Simon Graf PhD

 September 15th, 2024 until December 14th, 2024

Affiliation: University of Leeds

Research for a study about:

Epistemic Conflicts: Incommensurability and Permissibility

During my time at the IVC I am working on a novel treatment of so-called permissive cases, that is, cases in which one body of evidence seemingly rationalises multiple doxastic attitudes. The question of whether there are permissive cases or whether rationality always recommends a unique rational attitude has recently received much attention in epistemology. While permissivists believe that there are at least some permissive cases, impermissivists argue that there is a unique attitude for every evidential situation. Instead of contributing to this debate directly by providing arguments in favour or against permissivism, I argue that apparently permissive cases are best understood as epistemic conflicts between incommensurable doxastic attitudes. That is, instead of understanding the doxastic attitudes which are rationalized by the evidence to be equally supported, we shall treat them as being supported by independent and non-directly comparable, i.e., incommensurable, epistemic standards. This novel treatment of permissive cases is supported by the observation that these cases do show various idiosyncratic characteristics of comparisons under incommensurability, such as sweetening insensitivity (improving either of the alternatives does not necessarily resolve the conflict), bindingness (ending up with one alternative binds one to appeal to similar resolutions in analogous future conflicts), and angst (resolving the conflict often comes with a distinct uncertainty about whether one has responded rightly).

Lecture

Epistemic Conflicts: Permissibility and Incommensurability

Philosophy of Science Colloquium Talk

Date: October 24, 2024

Time: 4.45-6.15 pm

Venue:  Lecture Hall 2G, NIG Universitätsstraße 7, 2nd floor, 1090 Vienna

Abstract

Sometimes we face choices in which the different values we subscribe to give us conflicting recommendations. This talk sets out to compare these value-conflict cases with so-called permissive cases, which are cases in which one body of evidence seemingly rationalizes multiple doxastic attitudes. The proposed resemblance arises from a similarity in the underlying conflicts displayed in these cases: while the former involve conflicting values, the latter involve conflicting epistemic standards. In both instances, we are faced with incommensurable alternatives which are supported by independent and non-directly comparable normative sources. By showing that permissive cases share the idiosyncratic features of comparisons under incommensurability, we gain a better understanding of numerous issues, such as the alleged arbitrariness of permissive attitudes. Furthermore, I will demonstrate that the proposed strategy is neutral regarding whether epistemic rationality is genuinely permissive. While some understandings of incommensurability support a permissive interpretation, others can be used to motivate impermissivism. This shifts the debate between permissivists and impermissivists by reducing normative questions about epistemic rationality to more fundamental questions about the nature of incommensurability.

Report

From September 2024 to December 2024, I had the privilege to work as a research fellow at the Institute Vienna Circle, which provided a vibrant and interesting research environment. In particular, my interaction with the institute members, the other fellows, as well as the weekly seminars, were fruitful in further developing several key issues of my proposed research. A special thanks goes to Georg Schiemer, for his support and for the opportunity to work as a fellow at the institute.
The main aim of my research stay was to further develop my novel treatment of so-called permissive cases as epistemic conflicts; that is, cases in which different incommensurable epistemic standards support different conflicting doxastic attitudes.

During my time at the institute, I primarily worked on two papers which I presented at the Philosophy of Science Colloquium, as well as the HPS Dissertant*innenseminar respectively. Both of these papers have been submitted to high-ranking international journals. The first paper is a refined version of my treatment of epistemic conflicts, as developed in my PhD thesis. My research stay helped me to refine issues of how to exactly understand the incommensurability involved in epistemic conflicts and how to model diachronic rational development in the face of these conflicts (and normative conflicts in general).

The second paper is concerned with the apparent epistemic freedom supported by so-called self-fulfilling belief cases. Here, the work on decision theory and rational decision-making I conducted at the institute enabled me to show that extant treatments of self-fulfilling belief cases ignore the power of self-fulfilling beliefs to transform practical considerations into evidence about prospective behaviour. This enabled me to argue that, despite their reception in the literature, self-fulfilling belief cases do not support any kind of epistemic freedom. This is an important insight that allows me to generalize the proposed conflict treatment of permissive cases since self-fulfilling belief cases are apparently permissive but nonetheless do not involve any conflicting epistemic standards.

The titles are as follows: ‘Epistemic Conflicts: Incommensurability and Permissibility’ & ‘Against Epistemic Freedom’.
The papers will be linked as soon as they have gone through the review process.

In addition, during my time at the Institute, I have completed a chapter in an edited volume together with two colleagues, which can be found here: https://philpapers.org/rec/WANAOD-3.