Does Friendship Exert Pressure on Belief?

Sanford Goldberg
Northwestern University

September 5, 2019
4:00 PM
Breland Hall, Room 333

Does Friendship Exert Pressure on Belief?

It has been alleged that the demands of friendship conflict with the norms of epistemology – in particular, that there are cases in which the normative demands of friendship would require one to give a friend the benefit of the doubt, and thereby to believe something in violation of ordinary epistemic standards on justified and responsible belief (Baker 1987, Keller 2004, Stroud 2006, and Hazlett 2013).   While it appears that the requirements of friendship can put pressure on one to be epistemically partial to one’s friends, I argue that appearances are deceiving.  The burden of this paper is to explain these appearances away.  I do so by appeal to a kind of reason that has been insufficiently appreciated in the literature on this topic: value-reflecting reasons.  I contend that the impression of epistemic partiality in friendship dissipates once we acknowledge this category of reasons.