Do Reasons and Evidence Share the Same Residence?

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

5 Citations (Scopus)
234 Downloads (Pure)

Abstract

This is part of an authors meets critics session on Daniel Star's wonderful book, Knowing Better. I discuss a potential problem with Kearns and Star's Reasons as Evidence thesis. The issue has to do with the difficulties we face is we treat normative reasons as evidence and impose no possession conditions on evidence. On such a view, it's hard to see how practical reasoning could be a non-monotonic process. One way out of the difficulty would be to allow for (potent) unpossessed reasons but insist that all evidence is possessed evidence. This option, I argue, isn't open to proponents of the Reasons as Evidence thesis. Instead, it seems that they'll have to say that all normative reasons are identified with pieces of possessed evidence. This requires the proponents of the Reasons as Evidence thesis to impose epistemic constraints on norms that some of us find objectionable.
Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)720–727
JournalPHILOSOPHY AND PHENOMENOLOGICAL RESEARCH
Volume93
Issue number3
Early online date27 Oct 2016
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - Nov 2016

Cite this