mediated by highly structured doxastic attitudes, dispositional norms are grounded in coherence with our core preferences. Engaging in the process of trying to come to grips with and understand those preferences relies on our imaginative capacities and is a difficult personal task. But, our situation is then complicated by the fact that we are inevitably subject to a variety of complex (and sometimes divergent) normative forces.

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