The Appraisal of Belief

Abstract

Many contemporary epistemologists take their discipline to be a normative enterprise, much like ethics. According to this view, while ethics studies practical norms, normative epistemology studies epistemic norms: facts about what makes a belief epistemically justified, epistemically rational, supported by epistemic reasons, or what we epistemically ought to believe. In this dissertation, I argue against this general view of the subject matter of epistemology, with a particular focus on metaphysical accounts of what the epistemic domain itself could be. In Chapter One, I argue against two metaphysical accounts of what the epistemic domain is: what I call the institutional and valuative. In Chapter Two, I argue against the view that the epistemic domain is defined by the constitutive features of belief. In Chapter Three, having rejected the existence of a distinctively epistemic domain, I go on to argue for a substantive claim about what we ought to believe: namely, that we ought to believe charitably of others when the evidence regarding their attitudes is inconclusive.