Belief, Agency, and Knowledge

Abstract Epistemology is not just about the nature of knowledge or the analysis of concepts such as ‘knows’ and ‘justified’, it’s also about what we ought to believe and how we should investigate and reason about what is the case. This is a book focused on these normative aspects of epistemology. More specifically, it is concerned with the nature of epistemic norms and the relation these have to the value of knowledge and the structure of doxastic agency. The first part develops a theory of doxastic agency according to which believers exercise agency with respect to their beliefs primarily in the always ongoing activity of maintaining systems of belief. The second part develops an account of the grip epistemic norms have on us and the nature of our epistemic values, which explains these in terms of the way a state, such as a person’s belief, can be subject to robust “state norms” and valued accordingly for its stability within the practices constitutive of epistemic communities. The third part proposes inferentialist foundations for a meta-epistemological theory of epistemic discourse that takes seriously the idea that knowledge attributions are partly normative and hence should be partly classified on the ‘ought’ side of the division between claims about what reality is like and claims about what people ought to do, think, and feel.