Epistemic Psychology

Baron Reed
Northwestern University

March 21, 2019
4:00 PM
Breland Hall, Room 333

Epistemic Psychology

Epistemology has tended to focus its attention on the evaluation of belief. In particular, is a given belief justified, rational, or an instance of knowledge, or does it fail in any of these dimensions? But belief is not the only sort of attitude for which epistemic evaluation is appropriate. Relatively little attention has been given to articulating what it means for a doubt, a hope, or a fear to be justified or rational. How does truth bear on the evaluation of attitudes like these? In this paper, I argue that a broader focus on epistemic attitudes—a focus that includes both an immediate concern with truth and a larger concern with how these attitudes function in an agent’s epistemic life and in a shared epistemic practice—is the most fruitful approach to take. In pursuing this approach, it becomes clear that, just as moral psychology is an indispensable part of ethics, so too epistemic psychology is an essential part of epistemology.