Believing Against the Evidence

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Believing Against the Evidence

Agency and the Ethics of Belief

Philosophy: epistemology and theory of knowledge Ethics and moral philosophy

Author: Miriam Schleifer McCormick

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Collection: Routledge Studies in Contemporary Philosophy

Language: English

Published by: Routledge

Published on: 30th October 2014

Format: LCP-protected ePub

Size: 1 Mb

ISBN: 9781136682759


Introduction

The question of whether it is ever permissible to believe on insufficient evidence has once again become a live question. Greater attention is now being paid to practical dimensions of belief, namely issues related to epistemic virtue, doxastic responsibility, and voluntarism.

About the Book

In this book, McCormick argues that the standards used to evaluate beliefs are not isolated from other evaluative domains. The ultimate criteria for assessing beliefs are the same as those for assessing action because beliefs and actions are both products of agency. Two important implications of this thesis, both of which deviate from the dominant view in contemporary philosophy, are 1) it can be permissible (and possible) to believe for non-evidential reasons, and 2) we have a robust control over many of our beliefs, a control sufficient to ground attributions of responsibility for belief.

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