Abstract: Recent objections to epistemic permissivism have a metaepistemic flavor. Impermissivists argue that their view best accounts for connections between rationality, planning and deference. Impermissivism is also taken to best explain the value of rational belief and normative assessment. These objections pose a series of metaepistemic explanatory challenges for permissivism. In this paper, I illustrate how permissivists might meet their explanatory burdens by developing two permissivist metaepistemic views which fare well against the explanatory challenges.
In preparation (email for drafts)
A paper on norms of inquiry
A paper on the relationship between inquiry and bounded rationality
A paper on duties to gather evidence
A paper on tensions between norms governing inquiry and its outcomes
A paper on cluelessness and longtermism (with Andreas Mogensen)
Abstract: By the lights of traditional normative theories, human inquiry is substantially irrational. Humans regularly violate normative constraints set out by logic, probability theory, and decision theory. Traditional normative theories blame the agent, taking these findings to show that humans are irrational. By contrast, I suggest it is often better to blame the theory. Many seeming irrationalities are instances of rational inquiry by bounded agents. To defend this claim, I develop a consequentialist account of rational inquiry and metacognition. This view explains the value of rationality, accounts for duties to gather evidence, and is our best hope for vindicating empirically demonstrated biases as instances of rational inquiry.