Stop Making Sense? On a Puzzle about Rationality

Clayton Littlejohn*

*Corresponding author for this work

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39 Citations (Scopus)
75 Downloads (Pure)

Abstract

In this paper, I present a puzzle about epistemic rationality. It seems plausible that it should be rational to believe a proposition if you have sufficient evidential support for it. It seems plausible that it rationality requires you to conform to the categorical requirements of rationality. It also seems plausible that our first-order attitudes ought to mesh with our higher-order attitudes. It seems unfortunate that we cannot accept all three claims about rationality. I will present three ways of trying to resolve this tension and argue that the best way to do this is to reject the idea that strong evidential support is the stuff rationality is made of. In the course of doing this, I shall argue that there is a special class of propositions about the requirements of rationality that we cannot make rational mistakes about and explain how this can be.

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)257-272
JournalPHILOSOPHY AND PHENOMENOLOGICAL RESEARCH
Volume96
Issue number2
Early online date22 Dec 2015
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - Mar 2018

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