Judgment Puzzles. In Conversation With Pascal Engel

Abstract

It is a pleasure to continue a longstanding conversation with our honoree on questions about the nature of belief and how that bears on the theory of knowledge. Can belief be a sort of performance? Can it be motivated at all, much less properly motivated, by reasons that are pragmatic rather than epistemic? These are questions on which we disagree, under what Engel considers a more general clash over the sort of normativity that is proper to epistemology. He attributes to me a kind of teleological/axiological normativity, whereas he opts rather for a normativity that is deontic. In his view there are norms of belief, at a minimum a truth norm, and also a knowledge norm. You ought not to believe what is not true, nor even what you do not know to be true, see [Engel 2013], [Sosa 2013].