Research & Publications
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PhD Dissertation Abstract
Can features of beliefs other than those that suggest that the beliefs are true (like being supported by the evidence) be relevant with respect to the beliefs’ normative status (e.g., whether they are justified, whether they count as knowledge, whether we ought or are permitted to hold them, etc.)? This is the question that I will be trying to answer in my dissertation. I argue that they can. That is, I argue for doxastic impurism, according to which such non-alethic considerations can be relevant with respect to the normative status of a belief. Doxastic impurism thus addresses issues at the heart of the ethics of belief, such as how epistemic, practical, and moral normativities relate to one another. And doxastic impurism is particularly salient today in our digital, post-truth era, in which we are confronted with new doxastic and ethical challenges such as the spread of misinformation through digital media, information overload, statistical discrimination, algorithmic bias, and more. Doxastic impurism is also especially relevant in the current COVID-19 pandemic, in that global handling of the pandemic has highlighted the power of both information and misinformation, and, at a more local level, suggested that emotional limitations (and in particular the threat of emotional overload paralleling the threat of information overload) can be relevant with respect to our doxastic norms.
At least, this is what I suggest in arguing for doxastic impurism, one of my arguments for doxastic impurism being that our emotional limitations are relevant with respect to our doxastic norms. I argue likewise that our bounded rationality is relevant with respect to our doxastic norms, and that we should therefore accept doxastic impurism. Another positive argument I offer in favor of doxastic impurism is that it gets it right whereas doxastic purism gets it wrong when we consider what our doxastic norms ought to look like in light of the effects of epistemic injustice on the doxastic self-confidence of marginalized subjects. By “doxastic self-confidence” here I mean roughly one’s confidence in one’s intellectual abilities. Doxastic impurism is also the correct view, I argue, in the sort of stereotyping and profiling cases discussed in the moral encroachment literature, as well as the practical stakes cases discussed in the pragmatic encroachment literature; in many cases of religious belief, including Pascalian wager-type cases; in cases involving self-fulfilling beliefs in the contexts of health and athletic performance; with respect to certain beliefs involved in psychological defense mechanisms; in promise-keeping; in cases involving epistemic partiality, and more. I also defend doxastic impurism against topical objections such as what I call The Trump Objection, according to which doxastic impurism permits exactly the sort of non-truth-oriented, irresponsible, and self-serving believing which has recently been so detrimental to our democracies and to our very lives.
