To Sophie Horowitz we owe the following question: if having enough blood sugar contributes to our cognitive abilities, does it mean that we sometimes have an epistemic duty to eat a sandwich?
The last three posts in Owl’s Roost concerned some reasons to think that there are no practical reasons to believe and no duties of any sort to believe (or conclude, or become less confident, etc) – at least if we interpret “duty” in a way that’s friendly to deontologists in ethics. But never mind practical reasons to believe. Can there be epistemic reasons to act? Or, for that matter, epistemic duties to act? For example, deliberating is an action, something that you can intentionally do. One can also intentionally act to review the evidence in a complicated case, to ask experts for their opinions, or to check the origins of that article forwarded to one on Facebook that claims that cats cause schizophrenia. Do we have epistemic duties and epistemic reasons to do these things?
If we want money, there are things that we have reasons – practical reasons – to do. Call these practical reasons “financial reasons”. Similarly, there are things that we have reasons – practical reasons – to do if we want to be healthy. Call these practical reasons “health reasons”. “Health reasons” are practical reasons that apply to people whose goal is health, “financial reasons” are practical reasons that apply to people whose goal is money. Now, suppose your goal is not health, or wealth, or taking a trip on the Trans-Siberian Railroad, or breeding Ocicats in all the official 12 colors, or doing well on the philosophy job market without losing your mind. Your goal happens to be knowledge – in general or in a specific topic. Or maybe your goal is to be epistemically rational – you dislike superstition, wishful thinking, paranoia, and so on – or to have justified beliefs if you can. Just like health, wealth, train riding or Ocicat breeding, knowledge and justified beliefs are goals that give rise to practical reasons. Practical reasons to deliberate well, to review evidence, to avoid some news outlets, and even, at times, to eat a sandwich. Can these be called “epistemic reasons”? Yes, but in a sense parallel to “financial reasons” and “health reasons”, not in a sense that contrasts them with practical reasons. Is “eat a sandwich when hunger clouds your cognitive capacities” an epistemic norm? Yes and no. Yes in the sense that “make sure to clean your brushes when you paint pictures” is an aesthetic norm, and no in the sense that “orange doesn’t go with purple” is an aesthetic norm. Cleaning one’s brushes is conducive to creating beauty but it’s not in itself beautiful. To the extent that one wants to create beauty using paintbrushes, one usually has a reason to clean them. To the extent that one wants to come up with nice valid arguments in one’s paper, one has a reason to eat enough before writing. That does not make eating that sandwich epistemically rational in the same sense that believing what the evidence suggests is epistemically rational. Eating that sandwich is a way to make yourself epistemically rational, which happens to be what you want. In short, the adjective “epistemic”, now added to a larger number of nouns than ever before in the history of philosophy, can signify a type of normativity, a kind of reasons, or it can signify a type of object to which a norm applies, the stuff that a reason is concerned with, which happens to be knowledge or belief rather than money, paintings, Ocicats, cabbages or kings. I think the distinction needs to be kept in mind.
So…. “Epistemic duties to act” is just another name for “practical reasons that one has to act if one is after knowledge or justified belief”. Or is it really? Some might argue that there might be epistemic duties that do not depend on what one is after. Knowledge, truth, justified belief, or epistemic rationality are, say, objectively good things and one has a duty to pursue them – we’re talking something resembling a categorical imperative, not a hypothetical one. Perhaps we should seek knowledge, or at least some intrinsically valuable kinds thereof, regardless of what we happen to want. But “one should seek knowledge”, as well as “one should seek epistemic rationality” and “one should seek the truth” are only epistemic norms in the sense that they happen to be about knowledge, rationality, etc. They are not different in kind from the practical directives “one should seek beauty”, “one should seek pleasure, “one should seek honor”, and so on. Why one might want to seek knowledge is an issue for epistemologists, but it is also an issue for old-fashioned ethicists, theorists of the good life, who try to figure out what, in general, is worth pursuing. It makes sense to say that Sherlock Holmes, who refuses to pursue any knowledge that isn’t relevant directly to the cases he encounters as a detective, is missing out on something good, or on a part of the good life, and it makes sense to say (though I am not the type to say it) that he is irrational in refusing to pursue more knowledge. But to say that he is thereby epistemically irrational is odd. He is Holmes. He is as epistemically rational as it gets. If he is irrational, it’s a practical irrationality – albeit not in the colloquial sense of “practical” – in refusing to pursue episteme outside the realm of crime detection.
The View from the Owl's Roost 