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Process-oriented rationality

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Process-oriented rationality

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Content Process-Oriented Rationality by Abelard Podgorski A Dissertation Presented to the FACULTY OF THE USC GRADUATE SCHOOL UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY (PHILOSOPHY) August 2016 1 Acknowledgments This dissermtion is the culmination of three years of work in the department of philosophy at the University of Southern California, whose support has made it possible. There is enough blame for it to go around, but a few individuals deserve special mention. In the first place, of course, I would like to thank my parents, who played no small part in my coming to be, and, if the hypothesis of nominative determinism is to be believed, by the act of naming me made my coming to philosophy inevitable. I can only hope the power of names ends there. I am not sure monastic life would suit me. I would like to thank Debra Nails, who introduced me to philosophy and whose palpable and contagious love for Plato and the discipline itself gave me the aspiration to pursue a life in contemplation of the Forms. I would like to thank the graduate students and faculty at USC, particularly Stephen Finlay, Jacob Ross, and Ralph Wedgwood, for the feedback they gave on my proposal, which is responsible for the structure of the dissertation even now, for the comments and criticism they have given on many drafts of many chapters, which doubtlessly remain inadequately addressed but have made the dissertation stronger, and finally, in Jake's case, for failing to talk me out of the project entirely. Most of all I would like to thank my advisor Mark Schroeder, for whom the finitude of time 1s only a minor inconvenience. His guidance at every stage of the process has turned my clumsy philosophical fumblings into something coherent and presenmble, and I have never stopped learning from him how to write, think, and navigate the profession. His excellence as a philosopher and generosity as a mentor are model of the virtuous philosophical life, and my daimonion speaks with his voice. 2 If history had gone a little differently and I had not met any of these people, I might still, out of sheer modal stubbornness, be writing a preface like this, but I have little doubt it would be thanking much less deserving people and introducing a much worse dissertation. 3 Table of Contents Introduction Chapter One: A Reply to the Synchronist Chapter Two: Dynamic Conservatism Chapter Three: Dynamic Permissivism Chapter Four: Rational Delay Chapter Five: Rational Norms and Rational Ideals Closing Thoughts References 4 5 20 35 70 96 134 159 162 Introduction States and Processes Imagine Alice is wondering whether she should buy a lottery ticket. She remembers how infinitesimal the chances of winning are. She considers the bills coming up and recalls how close she was last month to failing to pay them. She thinks about how most of what she considers valuable does not require tremendous wealth to achieve. At the same time, she walks past a bakery, and the smell of fresh baguette fills her with a kind of reckless, optimistic exhilaration, and so Alice feels lucky. She sets all of those other thoughts aside, forming both the belief that she should buy the ticket and the intention to do so. Something has gone wrong with Alice. She has failed normatively, opening her up to a distinctive sort of criticism, which brings with it, among other things, harsh wags of her mother's finger. She has been irrational. But for what do we criticize her? Where do we locate her normative failure? One natural suggestion is that she is irrational because she has the wrong attitudes - she believes and intends things that are not sensible by her own lights. There is something rationally criticizable, we might say, about having the information she does together with the attitudes she does. After she forms the belief that buying the ticket is correct and the intention to buy the ticket, she is in a bad mental state. But there's also another way we may think Alice went wrong. There may be a problem not with what she thought, but with how she thought; a problem with what happened in the process of 5 deliberating. She cut that deliberation short prematurely, we might think. She gave the wrong weights to various considerations when deciding what to believe. She ignored powerful evidence that bore on her decision. Most cases where it is uncontroversial that an agent has been irrational are like Alice's, in that we have both kinds of candidates available for the source of rational failure - one located in the agents attitudes and overall mental state at particular times, and one located in the processes by which the agent manages those attitudes. It is natural to ask, then, whether rationality is concerned with the former or the latter - that is, whether the norms of rationality are what I will call state-oriented or process-oriented, or both. This question, different answers to which, I believe, have fundamental implications for how we understand the landscape of rationality, is the topic of this dissertation. The answer is not immediately obvious. In paradigm cases of irrationality like Alice's, these two potential sources of failure can be difficult to disentangle. Reasoning processes which look, intuitively, like they've gone awry tend to result in attitudes or states which look bad by the agent's own lights, and such attitudes or states are frequently the result of reasoning processes which look like they've gone awry. While we may be confident that some rational failure has occurred, it's not clear that our ordinary intuitions, insofar as they can be trusted, are fine-grained enough to pick out exactly what the source of that failure is. Strikingly, the question of whether norms are state-oriented or process-oriented is rarely explicitly addressed 1 . The literature does, however, implicitly reflect a picture that is not neutral on the matter. The vast majority of norms proposed have been interpreted as state-oriented norms. Copious 1 Kolodny (2005, 2007), Lam (2007) and Hedden (2015) are notable exceptions. 6 ink has been spilled over how best to formulate norms of this kind (Broome 2013, Lord 2011, Way 2009), but as a representative sample, we find such norms as: Enkrasia: You are required to intend to P, if you believe you ought to P. Means-end coherence: You are required to intend to P, if you intend to Q and believe that P is a necessary means to Q. Noncontradiction: You are required not to believe both P and ~ P. Probabilistic coherence: You are required to have degrees of belief which satisfy the probability axioms. Reasons: You are required to believe/desire/intend that P, if your (subjective) reasons favor believing/ desiring/intending that P. Process-oriented norms are, on the other hand, mostly neglected. Processes like reasoning are understood, implicitly or explicitly (Broome 2013, Hedden 2015), as merely the means by which we bring ourselves to satisfy state-oriented norms. On the picture presented by the literature, rational norms govern our states fundamentally, and our processes are at best of indirect, derivative, and secondary rational concern. This picture of rationality as a system of norms on states, or the combinations of our attitudes, I will argue, is not only incomplete, but misguided. Instead, we should understand rationality as a system of principles governing the operation of processes like reasoning and deliberation, both conscious and unconscious. As they chug along, these processes take various attitudes as inputs, and spit others out as outputs, and as a result, agents who are engaging in them rationally will tend to 7 exhibit certain patterns of attitudes with a rough correspondence to those described in some of the principles above. But we are not rationally required in any direct way to satisfy those principles. The sorts of norms that such a picture might include are less familiar. Part of the project of this dissertation is to begin to sketch a system of such norms. Here is one candidate, for illustration: Dynamic Evidentialism: When considering whether to believe P, you are required to grant weight only to those considerations that bear on the truth of P. The state-oriented and process-oriented models represent very different perspectives about the relationship between rational criticism and the elements of our mental life. Whether our picture of rationality is oriented towards states or processes, moreover, has implications for many contemporary disputes in epistemology and the philosophy of rationality more generally. The assumption of the state-oriented model, I will endeavor to show, has led to a myopic view of the space of possible answers to these disputes. Rational Norms, Rational Failure, and "Rational" Before I describe the structure of the dissertation, it will be helpful to sharpen the question I am interested in and the commitments of the answer I am giving, and preclude some natural misunderstandings about the project. The claim I will ultimately defend is that rational norms are process-oriented, rather than attitude or state-oriented. In this section, I'll say a little bit about how I will be understanding "rational norms". In the following section, I'll discuss some potential confusions about the state-oriented/process-oriented distinction. My claim, that rational norms do not govern attitudes, may strike one as immediately untenable. After all, we call beliefs and other attitudes rational and irrational all the time. If rational 8 norms don't really apply to such things, as I claim, doesn't it follow that this sort of talk is fundamentally misguided? If this were so, then the process-oriented picture would be radically revisionary of ordinary thought and speech, and therefore under a heavy burden of proof. Although I think the process-oriented picture is certainly revisionary of prevailingphilosrphical dogma about rationality, however, I do not think that it is revisionary of our ordinary usage of the term "rational". When I claim that rational norms do not apply to attitudes, this does not imply that it is inappropriate or false to call attitudes rational or irrational. That is, my claim is not one about the proper application of the predicate "rational". Rather, it is a claim about the source of a particular kind of normative deficiency. I am assuming that agents like Alice are guilty of a distinctive failure. When agents fail in this way, they are subject to a certain kind of criticism, of which the wagging finger of Alice's mother is one expression. We describe these failures and express this criticism by saying the agent has been "irrational", so we may call these "rational failures". A "rational norm", as I mean it, is a principle such that one fails rationally in virtue of violating it. My claim, then, is that we do not fail rationally in virtue of violating state-oriented principles, but rather in virtue of violating process-oriented ones. This is, I think, roughly what most philosophers mean when they discuss rational norms as well. Brian Hedden, probably the most explicit advocate of purely state-oriented rational norms, provides a very similar characterization (2015, p. 10). So I do not think I am talking past the defenders of the traditional view in the literature. Nevertheless, in the final chapter of the dissertation I will consider how one might interpret state-oriented principles as something other than rational norms thus defined. 9 As for the words "rational" and "irrational", they are used in many, many ways. Aristotle tells us that man is a rational animal. Your friend Mary may be, in a general way, a rational person. The belief in grand illuminati conspiracies is irrational. The action of suicide might be irrational. The tendency or disposition to favor short-term interests may be irrational. A government's strategy in the Middle East may be irrational. If you walk into my living room and see my sofa flush facing the wall and two armchairs stacked atop each other, you may well call the arrangement of my furniture irrational. Even in uses when we apply "rational" to the same kind of object, like a belief, philosophers have distinguished different senses of the term, as in the distinction bet\veen "doxastic" and "propositional" rationality of belief Most or all of these uses of "rational" and "irrational" are no doubt related to each other and to what I have called rational failures. Plausibly, for instance, a person is more or less irrational, in the general sense (rather than on a particular occasion), to the extent that they are disposed to fail rationally. Giving an account of all these uses is a serious project all its own and I will not attempt it here. The important thing to note is that it does not follow from the fact that we appropriately call X irrational that anyone fails rationally in virtue of X. It is controversial, for instance, whether one fails rationally in virtue of one's actions rather than, say, one's intentions or one's decisions. But even if one never fails rationally in virtue of one's actions, it may still be right to call actions irrational, if they follow from an intention which is the source of a rational failure. This is just one example. Nobody thinks that one fails rationally in virtue of one's living room decor (rather than whatever behavior led to the room being set up in such a ridiculous way), even though we may call the arrangement of my room irrational. On my view, attitudes, the furniture of our minds, are no different in this respect. It is the decorating, not the decoration, for which we are aptly criticized. 10 Processes, Diachronicity, and Historicity It is worth saying a few things by way of clarification of the state-oriented/process-oriented distinction as well. First, in suggesting that the norms of rationality are process-oriented rather than attitude or state-oriented, I do not mean to make much hay of a sharp metaphysical distinction between states or attitudes and processes. Perhaps believing that P is instantiated by having a billiard ball with "P" written on it in one's belief box. Then beliefs look very different in metaphysical kind from the dynamic activity of processes like consideration. But maybe believing that P is instantiated by having a little propeller with "P" written on it whirling around in one's head. Then believing is, loosely speaking, also something like an activity. In that case, the distinction between attitudes and what I have been calling processes, things like consideration, is one bet\veen t\vo kinds of activities, one of which is relatively simple, homogenous, low-level, and self-sustaining, and one which is typically composed ofheterogenous steps and which has a managerial role over the other in the mental economy. We can then understand my project as defending norms that concern processes of the latter type, over more familiar norms that govern belief, intention, etc. The arguments I give will not (I hope) depend on which of these psychological models of our attitudes is closer to the truth. Second, it is important to separate the distinction bet\veen state-oriented norms and process-oriented norms from the distinction bet\veen !Jnchronic and diachronic norms - that is, those that govern agents at a particular time and those that govern agents over periods of time. Because of the way processes unfold over extended periods of time, distinctly process-oriented norms will be diachronic, but not all diachronic norms are process-oriented. Norms that require agents who have one set of attitudes at a time tl to have another set of attitudes at a different time t2, like Bayesian conditionalization, are diachronic but still state-oriented - they tell us what attitudes to have and not how rational processes operate. While synchronic state-oriented norms will be my primary target, since they are the most 11 ubiquitous, and a diachronic state-oriented picture is certainly closer to the sort of view I have in mind, I think the diachronic state-oriented view does not go far enough. I will have more to say about this distinction and the reasons to prefer the robustly process-oriented picture in Chapter Four. Third, we should resist a line of thought, perhaps tempting, that runs as follows: "Suppose that rational norms are process-oriented. Surely, then it follows that it is irrational to have an attitude as a result of a process that violates these norms. But then at the very least there will be rational norms on states that say things like "you are rationally required not to believe Pas a result of a process that ... ", with the ellipsis filled out by whatever account we have of process irrationality. This is a mistake. It is true that one has, necessarily, failed rationally if one believes something as a result of an irrational process. But that doesn't mean one fails rationally in virtue of having that belief, which is, recall, what it takes to be a genuine rational norm in the sense I mean. Similarly, one may, necessarily, fail morally if one is wealthy as a result of stealing from another. But this is in virtue of the stealing, not in virtue of the being-wealthy-as-a-result-of-stealing. Indeed, one has failed rationally if one has blue eyes after being irrational. But "you are rationally required not to have blue eyes after failing rationally" is not a genuine rational norm. We may distinguish, with this in mind, process-historical norms on states from ahistorical norms on processes. Norms of the former sort tell us to have, or not to have, states with a certain procedural history, like "Do not have beliefs that are the result of bad reasoning." They refer to processes, but still suggest we are irrational directly in virtue of (in this case, historical) features of our states. Ahistorical norms on processes, on the other hand, say things like "Do not reason badly." It is the operation of the process, directly, in virtue of which we are irrational. 12 This distinction is subtle, and a view on which rational norms are process-historical on states much resembles one which is ahistorical on processes. There are, however, some differences. For instance, the process-historical norm "do not have beliefs that are the result of bad reasoning" suggests that we are irrational while we have the belief, and the ahistorical process norm "do not reason badly" suggests that we are irrational while we are reasoning. I think our intuitions about irrationality favor the ahistorical, process-oriented version in such cases, and I will argue in chapter one that there are arguments against historical views which have no force against the ahistorical process view. The process-historical account may be the right account of at least some uses of the word "rational" applied to states, but I do not think it is the right account of the conditions of rational failure. So the view I develop is meant to be an ahistorical process-oriented one. For the most part, however, I will not attend to this distinction. The paradigmatic state-oriented norms in the literature are not process historical, and if it turns out that the only plausible state-oriented norms refer back to processes in this way, I take the overall process-oriented picture to be vindicated in spirit if not letter. Rational Criticism and Cognitive Limitations I have left the precise nature of rational failure and rational criticism intentionally vague. Any account of this would be controversial, and as much as possible, I will rely in the dissertation on ordinary judgments about when agents have been irrational, to avoid commitment to anything stronger than is required. Nevertheless, there is a general conception of the nature of such failure that stands in a mutually supportive relationship with the judgments to which I will appeal. The idea is that rational failure is a kind of nonmoral analogue to moral fault or blameworthiness, and that rational criticism is a kind of nonmoral analogue to blame. This view has the virtue of explaining why rationality, unlike knowledge, seems to depend on an agent's limited information and beliefs rather than the full objective facts (for we do not blame people for not responding to things they are in no 13 position to know). It explains the quasi-moral tenor of Alice's mother's wagging finger. It also synergizes with a theme that will recur throughout the dissertation - that traditional state-oriented norms are in a poor position to make rationality sensitive in the right ways human agents are cognitive!J limited - by constraints to our memory, our ability to handle large amounts of information, and our finite processing speed. The model of rational failure as blameworthiness represents one way to explain why our rational norms should be sensitive to such limitations - it is inappropriate to blame people for not doing things that were beyond their capacity to do. One does not need to accept this model to find the arguments I will give forceful, and I will largely set it aside until the last chapter. But it doesn't hurt. Ancestry The project and view of this dissertation has two particularly notable precursors. In an exchange with John Broome over whether principles like Enkmsia above are narrow or wide-scope (that is, whether we should read it as "You are required to [if you believe you ought to P, then you intend to P]" or "If you believe you ought to P, then you are required to intend to P"), Niko Kolodny (2005, 2007) suggests that we should understand the dispute as one not over norms on states (as they are formulated), but rather as "process" norms telling us what to do "going forward", if you find yourself satisfying the antecedent but not the consequent. As he notes, understood as synchronic rational norms on states, wide and narrow scope norms are violated in exactly the same circumstances and the wide/narrow-scope dispute turns out to have little upshot. Kolodny's suggestive thoughts about the distinction between state and process norms and its implications are a major inspiration for this project, but he does not commit himself to the view I will defend here, that we should abandon norms on states altogether. The closest thing to an argument to 14 that effect that might be culled from his discussion is the brief suggestion that because norms on states only tell you how to be, and not what to do, they cannot guide our behavior. If rational norms must be guiding, this would tell us that rational norms must be process norms. 2 However, I would not want to rely on this kind of argument for two reasons. First, it is not clear why we should expect rational norms, in general, to be guiding. At least on the way I have characterized them, rational norms are closely tied to criticism, which is a different role than guidance, and I do not think we can assume a simple necessary connection between these two roles, one of which is normally retrospective in character and one of which is prospective. Kolodny himself only suggests that rational norms are "at least sometimes" guiding. (2005) Second, it is not clear, in any case, why state-oriented norms could not play a guidance role. If one is motivated to behave by a recognition of when one would violate a particular norm, this seems sufficient for being guided by that norm. And I see no reason why a norm telling us how to be could not therefore motivate us to do what will let us avoid being that way. A sign instructing people not to be on the grass is as effective as one instructing them not to step on it. A second ancestor of the view I defend is that of Barry Lam. In his dissertation (2007), Lam argues for what he called "dynamicism", the view that all epistemic norms concern changes of belief over time, rather than states of belief at times. His thesis, however, is only concerned with epistemic rationality, and this is reflected in the arguments he appeals to, which involve cases like the lottery paradox which have no obvious analogue when it comes to practical rationality. My ambition is to say something more general about rational norms, so those arguments, even if successful, would not be enough. 2 I<orsgaard (2013) makes a similar suggestion. 15 In addition, the thesis of dynamicism mkes norms to govern attitude changes. That is not the same as our thesis, that they govern the operation of processes. While processes cerminly often result in changes of attitude, on the view I propose norms may govern more fine-grained features of the operation of processes, such as what steps to take in the middle of an extended deliberation, independently of how one changes ones' mind at the end. In addition, there are processes, like brainstorming, which do not necessarily or even typically end in changes or reaffirmations of attitudes, and I mke rational norms to apply to these as well. Both of these views set the stage for the kind of project I am attempting here, but their ambitions differ from mine and their arguments are independent of those I will put forth. The Structure This dissertation has five chapters. Each, except the last, is designed to smnd more or less on its own. As a whole, it is organized as a progressive march away from a purely state-oriented model of rationality towards a purely process-oriented one, in a way intended to allow the reader to get off the boat at any point, rejecting the arguments in later chapters without giving up the lessons from earlier chapters. In the first chapter, I consider the recent case given by Brian Hedden (2015) for the claim that all rational norms are synchronic, on the grounds that diachronic norms are inconsistent with internalism about rationality and that they cannot account for the irrelevance of facts about identity to what it is rational for us to believe. I show that Hedden's arguments have force only against the background of the smte-oriented picture, where all rational norms are norms on attitudes like belief A view on which the objects of rational concern are processes is immune to his critique. In addition, I provide a positive case that provided that it is rational to take any time at all to form beliefs after 16 acquiring evidence, at least some norms must be diachronic. If this is as far as the reader gets before getting off the boat, they will have learned at least that there are diachronic norms, that there are advantages to understanding them as process-oriented norms, and therefore that the near-complete neglect of such norms in the literature leaves a gap in our understanding of rationality. Having made room for some process norms, in the next two chapters I consider two active debates in the rationality of belief - the debate over conservatism, the view that the mere fact that one already believes something can make it rational to keep believing it, and permissivism, the view that agents with the same evidence can rationally disagree. I argue that these positions are attractive, but that the views representing them in the literature are vulnerable to powerful objections. If, however, we reject widely assumed state-oriented versions of requirements capturing our responsiveness to our reasons, in favor of process-oriented versions of these requirements, the door opens to distinctive dynamic versions of conservatism and permissivism which are independently plausible and immune to the problems for traditional versions of those views. In developing the dynamic solution, I begin to give a positive sketch of what plausible dynamic norms might be and how they interact. Since conservatism is itself one kind of permissive view, in Chapter Two I consider those challenges specific to conservatism, and in Chapter Three I consider the issues facing permissivism more generally. If the reader gets at least this far before balking, they will have learned not only that there are at least some process-oriented norms, but that accepting certain norms of this kind as replacements for commonly endorsed state-oriented norms provides us a novel and attractive resolution of important contemporary disputes. In Chapter Four, I make a case directly against the state-oriented picture more broadly. In particular, I argue, state-oriented principles are unable to give a good account of the phenomenon of rational delay - how it can be rational for finite, cognitively limited agents like us to take time to update 17 our attitudes. I begin by showing how synchronic state-oriented norms relating our attitudes are inconsistent with rational delay. Then, I show how revised norms that are diachronic but still state oriented must, in order to avoid the objection, be formulated in a way that suggests they are best understood as the mere shadows of a system of norms on processes. I then show how considering a process-oriented approach to rational delay gives us a way to capture the spirit of motivations on both sides of the dispute over wide and narrow scope. If the reader is still with me, they will have accepted that state-oriented norms do not capture the conditions of rational failure. In the final chapter, I consider the prospects of denying that rational norms need be sensitive to our cognitive limitations, a move which would cast doubt on intuitions relied on throughout the dissertation. After arguing that this move is unattractive, I consider a retreat position for the defender of state-oriented principles, one on which those principles are understood not directly as what I have called rational norms, but rather are taken to have a more fundamental, and explanatory relation to rational norms on processes, for instance, by serving as a system of ideals to be approximated. I argue that many of the most common state-oriented principles cannot plausibly be understood to have this role, and that this kind of approach has difficulty distinguishing this role from one that might be played by fully objective conditions like truth. Although I do not give conclusive reasons against the possibility of such a strategy's success, I hope at least to show the reader that this is where defenders of state-oriented principles ought to tum their attention, and that it will be difficult to reinterpret what a system of traditional state-oriented principles is supposed to describe which preserves much of what their defenders have said about them and still maintains a central role in explaining rationality. The task of the dissertation is only the beginning of a larger project, meant to set an agenda for exploration of a fuller process-oriented approach, which will have to be informed by what the cognitive sciences may have to say about the design of human cognitive processing. The positive 18 sketch I will have provided of a system of process norms will be only a bare outline, in need of refinement and elaboration. I will not have defended the norms I propose against other candidates in the process-oriented family. I will have said very little about the connection between rationality, understood in the process-oriented way, and other core normative concepts like "knowledge", "ought", "reasons", or "good". But anyone who is moved to try and fill these gaps has already steered the philosophical conversation about rationality far from where it is today, and even if I do not succeed in convincing the reader that the purely process-oriented view is correct, there is value in exploring the work that process norms can do and whether the attention of epistemologists and theorists of practical reason might be pulled a little further in their direction. 19 Chapter One A Reply to the Synchronist On the face of it, in ordinary practices of rational assessment, we criticize agents both for the combinations of attitudes, like belief, desire, and intention, that they possess at particular times, and for the ways that they behave cognitively over time, by forming, reconsidering, and updating those attitudes. Accordingly, philosophers have proposed norms of rationality that are synchronic- concerned fundamentally with our individual time-slices, and diachronic- concerned with our temporally extended behaviour. In the former camp, we find familiar norms of consistency in belief and intention, of adherence to the probability calculus in credences, and of the constraint our current evidence places on our attitudes. In the latter camp, not quite so well-explored, we find Bayesian demands that we update our credences according to Conditionalization 3 , and requirements that our attitudes exhibit various sorts of stability across time. The impulse to unsheathe Ockham's razor and trim the excess in our theory is strong, however. It is perhaps not surprising, then, that a handful of epistemologists have recently begun to question whether an account of rationality requires both kinds of norms. It is synchronic norms which 3 According to Conditionalization, one's credence in P after learning some evidence E should equal one's prior conditional credence Pr(P /E). See Teller 1972 for a canonical defense. 20 have the deeper history, and with the notable exception of Barry Lam (2007) 4 , these would-be-barbers 5 have attempted to cast doubt on the plausibility of diachronic norms altogether. My aim in this chapter is to address what I take to be the most direct and general recent attack on diachronic epistemic rationality, the arguments for so-called 'time-slice epistemology' by Brian Hedden (2015). I argue that Hedden's attempt to motivate the rejection of diachronic rational norms ultimately fails, and in particular that an independently attractive view about the nature of such norms, namely one on which such norms govern processes, escapes his assault unscathed. 1. Time-Slice Rationality As Hedden understands it, time-slice epistemology involves the conjunction of two claims: Synchronicity What attitudes you ought to have at a time does not directly depend on what attitudes you have at other times. Impartiality In determining what attitudes you ought to have, your beliefs about what attitudes you have at other times play the same role as your beliefs about what attitudes other people have. (p. 4) Although Hedden's paper largely consists in the application of arguments for Synchronicity and Impartiality to refute two specific norms, Conditionalization and Reflection, it is clear that Hedden takes the larger project of time-slice epistemology to be inconsistent with the existence of diachronic norms of rationality altogether 6 • Because my interest is in defending the possibility of diachronic 4 Lam argues for a thesis he calls the view that rational norms apply fundamentally to chang:s of belief. Although it is beyond the scope of this chapter to argue, I join Lam in endorsing a purely diachronic approach to rationality, though the process-oriented picture of diachronic norms I sketch in this chapter differs substantively from his view that such norms apply to mere attitude change. 5 See particularly Sarah Moss (unpublished, forthcoming), who explicitly sympathizes with this project, and David Christensen (2000), who does not, but who argues against a large class of diachronic norms. 6 Hedden informally characterizes time-slice epistemology as the thesis that 'the relationship between time-slices of the same person are not importantly different, for purposes of rational evaluation, from the relationship between time- 21 norms, I will not discuss Impartiality, which functions mainly as a constraint on !Jnchronic norms and which I take to be well-motivated 7 • I will focus attention instead on Synchronicity and the arguments meant to establish it, showing in the next section that even if the claim were true, it would not be sufficient to motivate the rejection of diachronic norms (even, plausibly reformulated, those Hedden explicitly addresses), and sketching a view of such norms that I will defend in the face of the considerations Hedden marshals against them. 2. The Argument from Internalism Hedden gives two arguments for Synchronicity. The first I will consider is an argument from Internalism. The core internalist intuition, as Hedden presents it, is that 'being rational is a matter of believing and behaving sensibly, given your perspective on the world' (p. 4). What is rational for an agent, according to the internalist, supervenes on her perspective. But, he argues, one's perspective on the world at a time is surely constituted by what one's mental life is like at that time. So, it looks like it follows that what is rational for you to believe at a time is fully determined by what your mental states are at that very time. The internalist intuition is not uncontroversial, and Hedden does not himself go so far as to endorse it outright, but he notes that this formulation of internalism is weak enough to be compatible even with Timothy Williamson's view that what is rational to believe is determined by what one knows, given that knowledge is a mental state. (p. 5) I myself take the internalist intuition to have a compelling basis and will not reject it here 8 . Indeed, we may even safely grant that the argument just presented is slices of different persons' and that 'the locus of rationality, so to speak, is the time-slice rather than the temporally extended agent' (p. 1) and elsewhere as committed to the claim that 'All requirements of rationality are synchronic.' (p. 3) 7 Motivation for Impartiality can be found in Christensen (1991) and Arntzenius (2003). 8 For a typical challenge, see Goldman (1999). It is defended in Conee and Feldman (2001). 22 sound. The problem, I suggest, is that Hedden's formulation of Synchronicity is simply too weak to motivate the rejection of diachronic norms. Recall: Synchronicity states that what attitudes an agent ought to have at a time is wholly determined by their mental states at that time. For this to fully vindicate a purely synchronic model of rationality, however, an additional claim must be added: facts about what attitudes agents ought to have at particular times exhaust the demands of epistemic rationality. And this, I argue, the diachronist should reject. The mistake Hedden makes is much like the one underlying Zeno's infamous paradox of the arrow. Zeno notices that at each moment in time, an arrow does not change its position - it merely occupies its own space. So at each instant, the arrow does not move. Since there is no instant at which the arrow moves, he concludes, it never moves. Analogously, Hedden argues, according to internalism, what is rational for an agent at a time is determined by what they are like at that time. So at each instant, what is rational for an agent is determined purely synchronically. Since what is rational for an agent at each instant is determined purely synchronically, he implicitly concludes, rationality is purely synchronic. But the correct diachronist response here is likewise analogous to the proper response to the paradox of the arrow. The final step in either argument is invalid - just because there is no instant at which a phenomenon occurs does not mean that it never occurs. For there may be phenomena which are essentially diachronic, properties that temporal slices cannot possess but which temporally extended objects can. Motion is such a feature. And diachronists should say that rationality and irrationality, in at least some of its forms, is also such a feature. Some rational requirements, they can claim, are like the policeman's command 'Don't move!' There is no individual time-slice at which one violates this 23 command, only intervals during which one does so. Such norms tell us what is rational for agents over intervals in a way not reducible to what is rational for them at times. This does not mean abandoning or trivializing the intemalist insight. We may insist that the internalist claim, that what is rational for an agent supervenes on their perspective, is perfectly true. And it is perfectly true that what your perspective is at a moment is determined by what your mental states are like at that moment. But this is just a special case of a more general truth: what your perspective is like over any interval of time is determined by what your mental states are like during that interval. It follows that your rationality during an interval supervenes on your mental states during that interval. So the constraint internalism places on diachronic requirements is this: whatever fundamentally diachronic cognitive phenomena are assessable for rationality, their rationality will supervene on the agent's mental life during the interval in which they occur. Hedden misses this because the diachronic norms he considers are formulated as requirements on the attitudes one must have at a time, in virtue of facts about one's mental history, rather than requirements on essentially diachronic phenomena, in virtue of one's concurrent mental life. That is, they are historical norms on states rather than ahistorical norms on temporally extended objects. It could not plausibly be suggested that norms of the latter sort are outside the scope of his paper, for even his explicit target, Conditionalization, can be formulated so as to claim nothing about what attitudes are rational at individual times, instead describing only what changes in attitude are rational or irrational, a change being a paradigmatic example of an essentially diachronic unit. Though the view that rationality applies to mere changes is immune to the argument from intemalism, it is not the one I would like to defend. I suggest a different approach to diachronic norms. Just as we expect synchronic norms to be requirements on the most natural synchronic cognitive units, 24 attitudes such as belief, we should look for diachronic norms to govern the most natural diachronic cognitive units - processes such as reasoning. The notion of a process is a thicker one than that of mere change; it includes, significantly, a causal element. Norms on mere attitude change will not, in contrast to norms on processes, be able to distinguish shifts in opinion brought upon by pristine reasoning from those brought upon by repeated lightning strikes to the head. The view I propose, then, is that diachronic norms govern processes, temporally extended, causally continuous patterns of mental states. In light of internalism, those requirements will supervene on internal features of the agent during those processes. This sort of view is one that Hedden and other recent time-slice theorists do not explicitly address - their paradigm candidates for diachronic requirements are either norms that apply to mere changes, like Conditionalization, or norms that require broad coherence bet\veen our cognitive behaviour now and our cognitive behavior in the (possibly remote) past (Hedden 2013, 2015, Moss forthcoming). We have seen that by taking the norms to apply to diachronic phenomena rather than states, our picture avoids the argument from lnternalism. In what follows, we will see how the causal patterns approach in particular has the resources to deflect Hedden's second, and in his eyes, more central, objection. 3. The Argument From Personal Identity Hedden's second argument goes something as follows: to determine whether a diachronic principle is satisfied, one needs to know facts about the agent's personal identity over time. But one can know all there is to know about what an agent rationally ought to believe without settling the facts about personal identity. So one can know all there is to know about an agent's rationality without invoking diachronic principles. 25 To defend this argument, Hedden invites us to consider a case of fission such as those described by Derek Parfit (1971, 1984). An agent (Pre) steps into a teletransporter, which vaporizes her body and creates two duplicates (Lefty and Righty) in separate cities. It is not obvious what happens to Pre - whether she survives as Lefty, or Righty, or both, or neither. But to determine what Lefty and Righty rationally ought to believe, he claims, we do not need to know whether they are identical with Pre - we just need to know their current evidence. A diachronic principle like Conditionalization, which constrains future credences by past ones, would require us to settle the question of identity before settling what Lefty ought to do. 4. R-Relatedness Hedden anticipates a response that arises naturally from Parfit's own discussion of the fission cases. The objector rejects the significance of identity in favor of the significance of some psychological relation, call it 'R', which both duplicates may bear to Pre. Since whether R holds is settled in the case described, the case is no counterexample, provided the diachronic norms govern how we must be related to our R-ancestors rather than our past selves. But Hedden thinks that this response fails for two reasons. First, as Parfit notes (1984, p. 298) the R-relation comes in degrees. So, Hedden suggests (p. 7), it is natural to expect the degree to which a person's time-slices exhibit the R-relation to have some upshot for the way they are rationally assessed. But it is hard to see how rational requirements like Conditionalization can plausibly be made sensitive to these matters of degree. Second, Hedden thinks there is an explanatory challenge - the defender of the R-relation account should explain why the R-relation has its unique significance for rational assessment - why 26 collections of time slices united by the R-relation are importantly different, from the point of view of rationality, from other collections of time slices. He is skeptical that the challenge could be answered. These worries may have force against norms like Conditionalization, but if we understand the R-relation in the usual way, as some kind of causal psychological connectedness, the view about diachronic norms I suggested in the previous section, on which they are norms governingprocesses, can answer both challenges. We can both provide a natural account on which rational assessment is sensitive to differences in degree of R-relatedness, and explain why the R-relation in particular distinguishes those collections of time-slices that are subject to rational norms from those that are not. Notice that R-relatedness, on this picture, is a matter of how ones' mental states are causally related. So, differences in degrees of R-relatedness go hand in hand with differences in which causal patterns of mental states are exhibited. Processes, like reasoning, deliberation, and belief formation, in turn, just are causal patterns of mental states. Since these are exactly the things which are, on our view, the fundamental objects of diachronic rational assessment, facts about rationality will closely depend on the strength of the R-relation among time-slices. 9 This same feature promises an explanation for why R-relatedness bet\veen time-slices, among the countless relations time slices might bear to each other, has special rational significance. Hedden's skepticism makes sense if one assumes that all diachronic norms resemble Conditionalization. Whether an agent conforms to Conditionalization depends only on what the temporal series of their credal mental states looks like, and not on any deeper relations between them. An agent can satisfy 9 It is worth adding: it is not clear that R-relatedness being a matter of degree generates a problem unique to the diachronist. AJry view on which norms of any sort apply to subject matter vulnerable to Sorites or vagueness concerns will run into a similar problem. And even those features that distinguish agential time-slias from time-slices that are not rationally assessable will exhibit vagueness and continuity at the margins. So more needs to be said about why the diachronist is at a special disadvantage here. 27 Conditionalization by having their credences rearranged by an appropriate sequence of lightning strikes. So it is indeed a mystery on such a view why rationality would only govern those collections of time-slices connected by the R-relation. But this stems from a feature of Conditionalization inessential to diachronic norms. On the process account, the explanation is simple. R-relatedness is a matter of causal psychological connectedness; this connectedness is a matter of the causal relations between states; and causal patterns of states is precisely what diachronic rationality is all about. So it's no mystery at all why only collections bound by the R-relation would be the proper subjects of diachronic rational requirements. 5. Synchronic Sufficiency The R-relation response allows us to explain why we do not need to settle facts about personal identity to settle facts about rationality in the fission case. But Hedden's argument has a second layer. In addition to the claim that facts about identity are not necessary to account for the rationality of belief, Hedden suggests (p. 4, p. 7J that facts about the synchronic relation between each time slice and its evidence are sufficient to settle facts about rationality. If he is right about this latter claim, then appeal to the R-relation will not be enough to defend diachronic norms, for while the facts about R relatedness may not, in the test cases, be in dispute in the way facts about identity are, neither are they doing any work. The appeal Hedden makes to justify this thought is something like this: consider each time slice and the evidence it possesses. Ask yourself "what ought this time-slice rationally believe?'' Intuitively, Hedden expects, we will say "it ought to believe exactly whatever its evidence favors." The matter is thus settled without need for more information. So purely synchronic considerations are sufficient to account for the rationality of belief, and the time-slice picture is vindicated. 28 But here we recall the main lesson gleaned from evaluating the lntemalism argument: showing that what attitudes it is rational to have at particular times is determined synchronically is not sufficient to show that rationality is synchronic. For some rational requirements may apply not to the rationality of attitudes, but to the rationality of diachronic phenomena like belief change or reasoning. Synchronicity, as formulated by Hedden, is too weak to refute the existence of diachronic norms. This response applies with equal strength to the argument here. Even granting that the evidence of each time slice suffices for what attitudes are rational for that time-slice, there may be other questions we can ask about rationality that are not so easily dispensed with. We may ask whether a certain instance of belief formation was rational, whether someone is reasoning rationally, whether a certain pattern of attitudes they exhibit is rational, and so on. And these are not straightforwardly answered merely by looking at isolated time-slices. Moreover, there are positive reasons to think that important facts about rationality cannot be settled synchronically. I will give several examples concerning the rationality of belief formation. 6. Belief Formation On the face of it, the synchronist has an explanation handy for the rationality of belief formation: belief formation is a way we bring ourselves into compliance with synchronic norms when our evidence changes. We gain some new evidence, our total evidence now supports a new belief, and we bring ourselves to comply with the synchronic demand that our beliefs match our evidence by forming a new belief. This picture, I suggest, is mistaken. Rational belief formation cannot be explained by appealing to synchronic relations of evidential support, falsifying the sufficiency claim. I will be using a very weak assumption: that in the normal course of things, for finite human agents like us, responding to evidence takes time. For our purposes, this time may be vanishingly 29 small. It is sufficient that the time at which we initiate forming a belief in response to our evidence and the time at which it is fully formed are not identical. Imagine that my friend Minnie promises that she will come to my birthday party. Like most of my friends, Minnie is an odd duck; she is a pathological liar who delights in making promises she intends never to keep and rejoices in the disappointment of others. So the fact that Minnie tells me that she is coming to my birthday party is normally excellent reason to believe she will not. However, Minnie is also extremely superstitious, and believes that breaking a promise made on the thirteenth of each month will curse her. So she always keeps promises made on the thirteenth of the month, which, it so happens, is today's date. All this is known to me. Having incorporated this evidence at to, suppose that the earliest time at which I can deliberately fully form a belief regarding Minnie's presence or absence (about which I am, at to, agnostic) is ti. Now imagine that, unbeknownst to me, exactly at ti, I will suddenly forget that it is the thirteenth (so that I do not have this knowledge at ti). What belief is it rational for me to form at ti? According to the synchronist, the belief that it is rational for me to form at ti is the belief that Minnie will not be at the party, since this is the belief that is supported by the evidence I will have at that time. But, I claim, this is the wrong result. Because what belief I form at ti is determined by the process of belief formation that operates before that time, forming the belief that Minnie will not be at the party would require me to, before ti, ignore the perfectly compelling evidence I have that she will. It is true that at ti, my epistemic state has changed in a way that may require me, going forward, to cease believing that Minnie will come to my party. But at t1, I have not yet had any chance to respond to this sudden epistemic impoverishment, and so my failure to take it into account cannot be rationally impugned. 30 We may imagine a variation of this case which differs only in that I know, beforehand, that I am about to forget the decisive evidence concerning Minnie's reliability. I am deciding now what to believe, knowing that my current evidence supports Minnie's presence, but that by the time I form a belief, my impoverished evidence will support her absence. Which belief should I decide to form? Again, I maintain, forming the belief that is synchronically supported by my evidence at ti is bizarre. I am deciding now what belief to form, am now better informed than I will be at ti, and have every reason to think Minnie will be at the party. Whatever belief I form will be formed as a response to my current mental state, so my choice is between using all the information now available to me or effectively handicapping myself by treating perfectly good evidence as though it had no weight. To reject a belief we have every reason to think is true in favor of a belief that coheres with evidence we know to be misleading is, it seems to me, to disrespect the fundamental epistemic concern with truth. In both of these cases, then, it looks rational to form the belief that Minnie will make it to my party at ti. But either case would be enough. By ti, it is too late for that belief to bring me to satisfy a synchronic relation of evidential support. So if the judgment I suggest in either of these cases is correct, the synchronist is not in a position to explain the rationality of belief formation. The lesson here is that belief formation is something that happens goingforward. But the attitudes that rationalize it, the evidence one is responding to, when one is being properly evidence-responsive, is evidence one has during the process of deliberation, before the belief is formed. The rationality of belief formation cannot be captured merely by looking at what attitudes are justified synchronically before, during, and after deliberation. Another kind of case underscores the importance of causal relations between temporal parts in the rationality of belief formation. Consider the following two worlds. In the first, an agent A performs a typical act of good reasoning, forming a new belief in response to some newly acquired 31 evidence E. In the second, there are two agents, B1 and B,, similar to A except for the following bit of history: B1 gains the evidence E and begins the very same act of reasoning completed by A, but halfway through, after the evidence has made its causal contribution but before the new belief is formed, is hit by lightning, causing them to forget E and cease the reasoning. Elsewhere in the world, B2 is struck by lightning, causing them to gain or remember E and scrambling their brain as though it were halfway through the aforementioned act of reasoning, so the evidence makes no causal contribution but the belief is formed to completion. On the time-slice model, there should be nothing relevant to rationality that happens in the first world that does not also happen in the second world - cutting a sequence of time slices from B1 and setting them against a sequence from B2 allows us to replicate the pattern of consecutive mental states experienced by A. But this seems wrong. A formed a belief in response to her evidence. And this is an event of normative significance. This event does not occur in the second world - B1 does not form a belief because she is interrupted, and B2 forms a belief, but not in response to her evidence. If this is right, there is a certain kind of event - the formation of a belief as a causal response to evidence, whose rational properties are not reducible to the rational properties of its instantaneous parts. This kind of event is the sort of essentially diachronic object of rational assessment that only a correspondingly diachronic set of norms can adequately describe. 7. Uniqueness I have argued that Hedden's positive arguments for the time-slice picture and, consequently, the rejection of diachronic rational norms, do not succeed. Hedden has one final explicit aim in the paper relevant to our concerns here: to show that a synchronic view has the resources to capture intuitions about rational agency that on their face seem best explained diachronically. In particular, synchronic norms look ill-poised to explain why agents should exhibit stability in their beliefs and credences over time. Individual time slices may differ drastically in their attitudes and still be, m 32 isolation, rational. On the time slice picture, any sequence of such time-slices will exhibit no rational failure. Intuitively, though, agents who fluctuate wildly in their attitudes are not rational. Hedden argues (pp. 14 -1 7J that we can accommodate this intuition on a synchronic picture, provided we accept Uniqueness, the claim that there is only one rational set of attitudes to have given a set of evidence. If Uniqueness is correct, then provided we do not gain or lose significant amounts of evidence, a rational agent's beliefs will remain relatively stable. The problem with this is not just that Uniqueness is at best highly controversial1°. Even granting it, the principle will not rule out the rationality of intuitively objectionable instability without a complementary notion of"evidence". On one view, one's evidence is determined by states like belief. This will be no help to the synchronist, however, since an agent who wildly fluctuates in their beliefs is thereby fluctuating in their evidence. It is not much better if evidence is knowledge, since plausibly, wild fluctuations in beliefs can, in various ways, undermine knowledge as well. If evidence is something like perceptual experiences, then on a model that limits such evidence to the present time-slice, one's evidence will simply be too spare to justify much at all. Hedden needs an account of evidence where it is both plausibly the sufficient grounds for our attitudes and resists being gained or lost through an agent's bizarre cognitive behaviour, and there does not seem to be one in easy reach. Meeting this challenge matters for Hedden's project because as long as a synchronic understanding of the irrationality of radical cognitive instability looks out of our grasp, we have an additional reason to be skeptical of the time-slice view. 10 Proponents of the thesis include Roger \Xl}lite (2007) and Ballantyne and Coffman (2011), but a rebuttal can be found in I<elly (forthcoming), and Schoenfield (2012) argues for a qualified rejection of uniqueness in favor of a moderate permissivism. Chapter Three of this dissertation discusses the issue of uniqueness in more depth. 33 Conclusion I conclude, then, that there is no reason to think that diachronic norms have unacceptable implications concerning cases where personal identity is a matter of dispute, no reason to think that they violate plausible constraints of intemalism, and no reason to think that they can easily be done away with without sacrificing an explanation of apparently rational cognitive inertia. Hedden's arguments rest on the assumption that it is an agent's attitudes at individual times that are the sole fundamental target of rational assessment - an assumption the diachronist should reject. Furthermore, we have sketched a picture of diachronic norms, one on which such norms govern cognitive processes like belief formation and reasoning, and shown that it is independently plausible and especially well placed to answer the criticisms leveled by time-slice epistemologists. It may be time, then, for enthusiasts of parsimony in the realm of rational norms to accept that the rational person is more than the sum of their parts. 34 Chapter Two Dynamic Conservatism Our beliefs often exhibit a kind of self-perpetuation. That is, once we have formed a belief, we have a tendency to maintain it beyond what our evidence alone seems sufficient to explain. This tendency manifests in a number of different ways. It is harder, often much harder, to change the mind of someone who has already come to an opinion about something than to prevent them from forming that opinion in the first place. Minor influxes of evidence against our settled views rarely dislodge them, even when our original reasons were only marginally sufficient to justify those views, and we often continue to hold our beliefs even once we have lost track of those reasons. When presented with previously unconsidered alternatives to what we believe, we are inclined towards our original position even though we may be unable to articulate why that position is superior. 11 In each of these cases, the mere fact that we already believe something seems to play a crucial role in the explanation of why we continue to believe it. Let us call this psychological tendency towards the perseverance of our beliefs doxastic inertia. Especially when one reflects on the most extreme cases of stubborn belief, where agents act impervious to mountains of evidence against their settled views, it is easy to feel pressure to dismiss doxastic inertia altogether as a cognitive vice. But a number of philosophers have argued that doxastic inertia in some form is a rational phenomenon. According to a family of views under the label of 11 More formal psychological investigation into belief perseverance can be found in the work of Anderson, Lepper, and Ross (1980). 35 epistemic conservatism, the mere fact that one already believes something can positively affect an agent's rationality in believing it going forward. 12 I will begin this chapter by gathering together a set of core motivations for epistemic conservatism in the literature, all of which recommend the view as the best way to capture the implications for rationality of the ways we face constraints on our limited cognitive resources. Then I will look at the way conservatism has traditionally been developed and discussed and the reasons why many philosophers have been skeptical about how it could, in this form, be true. The main task of this chapter will be to develop an alternative conservative view that can capture the core motivations for conservatism without incurring the costs associated with the standard approach. My solution turns on identifying a widespread assumption among both conservatives and their critics-that there is a standing rational requirement for an agent to have beliefs with some appropriate epistemic merit-which leads to conservatism being understood in the problematic, standard way, and showing that this assumption is optional. The key to seeing that it is optional involves distinguishing norms that govern states of mind like beliefs from norms that govern processes like consideration, and developing a view which uses norms of the latter type in place of norms of the former type. According to such a view, our epistemic life is governed by at least t\vo distinct sets of norms: norms governing when to initiate the process of considering whether some proposition Pis true, and norms governing how that process operates, once initiated. A robust version of conservatism can be vindicated, I 12 Philosophers often give definitions of epistemic conservatism that are more committal about why behavior displaying doxastic inertia is rational than the one I have provided. For instance, Christensen takes conservatism to be the view that "an agent is in some measure justified in maintaining a belief simply in virtue of the fact that the agent has that belief" (1994: 69). Vahid considers it to be the thesis that "It would be unreasonable to change one's beliefs in the absence of any good reasons" (2004: 97). I choose a looser formulation here for two reasons. First, it is a common core in theories discussed under the mantle of conservatism by both proponents and critics, across their various formulations. Second, I do not want to prejudge the proper form of the explanation of rational doxastic inertia by building too much theory into our definition, for reasons that should become clear later in this paper. 36 will argue, provided that the right kinds of conditions must be met before one is required to reconsider a question. I will show that the resultant dynamic conservatism a) better captures the canonical motivations for conservatism than the standard view, b) is consistent with an attractive principle about the epistemic supremacy of evidence that the standard view must reject, and c) has special resources that allow it to sidestep the major objections and worries raised against conservatism. 1. The Canonical Virtues of Conservatism That one's evidence matters for determining rational epistemic behavior is denied by no one. That anything else matters, on the other hand, is far from clear. The conservative thesis in particular, that the mere fact that one already believes the proposition in question matters, is a surprising one. We have names for people who obdurately resist changing their minds, none of them flattering. We call them (out of earshot, if we are polite) dogmatic, pigheaded, and, indeed, irrational. Conservatives are not committed to licensing the most unpalatable instances of such behavior, but it is easy to conclude that milder cases are simply less extreme failures of the same kind. So it will be important to survey the reasons why many have found conservatism attractive, both to feel the force of such a counterintuitive claim and so that we may move forward with a sense of the degree and type of rational inertia the conservative must license in order to secure the advantages that motivate their view. 1.1. Cognitive Costs In this chapter, I'll focus on two purported virtues of conservatism. The first, defended in Lycan (1988), emerges from the observation that changing one's mind involves cognitive costs. A rational agent with limited cognitive resources, it is claimed, will be responsive to these costs. Since these costs attach to changes of mind, they will tend to lead agents who already believe something to continue to 37 believe it. Since conservatism recommends just this sort of behavior, it is argued, the view allows us to be properly sensitive to the costs our cognitive limitations impose on us. 1.2. Lost Evidence The second virtue, discussed in depth by McGrath (2007), concerns the way conservatism deals with lost evidence. Because we are forgetful creatures, we do not always remember the reasons for which we formed a belief. But intuitively, we are rational in continuing to believe things we learned as children even if we no longer remember our grounds. What can explain our rationality in maintaining these beliefs? According to an evidentialistview about memorial justification, like the one defended by David Christensen (1994), we are rational because, despite losing our original evidence, we now possess some new, independent evidential grounds for our belief. But what is the nature of these grounds? It does not seem plausible that the grounds could be some sort of quasi-perceptual experience, for there is no distinctive memorial phenomenology we undergo throughout the period we maintain our belief. Neither, on reflection, does it seem right to say that we are rational on the basis of our own past trustworthiness. For there may be agents, like children, who do not even have sophisticated second order beliefs about such things, and they too are intuitively rational in their remembrances. 13 Furthermore, even when such a justification is available to the agent, it cannot make the agent rational unless the agent's actual belief is in some way based on that justification. And it is doubtful that agents in cases of forgotten evidence typically base their memorial beliefs on relatively sophisticated considerations about the reliability of their past selves. These were not, after all, part of their basis when they formed the belief, and they have never reconsidered the question in a way we would expect 13 See McGrath (2007), who also raises the preceding points. 38 to add to their grounds. If they were to question their belief, then they might be able to use evidence about their past reliability to reaffirm it, by incorporating those considerations into their grounds. But this would not tell us why they were rational all the way up until that point. So even if such evidence were sufficient for maintaining a belief, this kind of view could tell us at best why it is rational for agents who have such evidence to actively reaffirm a belief once questioned about it. It would not explain why agents are rational to passively hold onto those beliefs when we have not yet used that kind of evidence to form or reaffirm them. 14 An alternative to evidentialism called preservationism holds that our beliefs inherit the epistemic credit they had when we originally formed them (Burge 1997; 2003a; 2003b). But for ancient evidence to reach forward and do work on our rationality today is an odd sort of epistemic action at a distance. More sharply, it is natural to think that part of what distinguishes rationality from extemalist phenomena like knowledge is that your rational responsibilities are constrained by what is available to you and that your success or failure by rational standards does not depend on things that are beyond your ken. The evidence possessed by our childhood selves, however, is not now available to us any more than that of a distant stranger and thus cannot bear on our current rationality. If preservationism were correct, then t\vo agents who are identical but for their distant histories, who currently have the exact same information and experiences, will nevertheless differ in whether it makes rational sense now for them to hold a given belief, purely due to facts about their remote history to which neither has any access. This is intuitively the wrong result. Conservatism, McGrath argues, promises to capture our commonsense judgments about the rationality of memorial belief without running into the problems faced by the views just discussed. The conservative suggests that the mere fact that one already believes something can affect the rationality of continuing to believe it, even when the other evidence alone is not sufficient. If this 14 We will return to the distinction between passive and active inertia of beliefs in Section 5. 39 pressure towards doxastic inertia is strong enough, we can secure rationality in cases of memory without appealing to other evidence at all, and therefore without choosing between implausible candidates for our evidential basis in our current perspective, as the evidentialist is forced to do, or in our remote and inaccessible past, as the preservationist is forced to do. The leakiness of our memory, moreover, is not a mere misfortune. Since our minds have limited storage, Harman (1986) argues, we must be selective about which beliefs to keep around, which to allow to be forgotten, and which evidential relations between beliefs to track. A rational agent will avoid mental clutter. Often, the beliefs we consult in forming a conclusion are less important than the conclusion itself, like a ladder that may be thrown away after it has done its work. All that work, however, will have been for naught if the agent is required to drop the belief as soon as she loses her evidential justification for it. Respecting the need for clutter avoidance, then, requires allowing the beliefs of rational agents to outlast the evidence for them. In light of our limited storage, our forgetting of evidence is not a bug but a feature. I will call the advantages conservatism has in treating these two subjects-the cognitive costs of belief revision and cases of lost evidence-the canonical virtues of the conservative view. I do not mean to suggest that they are the only reasons one might be attracted to conservatism. But they are widespread, cited by almost everyone who has defended a conservative view. 15 Moreover, they form an interesting class. They are concerned with the ways we are cognitively limited-in the first case, by the fact that changing our beliefs is costly, and in the second case, by the fact that our memories are both finite and leaky. In this chapter, I will be interested only in forms of conservatism which can capture the canonical virtues. 16 15 Harman (1986), Lycan (1988), McGrath (2007), McCain (2008), and Poston (2012) are a sample, all of whom appeal to the canonical virtues. 16 It is for this reason that I will not consider standard Bayesian accounts of rational credence, which might understandably be labeled a kind of conservative picture. Such vie\VS have quite different motivations than the ones I am concerned with here. Because of the strict demands of probabilistic coherence they place on our credences, they are in a particularly poor position to reflect sensitivity to our cognitive limitations. Nevertheless, one of the alternative 40 Some authors have suggested that in addition to what I call the canonical virtues, conservatism could help solve general problems of skepticism (Sklar 1975; Lycan 1988; McCain 2008; Poston 2014). I will briefly discuss this motivation later in the chapter, but I warn the reader in advance that if they are looking for a response to the skeptic, they will not find it in the view I endorse. If you are disappointed, read this chapter as an argument that it's useful to distinguish two sets of putative epistemological advantages of conservatism which need not go together, and therefore that those who want to use conservatism for extremely ambitious philosophical payoffs should be wary of appealing to its more mundane advantages in order to motivate the view. 2. Standard Conservatism and Its Costs Individual conservative accounts can be distinguished by their explanation of why doxastic inertia is rational. Although they differ significantly in their details, many writers on both sides of the topic seem to assume, explicitly or implicitly, that the explanation of rational inertia takes a certain form. Their characterization of conservatism suggests that there is rational pressure in favor of holding on to your beliefs because the fact that you already believe something confers some sort of epistemic merit on your belief-Dr as I will put it, contributes to it being epistemically worth believing, in a distinctly non-evidential way. Standard Conservatism: The mere fact that one already believes P can positively affect whether P is worth believing in a non-evidential way. Different views formulated along the standard line may take different stances on the exact contribution that the existing beliefthat P makes-providing a reason for (Adler 1996; Crook 2000), views I consider in Section 3 is in important ways structurally analogous to the Bayesian view. 41 justifying (McCain 2008), or granting prima facie rationality to (McGrath 2007). 'Worth believing' is meant to be neutral between these, and I do not mean, by lumping them together, to suggest that there are no important contrasts to be made between views depending on which of these relations is treated as the relevant one. But all of them suggest that the mere fact that one holds a belief contributes some epistemic merit to it. The qualification that this contribution is distinct from that of the evidence serves to differentiate the view from run-of-the-mill evidentialism, though a view on which existing belief is evidence of a special kind might count as distinctively conservative. We will examine the prospects of such a view later in the chapter as an alternative to the standard approach. It may be that some of the authors who have formulated conservatism along standard lines are not ultimately committed to understanding their view in this way. And others have simply not been clear or consistent about what form of conservatism they intend to discuss. 17 But this way of understanding the view is widespread enough that it has become a common currency bet\veen conservatives and their critics, and as I will argue, this is not without consequence. I will save a diagnosis of the prevalence of this approach for later in this chapter. Ultimately, my goal is to develop an alternative model of conservatism. But why should a conservative look elsewhere, if the standard view is such a natural approach? In the following two sections, I will discuss the costs that one incurs by accepting the standard model. 2.1. The Evidence Restriction The first major cost of the standard conservative thesis is that it directly conflicts with a plausible principle we may call the evidence restriction. 17 Harman sometimes seems to characterize conservatism in a way that implies the standard view, for instance, as involving the claim that propositions "acquire justification simply by being believed" (1986: 30), elsewhere in a way that does not (1986: 46). McGrath (2007: 2) recognizes that conservatism could be formulated in a non-standard way, but proceeds under the assumption that these would be equivalent. 42 Evidence Restriction (ER): The only considerations that, from the perspective of epistemic rationality, contribute to P's being worth believing are evidential-they bear positively on the beliefs truth. I will argue later in this chapter for a kind of conservatism that is consistent with ER. But first, it is important to say a little about why we should take the evidence restriction seriously. After all, we have just been presented with a battalion of arguments in favor of conservatism. If the most natural accounts of conservatism are in tension with ER, one might think, so much the worse for the latter. But I do not think we can afford to be quite so cavalier. First, we may note that the evidence restriction has more surface plausibility than conservatism, which is a rather counterintuitive view. More importantly, however, ER can be motivated by reflection on cases where agents believe for manifestly pragmatic reasons. Suppose you are offered a million dollars to believe that the next election will be won by the incumbent. There is, perhaps, some sense in which the offer counts in favor of the belief or makes the belief worth having. But the nigh-universal response to this case is that considerations like the promise of money, or the threat of torture, do not count in favor of a belief in the right way for epistemic rationality. An agent who formed a belief in response to such considerations might be admirable from a practical standpoint, but they would violate their distinctly epistemic responsibilities. And a natural thought further identifies just why such considerations do not make an epistemic contribution: what distinguishes epistemic requirements from requirements of other sorts is precisely their concern with truth and falsehood. The fact that I will receive money for believing something does not bear in any way on whether that belief is true, and for that reason does not make the proposition worth believing from the epistemic standpoint. Since those considerations which are connected in this way with truth 43 and falsehood are just what I am calling evidence, the evidence restriction is implicit in this natural explanation of the epistemic inefficacy of threats and rewards. It is worth noting that the evidence restriction is both weaker than a view that many philosophers have found plausible and stronger than what one needs to generate a worry for standard conservatism from a similar direction. It is weaker than the view we might call pure evidentialism, according to which an agent's epistemic rationality supervenes entirely on their evidence. To get that stronger view, we would have to add a bridge principle from beliefworthiness to rationality of the sort I will go on to reject. Indeed, the view I defend in this chapter is one way to accommodate ER while rejecting pure evidentialism. So those skeptical of pure evidentialism should not for that reason alone reject ER. And even if one is unsure of ER, it would be enough to raise doubts about standard conservatism if the mere fact that one believes P seems like the wrong sort of thing to make P worth believing, whatever other non-evidential factors might plausibly matter. I do not claim that the considerations here are dispositive. My point is just to emphasize that abandoning ER is a real cost of the view. If there is an alternative picture that could preserve the motivations for conservatism while remaining consistent with ER, it is worth exploring. 2.2. Three Objections to Standard Conservatism Besides being inconsistent with ER, conservatism in its standard form has been subjected to several powerful criticisms. In this section, I will survey the three I take to be most threatening, all of which have at various points been raised by Christensen (1994; 2000), and argue that the responses available to the standard conservative either fail or threaten to undermine their ability to secure the canonical virtues. The first objection concerns our practices of explicit justification. When asked to justify our belief, or tell someone why something is worth believing, it is natural to refer to the evidence in favor of that belief. It is intuitively inappropriate to cite the fact that you already have that belief, just as it is 44 inappropriate to cite the fact that someone offered you money to believe it. This objection cuts most sharply against the kind of standard conservative 18 who takes one's current belief to provide a reason for continued belief, since reasons are paradigmatically the sort of thing one lists to others when justifying oneself or weighs explicitly in deliberation. But any standard conservative thinks that current belief confers some sort of epistemic merit on continued belief. And yet there does not seem to be a natural context where "because I already believe it" is appropriate as an answer to a question like "what justifies your belief?", "Why should you believe that?" "What are your reasons for believing that?" or "What makes that the right thing for you to believe?" Neither does this sort of consideration seem to come up when we are deliberating privately about what to believe. As long as we take the considerations that we are willing to cite in favor of our beliefs as at least a presumptive guide to the considerations which in fact count in favor of them, this gives us reason to be skeptical of standard conservatism. In response, the standard conservative may try to appeal to pragmatic considerations to explain why such appeals are infelicitous. Poston (2012) suggests, for instance, that in normal contexts of justification, citing a consideration implicates pragmatically, though does not literally convey, that it is a special piece of evidence. But pragmatic implicatures are typically cancel/able-when we make explicit in our utterance that we do not mean to suggest the content that would otherwise be implicated, the implication disappears. However, adding "I don't mean to imply that this is evidence, but ... " to assertions like "the fact that I already believe it justifies my believing it" does not seem to render them any more acceptable. Such citation sounds bizarre however it is qualified. So it fails the standard test for pragmatic implicature. Furthermore, even if dialectical norms of conversational implicature could explain why it seems inappropriate to say things to others that, on the standard conservative model, are 18 See Adler (1996), Crook (2000). 45 strictly true, they don't explain why in purely first-personal contexts, when we are merely thinking to ourselves, it still seems wrong to consider mere belief in P among our reasons or justifiers for P. The second worry is that standard conservatism seems to license a kind of objectionable bootstrapping. 19 The conservative holds that some beliefs that it would not be rational to form from scratch given one's evidence are rational to maintain if one already has them. But suppose that an agent who doesn't have sufficient evidence to form a belief goes ahead and forms it anyway. Now, in addition to their evidence in favor of that belief, they may add to the considerations favoring it the fact that they already believe it, heightening its epistemic merit and, in marginal cases, making it rational for them to keep believing it. But forming a belief irrationally seems like an illegitimate way to give that belief an epistemic boost. Some conservatives (McCain 2008; Poston 2014) respond by proposing limitations on the conditions under which mere belief provides its epistemic boost. Ted Poston (2014: Chapter 2), for instance, limits the contribution of mere belief to cases of empty symmetrical evidence-when there is no evidence one way or the other about P. The most objectionable kinds of bootstrapping, where one might bootstrap oneself into believing against the evidence, could thereby be avoided. One worry about this kind of move is that such constraints can look ad hoc. If mere belief can contribute to epistemic merit, why would this contribution vanish in precisely these cases? More importantly, however, there is a tension between this strategy and one of our canonical motivations for conservatism. Note that once a belief has been formed on insufficient evidence, the agent is in the same subjective situation as one who formed a belief rationally and then lost track of the evidence for it. It was supposed to be a virtue of the conservative view that it could allow us to hold on to our beliefs in cases of that sort. Since there is this symmetry between cases of irrational belief formation 19 More discussion of bootstrapping and epistemic conservatism can be found in Foley (1983), Feldman (2003), and Furnerton (2007). 46 and cases of forgotten evidence, however, the very feature of standard conservatism which let it explain rationality in cases of forgotten evidence commits it to bootstrapping poorly formed beliefs. Poston's suggestion may avoid the worst sorts of bootstrapping, but only by limiting justified cases of lost evidence to exceedingly rare instances where we end up with no evidence once way or another. In general, placing conditions on the contribution of mere belief substantially limits bootstrapping at the cost of equally substantially surrendering the cases of lost evidence that conservatism promised to explain. Finally, standard conservatism is accused of violating demands of epistemic impartiality. Impartiality demands that we not treat our own beliefs as special, from an epistemic point of view, compared to the beliefs of others, merely because they belong to us. It is fine to regard one's own beliefs as special if, for instance, one takes oneself to be in a better epistemic position than other people. To do so mere!J because they're one's own, however, looks like epistemic narcissism. But the standard conservative does seem to endorse this kind ofasymmetry-the fact that I believe something confers some positive status to my continued belief, but the fact that you believe something does not. But what's so special about me that makes my current opinions worth emulating? McGrath (2007) makes the suggestion that we should treat the beliefs of others as conferring the same sort of epistemic value on our beliefs as those beliefs confer upon themselves, by taking the epistemic contribution of mere belief to parallel that of testimony. The mere fact that others believe something can, on such a view, justify our accepting it. But there are reasons to worry about this move. First, if the role of our beliefs in justifying themselves is to match that of testimony, and conservatism is to survive as distinct from ordinary evidentialism, then a proponent of this strategy must commit to a view on which testimony rationally justifies in a way different in kind from ordinary evidence, since non-conservatives are happy to grant that existing belief can sometimes make that sort of contribution (Christensen 1994). While such a view is by no means obviously wrong, it introduces 47 additional controversy. Second, unless we accept a preservationist account, which would make conservatism redundant for explaining the rationality of memory, the beliefs of others make us rational in believing things only through our own beliefs about what others believe. A fully symmetric approach to conservative justification, then, will say that it is through our belief that we already believe P, rather than the mere belief that P itself, that we are rational to continue to believe P. But this is not how conservatives, including McGrath himself, have understood their view, and worries would be raised about cases where we lack the relevant second order beliefs or where we are mistaken about what we believe, since it would suggest that there cannot be conservative justification in such cases. And the need to account for the rationality of memorial belief in cases where second order beliefs are not present was precisely the sort of thing conservatives would like to use as leverage against the evidentialist account of memory. If we want to avoid these problems, we will have to commit to at least one striking asymmetry between the way our own belief that P makes continued belief rational and the way someone else's beliefthat P does, and this puts pressure on the idea that testimony and doxastic inertia are two sides of the same coin. These objections are, again, not intended to be entirely conclusive. A devoted standard conservative may be willing to take on radical commitments about the pragmatics of justification or the nature of testimony to avoid them, or to make sacrifices to the canonical virtues that give conservatism much of its appeal. But I've tried to argue that the responses will not be cheap or easy, and represent genuine costs of the standard approach. 3. State-Oriented Worth Believing: A Diagnosis Standard conservatism, we have seen, carries serious costs, as it must reject the plausible evidence restriction and has no easy reply to a number of forceful objections. If we are attracted by the canonical virtues, then, we have strong reason to look elsewhere. Yet alternatives to the standard model are largely unexplored. In this section, I will try to diagnose why the standard view might have 48 seemed the only plausible option for the conservative by identifying a common assumption which provides the basis for an argument for the standard view, and by arguing that rejecting other premises is an unattractive option for anyone seeking to secure the canonical virtues. The standard view is as standard as it is, I suspect, because many philosophers at least implicitly accept a norm to the effect that an agent is irrational for believing something that is not justified or supported by their reasons-'° These are versions of the norm I will call State-oriented Worth Believing, with different conceptions of the conditions of beliefworthiness filled in: State-Oriented Worth Believing (SWB): It is irrational to believe something that is not worth believing (from one's perspective). This norm has t\vo notable features: it connects an agent's rationality with the considerations bearing on beliehvorthiness, and it is state-oriented-rendering an agent irrational in virtue of features of the mental states they are in (in particular, the beliefs they have) at individual times. This norm may seem trivial; we will soon see that it is not. It is only a short jog from this principle to the conclusion that conservatism must take a standard form. Consider the following argument: Pl) Conservatism: The mere fact that one already believes that P can make it rational for one to believe P going forward. That is, there are cases of rational doxastic inertia. P2) SWB: It is irrational to believe something that is not worth believing. P3) In cases of doxastic inertia, if one did not already believe that P, P would not be worth believing. 20 See, e.g.,, Way (2009), Schroeder (2010), and Lord (2014) for explicit endorsements of principles of this sort. 49 P4) (From Pl, P2, P3) There are cases where the mere fact that one already believes that P can make P worth believing. PS) The mere fact that one already believes that Pis not evidence that P. C) (From P4, PS) Standard Conservatism: There are cases where the mere fact that one already believes that P non-evidentially makes P worth believing. There are two ways one might try to resist this line of reasoning from conservatism and SWB to standard conservatism. The first way is to reject P3. This requires claiming that in cases of rational doxastic inertia, the belief would be worth having even if the agent didn't already have it. In order for the view to be conservative, though, the fact that one already believes P must make a difference. So, such a view would require some independent norm that at least sometimes prohibits one from adopting perfectly worthy beliefs if one does not already have them. But whether or not such a norm is plausible, this sort of conservative view won't be able to capture the canonical virtues we identified for conservatism. This is because in many cases of lost evidence where we are intuitively rational in maintaining our belief, the evidence we have is very meager or nonexistent, and it is singularly implausible that when one has very little or no evidence for P, P could be worth believing on the evidence alone. The reason we do not form beliefs on the basis of little to no evidence is notto avoid being inconsistent over time-it's that the evidence isn't good enough to warrant it. The second way is to deny PS, and assert that mere belief is evidence for itself. However, when this claim is distinguished from other claims that superficially resemble it, such as that certain appearances can be evidence for beliefs with the same content (Huemer 2013), that a coherent system of beliefs might justify its members (Elgin 2014), or that beliefs together with information about our general reliability can justify themselves (Christensen 1994), it looks rather implausible. In the absence of any reason to think that I'm reliable or that my belief is well-formed, it is doubtful that my belief is evidence so at all-we certainly don't cite it as such. If it is, it is plausibly very weak evidence at best. This, again, threatens the view's ability to explain the range of cases oflost evidence we want, which include cases where our current evidence is insufficient by a fairly wide margin. Moreover, this view is in an even poorer position to respond to the first t\vo objections to conservatism than the standard picture, first, because evidence is precisely the sort of thing we'd expect to be dialectically appropriate to cite in explicit justification, and second, because the bootstrapping worry is particularly forceful against the view of mere belief as evidence-such a view implies that merely forming a belief is a way of gaining evidence for it, which is even more implausible than the claim that merely forming a belief could non evidentially justify it. So ifSWB is true, we must either reject conservatism (of a form that can capture the canonical virtues) or accept the standard view. This, I propose, is why the standard view is so widely assumed. This is further evidenced by the fact that authors on both sides of the debate often define conservatism in a way that presupposes that mere belief must contribute to the beliefs epistemic merit to rationalize doxastic inertia, a presupposition that only makes sense if something like SWB is lurking in the background. McCain (2008) and Christensen (1994) both define conservatism as the view that mere belief confers justification, and Poston (2012) identifies it as the claim that characterizes it as "the mere holding of a belief confers some positive epistemic status on its content". If we want to hold on to the canonical virtues without incurring the standard costs, then, we must reject SWB. Purely on its face, it must be admitted, SWB certainly looks more appealing than conservatism. It may be hard to see how one could even deny it. But both the benefits a robust conservatism can secure and the challenges the standard view faces are considerable. Instead of abandoning conservatism or accepting the standard view, warts and all, then, I want to explore what happens if we take the road less traveled and reject SWB. 51 4. The Dynamic Strategy Throwing out SWB places us in a position of some disarray. On the standard conservative model, SWB is an important part of the explanation why doxastic inertia is rational-according to the standard view, the fact that one already believes something contributes to beliefworthiness, and SWB tells us that a belief's worthiness is crucial to determining the agent's rationality in continuing to hold it. Without SWB, it is not at all obvious how a conservative view will be reconstructed. In addition, rationality surely has something to do with being responsive to the considerations that make things worth believing. SWB was the most natural way to cash this out. Some sort of replacement is required that will not simply regenerate the problems that led us to reject SWB in the first place. The view I am about to sketch exploits a distinction that other authors have emphasized for different purposes--0ne between considerations that bear directly on the question of whether P and those that bear on the question of whether to make up ones' mind or engage in deliberation about P. 21 Making this distinction does not, by itself, provide us with a way to avoid the pitfalls we have discovered, for it remains an open question what relevance these different types of consideration have for assessing the rationality of agents. As long as the upshot for rationality still includes a version of State-Oriented Worth Believing, 22 we have made no progress. What I propose is a dynamic interpretation of the rational relevance of both types of consideration. It is dynamic because it appeals, not to norms that police an agent's mental states at particular times, like SWB, but rather to norms that govern processes, essentially diachronic causal 21 See, for instance, David Owens (2000: 157-158) on "two-dimensional rationality" during a defense of a preservationist view of memory, Pmnela Hieronymi's discussion of the '\vrong kind of reasons" problem (2005), and the discussion of "two-stage" theories in the exchange between Mark Schroeder (2012; 2013) and his critics (Hieronymi 2013; Shah & Silverstein 2013; Hubbs 2013) 22 Schroeder's (2012) and Owens's (2000) formulations of the two-stage view are examples of views that do maintain S\11/13. 52 patterns of mental activity, over intervals of time. 23 In particular, I want to focus on the process of considering whether P, for a given proposition P. We may distinguish t\vo kinds of norms governing a process of consideration. First, there are norms that determine when a rational agent initiates such a process. Second, there are norms that determine the rational operation of that process, once initiated. On my view, considerations of one type will feature in norms on the initiation of the process, and considerations of a different type will feature . h . fh N in norms on t e operation o t at process. I will present a simplified model on which consideration is the only process by which we rationally form or give up beliefs, so we may see in an uncluttered way how a dynamic model operates, and take for granted that whatever other belief-forming processes there are, either they are governed by similar norms and will therefore function in a similar way, or they are not intrusive enough to undermine the general patterns I describe. This illustrative model is only a partial sketch of the full story of norms governing even the single process of consideration. But I will begin to fill the gaps left by our rejection of SWB and show how the conservative picture it generates is attractive as a model of rational doxastic inertia. 4.1. Dynamic Conservatism I begin with a dynamic replacement for SWB-a norm that describes how our epistemic behavior must be sensitive to the considerations that make things worth believing. 23 That a broadly dynamic approach to rationality would have implications for the conservative project was recognized by Barry Lam (2007), though he does not develop the thought in detail and his understanding of the nature of dynamic requirements differs in important ways from mine, for instance in whether such requirements apply to processes or mere changes of attitude. 24 My O\Vll view is that we should go in for a purefy dynamic picture, on which there are no norms on states at all. But that is beyond the scope of this paper. \Xlhat matters for our purposes is that there isn't a standing requirement like S\XlB requiring us to have beliefs wi.th sufficient merit. We may leave open whether there are, for example, requirements not to have contradictory beliefs. 53 Dynamic Worth Believing (DWB): It is irrational to conclude consideration of whether P by forming or reaffirming the belief that P if Pis not worth believing (from one's perspective) IfSWB is true, then so is DWB. But the reverse does not hold. DWB places constraints on an agent only in the course of a process of considering whether P, and only when the agent is forming or reaffirming a belief during such a process. This is crucial, for it is what allows the view to resolve the tension between conservatism and ER. To see how this works, we must explain how our dynamic picture secures conservatism. All it takes, I suggest, is this general claim about the norms surrounding the initiation of consideration: Inconsiderate: One is not always rationally required to initiate consideration whether P when one believes that P and one's evidence does not make P worth believing (from one's perspective). If Inconsiderate were false, then whenever one believed P and one's current evidence wouldn't justify forming that belief from scratch, one would be required to reevaluate whether P (and, consequently, give up that belief). That's no good for conservatism. But if Inconsiderate is true, then there will be some cases where one's evidence does not make P worth believing, one believes P, and one needn't reconsider that belief For as long as that state of affairs lasts, the mere fact that one already believed P (together with the fact that one was not required to reconsider) explains why one is rational in continuing to believe P, at least until one is required to reconsider. If one didn't already believe P, then to believe P, going forward, one would have to form that belief. To form that belief (on our simplified picture at least), one would have to consider it. And DWB tells us that the formation of the belief during such a process must be sensitive to whether the belief 54 is worth having, which in this case it is not. So the behavior demanded of an agent who already believes P, in such cases, going forward, is very different from the behavior demanded of an agent who does not. The key point here is that vis a vis the process of consideration, an agent who does not believe P can be rational in coming to believe P only in one way, by rationally considering whether P and then forming that belief. An agent who already believes P can be rational in continuing to believe P in two ways, by rationally considering whether P and then reaffirming it (the same way the nonbeliever has), or by rationally not reconsidering whether P. So, at least as far as consideration is concerned, it is strictly easier for itto be rational to believe P going forward if one already believes it. This is, of course, a characteristically conservative position. 4.2. Strengthening the View: Dynamic Worth Considering We have seen that if Inconsiderate is true, then the dynamic approach justifies a form of conservatism. And Inconsiderate is a relatively weak claim. All it takes for it to be true is a single case where one may permissibly fail to reconsider a belief in P while one's evidence doesn't make P worth believing. As one case of this sort, suppose one comes into possession of a large amount of new evidence sufficient to undermine the justification of a large number of beliefs, which one cannot consider all at once. If Inconsiderate were false, then it would be impossible for one to avoid irrationality in such a case. But intuitively, agents in this position, who are forced to prioritize which questions to consider now and which to leave for later, are not irrational. While it may be that sometimes a defect of one's belief must trigger reconsideration-when, for instance, the agent is in a position to easily recognize the defect and to improve their position in a straightforward manner (when they have blatantly contradictory beliefs, perhaps), to expect this of agents in all cases of evidential insufficiency would be extremely demanding. And while not all philosophers take demandingness seriously as a constraint on epistemic theorizing, it is implicit in the core motivations for conservatism. 55 The downside to the weakness of Inconsiderate is that the form of conservatism it guarantees 1s correspondingly weak. It is consistent with the existence of only a handful of cases of rational doxastic inertia. But a conservatism which justifies rational inertia only in some very small or theoretically uninteresting range of cases is not the success we want from a view which involves so drastic a rethinking of the norms on rational belief. Ideally, we want a conservatism strong enough to secure the advantages proponents of standard conservative views have long touted for their own views. To achieve this, we will have to say something stronger than Inconsiderate. In what follows, I will propose some plausible developments of the view and show how, thus bolstered, it can capture the canonical motivations for the conservative outlook concerned with our cognitive limitations. We can begin our development with the following observation: just as there are things that bear positively or negatively on whether something is worth believing, there are things that bear positively or negatively on whether a question is worth opening for consideration. And there will be corresponding norms that connect an agent's rationality to the way they respond to such reasons. For instance: Dynamic Worth Considering: It is rationally required to consider whether P only when it is worth considering whether P. In general, those things that make P more worth considering will push in the direction of rationally requiring the agent to consider, and those that make P less worth considering will push in the direction of making such consideration optional or prohibited. We are in a position, then, to work out the contours of dynamic conservatism by thinking about what sorts of things bear positively or negatively on whether it is worth considering whether P. Here are some plausible candidates. 25 25 I should note, importantly, that we are interested in what is worth considering from the agent's perspective, so these are 56 More Worth Considering: 1 +)It is now especially important that I believe truly regarding P. 2+) I am now in a significantly better epistemic position regarding P than I was when I last considered P (for instance, by having recently received evidence regarding P, or because my current belief that P was formed in unfavorable circumstances, like when I was drunk). 3+) I am now in a significantly better epistemic position regarding P than I will be in the future (for instance, by having evidence available that I expect to lose). Less Worth Considering: 1-) It does not matter whether I believe truly regarding P. 2-) I am now in a worse epistemic position regarding P than I was when I last considered P (for example, because I have lost evidence regarding P, or because I am now tired or under the influence of drugs). 3-) I am now in a worse epistemic position regarding P than I will be in the future (for example, because I anticipate crucial evidence is forthcoming, or because I am now tired or under the influence of drugs). 4-) Considering P is an expenditure of time or cognitive effort. The lists are only a suggestion and only a start, and the reader is invited to disregard those entries they find questionable and include others they find compelling. A fully mature dynamic theory, which we do not have space to develop here, will unify and explain the items on these lists in a considerations which are believed by the agent or otherwise cognitively available to her, and they needn't be true. 57 principled way. 26 For now, it will suffice to note that which lists we accept tells us, in some qualitative way, what the resultant conservatism will look like. In particular, we expect rational cognitive inertia to be less prevalent when items from the first list are present, since those will make rational agents more inclined to reconsider and therefore keep up with their evidence, and more prevalent when items from the second list are present, when they will be inclined to hold on to their existing opinions. One additional question to ask is whether by default, that is, without special reasons one way or the other, consideration is rationally required, permissible, or prohibited. I suggest the following thought: we spend much of our time not considering any question of belief at all. The rest of the time, we consider at most a small number of beliefs. If we are not being irrational in acting this way, as is, I think, the appropriate presumption, then either failing to consider is at least default permissible, or the things that count against considering are ubiquitous enough that for practical purposes we may treat it as if it were so. Whatever it takes to make consideration required is, in the normal case, fairly substantial, or the default permissibility would be too often overridden to make sense of our intuitively reasonable practices of consideration. With the substance of a dynamic view (partially) filled out in this way, we are in a better position to see how it handles the cases of interest to conservatives. 5. The Canonical Virtues, Revisited If, as I suggested, not considering has at least a de facto default permissible status, then there will be a kind of general, permeatingpresumptive conservatism. We are not required to consider a question until we have some special positive reason to do so. So agents will be rational in maintaining any given belief for at least as long as they do not encounter such a reason. Atop this presumptive conservatism, 26 At the end of Section 5, I propose a thought that may serve as the beginning of such a theory. 58 our view warrants an additional push towards doxastic inertia in the presence of items from our second list, reasons against considering. Now, recall the canonical virtues of the conservative approach. The first suggested that conservatism represented a way for rational agents to be sensitive to the fact that changing beliefs has cognitive costs. The second suggested that conservatism reflected our rational need to trnst our memory and avoid clutter, by letting us maintain our belief and thereby take advantage of the original justification we had for our views even when it has been lost. Because of the presumption of rationality for not considering, our version of conservatism substantially limits the burdens on our cognitive resources, and frequently spares us the cost of changing our minds. In fact, I suggest, our dynamic approach is a better account of how the cognitive costs of giving up our belief justify doxastic inertia than the ones built to explain that very fact. On some standard conservative accounts, we have our evidence for various positions, and then because there are costs to changing one's mind, there is a little extra justification sprinkled atop those propositions we already believe. fui.tional agents are responsive to the sum total of the evidence and this extra justification, and thereby exhibit cognitive inertia. But this effectively locates the important cognitive costs in the wrong place. Once we have assessed our evidence, the additional cost of merely changing our opinion is miniscule. Indeed, it tends to happen automatically and almost instantaneously. The expenditures involved in changing one's mind are primarily expenditures involved in the processes of assessing the evidence leading up to the change in belief. An approach that treats existing belief as something that goes into the calculation of on-balance justification with other familiar evidential factors requires us to be conscientious in taking the evidence into account anyway, and spares us only the trouble of switching beliefs when the evidence turns out to be very close. Our view, in contrast, spares us the costs of assessment itself, which is as it should be. 59 The presumptive conservatism our view generates is also strong enough to imply that in a range of cases, we may persist in our beliefs after we have lost our evidence. As long as an agent lacks any special reason to reconsider that belief, she is rational to hold on to it even if, due to the need to minimize mental clutter or through sheer forgetfulness, she no longer has the same evidence available to her. And we secure this without needing to locate the source of this rationality in either her current evidence or in her past evidence. So dynamic conservatism is able to capture the most important case judgments involved in these arguments for conservatism. But it does much more than this. Notice that we have secured these judgments by appeal only to the default rationality of not considering. This presumptive conservatism bears some structural similarity to standard conservative proposals (McCain 2008; McGrath 2007) which claim that the mere fact of belief renders it prima facie rational, a status which is then undermined by defeaters of various kinds. Those views also offer a way to limit strain on our cognitive resources and allow us to believe when we have lost our evidence, as long as the conditions for defeat are sufficiently strong. But when one looks at the mechanics of these views, one finds no reference to the costs of belief formation, to clutter avoidance, or to the limitations of our memory. To the extent that defeat conditions are developed at all, one finds general evidential defeaters like "If S has better reasons for believing that ~ P than S's reasons for believing that P, then S is no longer justified in believing that P" (McCain 2008: 186) These are plausible enough as defeaters go. It is obscure on these views, however, how the fact that forming beliefs is costly, that we must avoid clutter, or that our memories are limited might explain the existence and extent of rational doxastic inertia. Why these particular defeaters? Why not stronger ones? Why not weaker ones? Our cognitive limitations are contingent facts about us. But on such views, no sense is given of how our conservative practices should change if, for example, the costs of belief formation were less, or we did not have to worry about mental clutter, or we had perfect memories. These views may 60 get the cases right, but they seem to operate in isolation from the thoughts that motivated those cases, and so seem to get them right by coincidence. On our view, on the other hand, once we move past the basic presumptive part of the dynamic picture and begin to look at the list of candidates for reasons against consideration, we find those very thoughts reflected back at us directly. 4-, for instance, tells us that some degree of conservatism is warranted in virtue of, and to the extent that, considering a question represents a burden on our cognitive resources. In addition, not only can we explain our rationality in the face of losses of belief that occur as a consequence of clutter-avoidance, our view suggests an independent mechanism for clutter avoidance, in the form of 1-. Our original state concerning most beliefs, after all, is nonbelief. The vast majority of beliefs are acquired, not innate. So a tendency not to consider a question when it lacks importance manifests on balance as a tendency not to have beliefs about such things, that is, precisely a tendency not to clutter one's mind with trivialities. So our view is especially well placed to appeal to those who take clutter avoidance as a serious concern for rational agents. Furthermore, 2- tells us that the degree to which doxastic inertia is warranted is sensitive to the ways our condition as finite human agents may lead our epistemic position to deteriorate over time. One way, of course, that our epistemic position may deteriorate over time is through the loss of memory. And the thought that our rational norms should reflect this by inclining us to trust our beliefs is precisely the sort of thing underlying the attractiveness of conservatism as an account of the rationality of memorial belief. In fact, I think we may understand the conservative insight about memory as merely a special case of a more general, more fundamental motivation for our dynamic picture. Our norms on rational epistemic behavior, I suggest, should lead us to do work on our beliefs at precisely those times when that work will be most epistemically effective. In the end, we want our beliefs to reflect the best 61 response to the most information, and then lock them in until an even more optimal situation comes along. This is reflected in the interaction of considerations like 2+, 3+, 2-, and 3-. If I expect I may have lost evidence, or become less competent as an evaluator, I should not begin a process that I expect will mislead me. This allows my beliefs about each topic to reflect the epistemic peaks in my history on that issue. So our view makes manifest not only how rational doxastic inertia is possible, but how it is sensitive to those features of the human condition that made endorsing it attractive. If updating our beliefs were less costly, if we could easily store arbitrarily many beliefs, or if our memories were perfect, the extent of rational inertia would be reduced. It bears emphasis that the list of reasons for and against consideration was not simply constructed ad hoc to build our abstract motivations for conservatism into the view---each item is, I think, independently and intuitively plausible as the sort of thing that bears on whether it's worth considering whether P. That it would, then, have such a tight connection with the very things that motivate the conservative project would be a coincidence bordering on miraculous unless it were capturing something very deep about the conservative insight. 5.1. Passive versus Active Inertia One notable feature of dynamic conservatism is that it makes significant the difference between two kinds of inertia. Active inertia occurs when an agent continues to hold a belief due to the fact that they already hold it, through active consideration. Passive inertia occurs when an agent continues to hold a belief due to not reconsidering. On the dynamic picture we have sketched, the only kind of doxastic inertia which is rational is passive inertia. Dynamic Worth Believing tells us that once we have decided to consider whether P, we are beholden to the considerations that make P worth believing. And according to the evidence restriction, only evidence can make P worth believing. So once we are engaged in active consideration, the mere fact that we already believe something no longer has any 62 weight in determining whether we'd be rational to keep that belief The view does not, then, license any kind of active inertia. In this respect, dynamic conservatism is more modest than some versions of standard conservatism, which, by allowing mere belief to count in its own favor, rendering it all-things considered worth having, allow an agent to maintain their belief even when actively considering it, and indeed, even when aware of the evidential shortcomings of that belief One might worry that this makes the view too modest. In some cases of forgotten evidence, it seems, we do actively consider the question, and find ourselves unable to recall our reasons. And yet it still seems rational for us to hold on to our beliefs. Because dynamic conservatism does not explain active inertia, we must tum to other tools, like those appealed to by the evidentialist, to explain these cases. If we must make this appeal anyway, the worry goes, why not do without dynamic conservatism altogether? It is true that a dynamic conservative will use more familiar evidentialist tools to handle these cases. But that does not mean that it fails to improve on those views. The standard evidentialist explanation of memory, recall, appeals to second order evidence (about, for instance, the general reliability of memory). One major problem with this explanation, we saw, was that this sort of evidence could not contribute to our rationality unless our belief was based on that evidence. So while we could use this evidence to rationally actively reaffirm our belief, this would not explain our rationality when we do not perform some such reaffirmation. But this is just to say that evidentialism fails to explain passive inertia. It is a gap that dynamic conservatism has the perfect shape to fill. So it is complementary to the evidentialist strategy, rather than redundant. Moreover, while the evidentialist cannot explain why agents who lack relevant second order information at all can lose evidence and rationally maintain their beliefs, the dynamic view can at least explain why such agents can exhibit passive inertia. The cases the view doesn't endorse as rational are those where an agent active!J reaffirms 63 their belief withoutrelevant second order information. And these are the cases where it is least intuitive that doxastic inertia is rational. Nevertheless, if these are taken to be core cases, it must be admitted that this is a genuine disadvantage of the dynamic approach-" The distinction bet\veen active and passive inertia also lets us see why the dynamic view won't explain the rationality of maintaining ordinary beliefs in the face of skeptical challenges, a common motivation for conservatism we have so far set aside (Sklar 1975; Lycan 1988; McCain 2008; Poston 2014). We want a way to respond to the skeptic-to justify our belief to her or to ourselves, to restore our confidence when we do consider whether a skeptical scenario is true. A view that lets us defy skepticism only by not thinking about it will not satisfy. This is not to say that a dynamic conservative can't respond to the skeptic-but their solution will not flow from their conservatism. Whether this is a major strike against dynamic conservatism will depend on how seriously one takes the anti-skeptical ambition. There is good reason to think that the cognitive cost, clutter- avoidance, and memory motivations are fundamentally independent of the anti-skeptical hope. The skeptical problem, after all, appears even for agents who are cognitively flawless-perfect, instantaneous reasoners with limitless cognitive resources. So the problems that the dynamic view helps us solve form an interesting and unified class. Furthermore, I think there is more grounds to be skeptical of the rationality of active belief perseverance than that of passive perseverance. Any conservative, remember, will want to distinguish rational inertia from those types of belief perseverance that we criticize as cognitively vicious. And a characteristic criticism of this sort is an accusation of stubbornness. To be stubborn is not merely to hold on to a belief despite having, in the background, insufficient evidence for belief, it is to hold on 27 A related worry goes as follo\VS. If whenever one thinks about P, or retrieves a belief from memory, one counts as considering whether P, then it will be extremely easy to stop the inertia of belief, and we won't have captured the interesting cases of forgotten evidence. I mean to use "consideration" in a more robust sense than this. Merely checking or recalling one's belief on a matter is not sufficient to be considering whether Pin my sense, which is a more involved process involving the weighing of evidence. "Deliberation" would be the practical analogue. 64 to that belief in the face of evidential insufficiency. Someone who exhibits merely passive inertia, then, is immune to charges of epistemic stubbornness in a way someone who exhibits active inertia is not. Someone who believes in the rationality of active inertia may, of course, have a way of distinguishing objectionable epistemic stubbornness from acceptable sticking-to-one's-guns. But the fact that by sacrificing a response to the skeptic, the dynamic picture can easily dismiss a characteristic cognitive vice as fundamentally different in kind from rational inertia and not merely in degree is a reason to suspect that its limitation to justifying passive forms of perseverance is a feature, not a bug. 6. The Standard Costs, Revisited We have seen that the dynamic view can cite the canonical virtues of conservatism in its favor, and indeed, that it has a better claim to these virtues than the standard view itself.Now we will consider the costs of the standard view and see whether the same problems arise for dynamic conservatism. First, we can see that unlike the standard view, dynamic conservatism is consistent with ER. Notice that the explanation of rational inertia on the dynamic view is crucially different from the one given by the standard conservative. On that view, an agent was rational to continue believing because that belief was worth having. That belief had something non-evidentially counting in favor of it. This was a violation of the evidence restriction. On the dynamic conservative picture, the belief the agent has need not be worth having. There needn't be anything counting in favor of it. The belief the agent already had is not related to the belief they have going forward as justifier to justified, or as a reason, or as a conferrer of epistemic merit of any kind. This version of conservatism is able to capture ER because by rejecting state-oriented norms demanding the worthiness of our beliefs, we allow that there are periods of time where what a belief 65 has going for it simply doesn't matter for an agent's rationality. This lets us maintain that the only thing that counts in favor of a belief is the evidence for it while allowing for rational doxastic inertia. 28 It is important to add that if we are skeptical of the evidence restriction for other reasons, we need not keep it. The dynamic approach is equally handy for those who reject ER but nevertheless think that mere existing belief is not the right sort of non-evidential consideration to contribute to beliefworthiness. We may even, if we are perverse, take the dynamic view on board and hold that the mere fact that one believes something counts in favor of believing it. Dynamic conservatism is compatible with any view about what makes a belief worth having. Finally, let us reconsider the three traditional objections to conservatism, as challenges to the dynamic rather than the standard model of the view. First, conservatism is accused of having the unacceptable implication that it should be appropriate to cite the fact that one already believes something when justifying one's belief to others or deliberating about what to believe. What resources does the dynamic conservative have to respond? Let us consider the nature of the practices of justification and deliberation. We ask for justification from others when we are looking for a basis for our own beliefs, or examining the basis of theirs. Justification, in other words, is paradigmatically a process of demonstrating to others what is good about what one believes. Deliberation, in tum, is a kind of first-person analogue of justification-we are identifying and balancing those considerations which bear on the question of what to believe. That is, we are considering some matter of belief On our dynamic picture, by the evidence restriction, the fact that I already believe something does not count in favor of the belief- it is not part of the basis or the grounds for my belief It is not, furthermore, something we are allowed to appeal to when engaged in the process of considering whether to hold the belief The role of mere 28 It is worth emphasizing a distinction between the dynamic view and a superficially similar view----one that maintains S\Xi'B and claims that mere belief only confers epistemic merit while an agent is not considering. Such a view would not be consistent with the evidence restriction 66 belief in rationality is just fundamentally different from that of a justifier of any kind. Unlike the standard conservative, then, the dynamic conservative is under no pressure to claim that in such practices it is appropriate to cite the fact of mere belief in favor of the belief itself. Second, conservatism is accused of licensing bootstrapping, by which a person may, by irrationally forming a belief, thereby make it rational for him to continue believing it. It was noted when we introduced this objection that it put the conservative in an especially awkward position dialectically, since the situation of a person who has formed a belief on insufficient evidence is, afterwards, the same as one who formed a belief on good evidence and then lost that evidence. And one of the reasons to favor the conservative approach to memory over preservationism is that it allows us to maintain that our rationality now does not depend on facts about our distant history. Since as far as the present is concerned, the rational forgetter and the agent who formed a belief irrationally are indistinguishable, the conservative who wants to exploit such an intemalist requirement must insist that agents after rational forgetting and irrational formation are on a par. I accept this as a commitment. Any view that takes intemalism seriously will have to do the same. But I think the sort of 'bootstrapping' the dynamic view allows is not of an objectionable sort. Recall that the dynamic picture licenses only passive inertia. The agent who forms a belief irrationally is later rational in holding on to that belief, but only as long as she does not reconsider the question. When she again asks herself whether her belief is correct, she begins a process that ends with her giving up that belief on pain of irrationality. This does not sound crazy. The really objectionable kind of bootstrapping comes with views, like standard conservatism, that justify active inertia. On such views, it seems, an agent could irrationally form a belief, and then keep on actively reaffirming that belief, thereafter, without repeating their original irrationality. In contrast, the dynamic picture does not allow mere formation of a belief in a proposition to take that proposition from being unworthy of belief to 67 being worthy of belief, preventing an irrationally formed belief from being actively reaffirmed. So it is immune to the most serious charges of bootstrapping. Finally, conservatism is accused of violating a constraint of impartiality by treating the rational force of our own beliefs asymmetrically from that of the beliefs of others. It's clear on the standard conservative picture how the asymmetry occurs-my beliefs count directly in favor of my own beliefs, but yours do not. But what is the asymmetry on our dynamic picture? Neither my mere beliefs nor anyone else's count directly in favor of the proposition believed. Nor do they bear on the worthiness of considering whether something is true. In fact, the only way that the identity of an agent matters to our norms is in identifying whose beliefs are being considered. I treat my beliefs differently than yours only in the sense that I reconsider my beliefs but I don't reconsider your beliefs. But to complain that this is objectionably asymmetrical would be absurd. I can'treconsider your beliefs any more than I can (directly) raise your hand. So the partiality objection cannot even get off the ground against the dynamic view. 7. Recapitulation Let me summarize the case I have presented. Conservatism is attractive for the way it reflects a proper rational sensitivity to our cognitive limitations. Standard conservatism, however, is associated with several significant costs-it must reject the well-motivated evidence restriction and it is vulnerable to several serious independent objections. The conservative is forced to accept the standard version of the view, however, only if they accept State-Oriented Worth Believing. By rejecting SWB, we open the door to a view on which the relevant norms of rationality govern dynamic processes like consideration instead of state-oriented attitudes like belief The dynamic conservatism that emerges allows us to maintain the evidence restriction, and captures the canonical motivations for conservatism in a way that is in many respects better than the standard conservative views that originally sought to exploit them. Furthermore, the dynamic conservative picture is immune to the arguments that threaten 68 standard conservatism. Its failure to secure the conservative ambition of responding to worries about skepticism is grounded in its rejection of the rationality of active doxastic inertia, of which we have independent reason to be skeptical. In light of the gains made possible by endorsing a dynamic approach to the rationality of belief, a project whose potential is yet to be fully explored, the long philosophical entrenchment of norms like State-Oriented Worth Believing would be irrational not to reconsider. 69 Chapter Three Dynamic Permissivism There has been considerable recent philosophical debate over a thesis called epistemic permissivism. According to the permissivist, it is possible for two agents to have the exact same total body of evidence and yet differ in their doxastic attitudes towards some proposition, without either being irrational. Although the camp of permissive views is large and diverse, it has found its fair share of criticism, most notably in a seminal paper by Roger White (2005) and the vigorous debate it spawned. However, I will argue, not enough attention has been paid to the distinction between different ways in which permissivism might be true. In particular, there is one type of permissive view which the contemporary debate has completely ignored. This view permits differences in belief between evidential equals by rejecting state-oriented norms connecting an agent's rational behavior to their evidence in favor of rfynamic norms governing their processes of consideration and belief-update. In this chapter, I will present a taxonomy of forms of epistemic permissivism framed as the upshot of different ways one might respond to a basic argument against the view culled from White. I will discuss briefly some of the commitments these views incur and the resources they have to answer challenges from their critics. Then I'll show how the dynamic strategy of rejecting state oriented norms on belief opens the door to a new and particularly attractive kind of permissivism. In 70 doing so, I will give an independently plausible sketch of the kinds of norms such a picture would include, discussing their implications for rational behavior in general and the permissivist dispute in particular. This view, I will argue, is especially well-placed to answer worries that have been raised against traditional permissivist views. 1. Permissivism and Uniqueness Epistemic permissivism, roughly speaking, is the claim that agents with the same evidence can reasonably disagree (the denial of permissivism has its own name, uniqueness). More precisely: Permissivism: It is possible for two agents (or the same agent in different possible worlds), to a) have the same body of total evidence E, b) hold different doxastic attitudes towards proposition P, and c) exhibit no irrationality. I will not take a stand here on exactly what constitutes our total evidence, thinking of it as, minimally, some set of mental states like belief or knowledge (or the content of such states) which are in some broad sense internally accessible to us. To be fair to uniqueness, I will assume that our evidence is relatively extensive, including things that are only a passive part of our psychology at the time. Taking an overly narrow view of evidence, such as limiting it to those things of which we are at the time immediately consciously aware, would render Uniqueness implausible on its face, since our evidence at any given time would be far too spare to settle anything like the multitude of beliefs ordinary agents carry with them. Although views with implications concerning permissivism have been around for a long time, the contemporary debate on the topic has as its focal point a paper by Roger White (2005) in which he presents a series of arguments against the view. Since then, both sides have found their fair share 71 of advocates - besides White himself, Feldman (2007), Christensen (2007), and Hedden (2015) come out in favor of uniqueness, while Meacham (2013), Schoenfield (2014), and Kelly (2013) defend versions of permissivism. I will, for the purposes of this chapter, be primarily considering permissivism as a view concerningfu// belief, as opposed to other doxastic attitudes like credences, which are foremost in the mind of those disputants in the literature of a bayesian persuasion. 29 This is primarily for the purposes of unburdened presentation, and the dialectic over permissivism in these other attitudes is similar, though the reader is advised some kinds of permissivism may be more or less plausible when applied to them. Secondly, although permissivism can take a moderate form, according to which some given evidence may allow only slack between believing a proposition and withholding judgment on it, I will be concerned with a more extreme kind of permissivism, which holds that slack exists between believing a proposition and believing the negation of that proposition. I have a particular interest in the prospects of this more radical view since it is a consequence of the dynamic approach I favor, and many proponents of permissivism in the literature do endorse it in its stronger form. Still, although my discussion will be framed around the debate over the extreme view, the taxonomy I will develop equally well describes options for a moderate approach. 30 1.1. Why Permissivism? Permissivism as such is rarely argued for in depth. It is sometimes claimed to have the force 29 Meacham (2013) defends the permissive form of Bayesianism, while Christensen (2007) argues for impermissivism. 30 For a defense centered on the more moderate versions of permissivism, see I<elly (2014). Also, Mark Nelson (2010) argues for a moderate view on which withholding judgment is alw([YS permissible. 72 of intuition behind it. Gideon Rosen (2001) suggests that "It should be obvious that reasonable people can disagree, even when confronted with the same body of evidence. When a jury or a court is divided in a difficult case, the mere fact of disagreement does not mean that someone is being unreasonable." (p. 71) In light of subsequent controversy, the claim of obviousness seems premature, though the general sentiment, echoed in Schoenfield (2014), retains some force; given the ubiquity of disagreement between intelligent and similarly informed people, rejecting permissivism implies that irrationality is more widespread than we generally think. Much of the rest of the support for permissivism comes from the fact that it follows from a number of epistemic views philosophers have found independently attractive. White (2005), for example, lists conservatism, subjective bayesianism, and reflective equilibrium as established classes of views committed to permissivism, and Ballantyne/Coffinan (2011) argue that uniqueness rules out several plausible pairings of views about evidence and rationality internalism - possible stances on whether internal duplicates can differ in their evidence and their rationality respectively. If attractive models of rational belief are committed to permissivism, then that is a presumption favoring the view. 31 I will not be breaking this dialectical pattern here. I take it for granted that there is considerable variety in the doxastic attitudes of ordinary people with roughly similar evidence, that we do not naturally attribute to irrationality on the part of one or more of the parties, and that it is a virtue of permissivism that it provides a simple face-value explanation of this fact. And though it is beyond the scope of this chapter to argue, I believe the thesis of epistemic conservatism, that the fact an agent already believes something can make a difference to whether it is rational for them to believe it going 31 In particular, they suggest that uniqueness precludes both being an internahst about rationality and an externahst about evidence, and being an externahst about rationality and an internahst about evidence. 73 forward, is independently plausible for a number of reasons. 32 Such a view entails that there are at least two different doxastic attitudes that might be available to an agent with certain given evidence - the attitude that it is rational for them to have going forward if they do not already believe P, and the attitude that is rational if they do. Any attractions of conservatism, then, are ipso facto attractions of perm1ss1v1sm. I don't take these meager considerations to be sufficient to motivate those committed to uniqueness to abandon their views. My task in this chapter is to explore ways in which permissivism could be true and assess their relative advantages, as the thesis can be achieved in a number of ways, the distinctions between which have not been fully appreciated, and to welcome a new view into the family that I believe stands on its own and may ameliorate skepticism of the permissivist outlook. Before I present the dynamic form of permissivism I prefer, I will canvass the more common varieties and the difficulties they face. The differences between the views will stand out more clearly, however, if we introduce them in light of a basic challenge to the general permissivist project. 2. The Evidence-Pointing Argument The canonical attack on permissivism comes from Roger White (2005). He presents and elaborates his objections in several ways, but it will be instructive to first consider a version of what he calls his "quick and dirty" argument against the view (p. 447). Following Schoenfield (2014), we may call it the "Evidence-Pointing Argument", and it runs as follows: (1) State-Oriented Evidential Support: It is rational for an agent to believe that P only if their total evidence supports P. 32 Some motivations for conservatism can be found in Harman (1986), McGrath (2007). 74 (2) The Evidence Points One Way Any given set of evidence may support P or it may support not-P, but it cannot support both. (3) Therefore, there is no body of evidence such that sometimes an agent with that total evidence may rationally believe P and sometimes an agent with that evidence may rationally believe not-P. Though White takes the evidence-pointing argument to be sound, he recognizes that it may not be fully dialectically adequate. Nevertheless, it is a helpful tool because we will find, in different responses to this argument, the seeds for distinctive species of permissivism. 2.1. Options Permissivism One way to respond to the evidence-pointing argument is to reject premise (2) and insist that a single set of evidence can, at the same time, in the same sense, and for the same person support both P and not-P. When one considers one's evidence, on this view, multiple options present themselves as equally supported. I call this approach rptions-permissivism because it allows that a single agent with given evidence has, in some cases, something like an epistemic choice bet\veen believing P and believing not-P. It allows intrapersonal slack between evidence and belief Though this extreme, full belief version of options-permissivism is unpopular for reasons that will become clear, Kelly (2010, 2013, p. 300) expresses sympathy with a version of this kind of view applied to credences. 2.2. Background-Relative Permissivism There are two sibling permissive views which take a very different approach. In response to the evidence-pointing argument, these views do not reject 2 outright, but insist that it has a missing parameter. The support relation, it is claimed, is not a mere t\vo-place relation bet\veen a set of 75 evidence and a belief or proposition. It is a three-place relation between a set of evidence, a belief or proposition, and some background condition of the agent. On one spelling-out of this background condition, evidence supports a proposition only relative to a certain epistemic startingpoint. The cleanest example of such a view is the sort of subjective bayesian picture defended, in the context of the permissivism debate, by Meacham (2013). According to the standard bayesian picture, rational epistemic behavior is determined by two things - one's evidence, and one's prior probability function. The prior operates as a kind of essential background against which evidence does its work. Given a particular prior, there is only one way an agent can respond to her evidence. So this view does not tolerate intrapersonal slack in the way the options permissivist does. The view secures permissivism by claiming that there are many equally rational priors that can be had by different agents - agents with the same evidence but with different priors will rationally come to different conclusions. A second strategy of this type is defended by Schoenfield (2014) and takes evidential support to be relative some set of epistemic standards. Much like priors, the epistemic standards determine how the agent is to respond to evidence, and much like priors, many different epistemic standards are equally rational. Two agents may, with full rationality, have the same evidence and different beliefs due to a difference in their epistemic standards, while each agent's standards only allow one response for that person. These views both claim, then, that to be true, (1) must be read as claiming "it is rational for an agent to believe P only if their total evidence supports P relative to their own background. And to be true, (2) must be read as something like "Any given set of evidence may support P relative to background Q or it may support not-P relative to the same background, but not both". But on these readings, (3) no longer 76 follows from (1) and (2). So, the evidence-pointing argument is blocked. 2.3. Non-evidential Permissivism A third way of responding to the evidence-pointing argument involves rejecting premise 1. This premise is a norm that is both state-oriented and evidential. It is state-oriented because it judges an agent's rationality in virtue of features of their states of mind at individual times - in this case their beliefs. It is evidential because the constraint it places on the agent is determined entirely by the agent's evidence. Because there surely is some norm that connects an agent's beliefs to the considerations that support those beliefs, and because evidence is paradigmatically the sort of thing that bears on belief, state-oriented evidential support has a great deal of initial plausibility. But some deny that evidential considerations exhaust the considerations that bear on belief The strategy of what I'll call non-evidential permissivism is to replace the evidential state-oriented support principle in (1) with a non-evidential state oriented support principle, that is, to claim instead that the right requirement should be something like: State-oriented Non-evidential Support: It is rational to believe P only if the evidence, together with all the relevant non-evidential factors supports P. Replacing (1) with such a principle blocks the evidence-pointing argument. The evidence may point only one way, the non-evidential permissivist will say, but the evidence plus other non-evidential factors will, in different cases, point in different ways. Different versions of this view will take different stances on what the relevant non-evidential factors are. One possibility is that these are pragmatic reasons for belief While this sort of view is unpopular, a moderate picture of this sort is defended by Schroeder (2012), who argues that there are 77 pragmatic reasons against belief, which can lead agents with the same evidence to differ in whether they rationally believe or withhold on a proposition. An extreme permissivism in this vein would have to identify pragmatic factors that can make the difference between believing P and believing its negation. A more common approach of this type we have mentioned already - standard epistemic conservative views are a kind of non-evidential permissivism that take the mere fact that one already believes in P to be a non-evidential epistemic factor in favor of P. Proponents of this view argue that the conservative view has several important virtues, from allowing us to manage the cognitive costs of changing our minds (Lycan 1988) to providing a solution to skepticism (Sklar 1975). Permissivism falls out of this view as a corollary, since it allows agents who differ in whether they already believed a proposition to differ in whether they rationally believe it going forward, even when their evidence is the same. 3. An Evaluation It is not my aim in this chapter to refute these forms of permissivism. But to whet the reader's interest in my own special brand of the view, it will help to see why one might worry about traditional elaborations of the permissivist thesis and the commitments they incur. Options-permissivism seems to be the sort of permissive view critics (White 2005, Christensen 2007, Feldman 2007) have in mind by default. But few of those engaged in active defense of permissivism commit to this view when it comes to a belief and its negation, and it is not difficult to see why. First of all, The Evidence Points One W'!)I is extremely plausible on its face, and the options permissivist doesn't seem to have in easy reach any way to cushion the blow of rejecting it by, for instance, proposing a replacement, as the other forms of permissivism do. It's difficult to see what it 78 could be for evidence to support some proposition except by contrast with the negation - to support that proposition over its falsehood. Each part of our evidence counts in favor of P, it is natural to think, to exactly the same extent it counts against ~ P. Evidential support, on this intuitive picture, works like a scale with the evidence for P piled on one side and the evidence for ~ P piled on the other. To say that the evidence could point both ways is to suggest that there are ways of placing weights on the scale that lift both ends at once. On this way of thinking, to claim that the evidence can on balance support both P and ~ P sounds incoherent. Furthermore, the idea that we may be presented with an epistemic choice between believing P and believing ~ P is false to our own experience. When we form a belief that P, we do not do so with the background thought that the evidence for ~ P is just as compelling. Indeed, to form a belief like this is a borderline psychological impossibility. In cases where the evidence for P and the evidence for~ P are equally compelling, the only rational response, and the one human agents actually manifest seems to be withholdingjudgment. Options permissivism's relatively radical commitment to intrapersonal slack does not, moreover, do much work in explaining the kinds of intuitions that motivate permissivism - which are typically thoughts about rational disagreement. So the considerable costs that attach to this feature of the view come with very little upside. The idea that there might be epistemic options available to us is most plausible in borderline cases - where the evidence is right around the boundary of being good enough for a belief that P. And Kelly (2014) suggests that some given evidence may leave rationally open whether to have, say, 39% or 40% credence in some proposition. But these boundaries exist between believing something and withholding judgment, or between one credence and another, very nearby credence, not between believing something and believing its negation. So options-permissivism looks like it's poised, at best, to account for a moderate permissivism. 79 Background-relative views are in a somewhat better position. By recovering a plausible reconstrual of the highly intuitive premise (2), and because they are not committed to problematic intrapersonal slack, these views have a better response to the evidence-pointing argument than options-permis sivism. But one may worry that these views have something of a needle to thread. The strategy owes us the promise of some kind of principled explanation of the extent of slack in the background conditions. There are dangers in two directions. Consider the epistemic-standard permissivist view. If a'!Y epistemic standards are fair game, then no matter how bizarrely someone reacts to evidence (by, say, forming random or even contradictory beliefs), they will not be rationally criticizable provided they are following their own rules. Similarly, if someone's priors are allowed to be sufficiently extreme, their Bayesian responses to evidence will be unrecognizable as what we would ordinarily consider rational behavior. If, on the other hand, the range of acceptable standards or priors is very narrow, then the view may end up too moderate to explain the range of disagreement we find intuitively rational, and lose out on one of the motivations for a permissivist outlook. Whether any sensible, non-ad-hoc restriction of this sort is available is far from clear. The non-evidential permissivist has their own set of concerns. It is generally thought, from reflection upon Pascal's Wager and similar cases, that pragmatic factors are reasons of the wrong kind to bear on a belief's epistemic rationality. Even some who think that there are such pragmatic reasons claim that they specifically concern withholding (See Schroeder 2012). Because on such views non evidential factors can only make the rational difference between believing P and withholding on whether P, and never between believing P and believing not-P, they only justify permissivism in a moderate form. The other main representative from this category, the standard conservative view, on the other hand, faces several powerful challenges, threatening to license agents in bootstrapping 80 themselves into rational beliefs merely by forming them, and objectionably treating an agent's own beliefs asymmetrically from those of others (Christensen 1994). In addition, any non-evidentialistview rejects a plausible claim we may call the evidence restriction, the thesis that the only things bearing on beliefworthiness in a distinctly epistemic way are evidential, relevant in some way on the belief's likelihood of being true. The evidence restriction is both intuitive and theoretically attractive for the way it draws the boundary between reasons for belief of the right, genuinely epistemic, kind and the wrong kind, while reflecting what many take to be belief's fundamental aim of truth. 3.1. The Arbitrariness Argument There is also a general worry about permissivism arising from the thought that these views make our beliefs in some sense objectionably arbitrary. Although he does not give the argument in this form, the following is, I think, a distillation of a particularly compelling set of concerns White raises in developing his objection: (A) Any plausible form of (extreme) permissivism will allow that we can sometimes know we are in a permissive case and retain our belief (B) If I believe I am in a permissive case, I must view any belief on the topic as arbitrary from the standpoint of truth. (C) Viewing my belief as arbitrary from the standpoint of truth makes it irrational for me to hold the belief (D) So, it is impossible for me to rationally hold a belief when I know I am in a permissive case. (E) So, (extreme) permissivism is false. 81 One might reject (A) if one thinks that permissive cases only exist for those who are blind to them - that rational disagreement may exist only when the parties involved do not realize that it does. But this self-effacing permissivist response is quickly discarded in White's own discussion (pp. 450- 451), and to my knowledge no permissivist is happy to endorse it. This view has the odd implication that meta-information vindicating your present belief as rational can defeat that belief Moreover, permissivists typically think the phenomenon of rational disagreement is fairly pervasive - indeed, as we have noted, the appeal to intuitions to that effect are part of the motivation for the view. There is a tension between the visibility this implies for permissive cases and the blindness rejecting (A) suggests we need for them to exist. (C) is also difficult to deny. It is arguably constitutive of belief as a mental type that it is fundamentally concerned with truth. (B), it seems, is the crucial premise. We may ask, then, how plausible it is given each of the forms of permissivism we have so far discussed. Options Permissivism seems especially poorly positioned to deny B). After all, on that view, believing P and believing not P are both direct options for me, once everything bearing on the truth of P has been taken into account. In the most straightforward way, then, I might as well choose either one, as far as truth is concerned. Background-relative permissivists are better situated. I(.nowing that I am in a permissive case, they may suggest, doesn't mean that my belief is arbitrary from the standpoint of truth, because my belief looks, antecedently, a lot more likely to be true,from my background perspective, than the belief of my disagreeing evidential peer. And, they may add, it is only against a background of priors or standards that we can even begin to make such a judgment. Though my evidential equal has a different view, from my perspective the standards or priors he has are worse, when it comes to the truth, (though not when it comes to rationality), than mine. (See Schoenfield 2014) 82 I think there is much to be said for this kind of reply. But it is easy to remain worried. Suppose you learned that the background standards or priors you accept were chosen for you in the following way: when you were young, a scientist came up with two backgrounds she knew would lead to directly opposite opinions regarding P. Then, she flipped a coin, and based on the outcome assigned the associated background to you, subsequently leading you to form the belief that P. Leaming this would, plausibly, justify you in losing confidence in your belief in P. It differs from a case where the scientist flips a coin and directly implants a corresponding belief in you, it seems, only by degree of elaboration. It is little comfort to notice that according to the standards the coinflip chose for you, the belief you reached looks pretty good. That looks like bootstrapping of a particularly flagrant variety. There is something arbitrary about the coinflip, which is insensitive to truth, that threatens to infect things all the way down. And since our adoption of backgrounds is, like the coinflip, not truth-sensitive, it looks arbitrary in the same way. The non-evidential permissivist, finally, must claim that what makes the difference, sometimes, between rationally believing P and rationally believing its negation is some non-evidential factor. But evidence is precisely all that bears on the truth of a proposition. The non-evidential permissivist is no better off, from the standpoint of truth than an agent in an options-permissive case would be if they decided by a coinflip. They simply substitute for the coinflip some equally truth-irrelevant decisive factor. I do not claim that the challenges facing the views I've raised above are unanswerable. But answering them is sure to take on controversial commitments which may turn a potential permissivist away. So it is worth seeing if other forms of permissivism with different, and at least for some, more palatable commitments can be found. 83 4. Dynamic Permissivism The three general forms of permissivism above are perhaps not exhaustive of the literature but they are representative. Each is associated with a distinctive way of responding to the evidence pointing argument consistent with accepting a version of a state-oriented or !Jnchronic principle - one judging us according to the states and combinations of attitudes we are in at particular times - that demands that at all times our beliefs be supported by our evidence. Such a principle is intuitively appealing, and implicit or explicit commitment to state-oriented norms of this sort are common (Broome 2007, Hedden 2015). So it is not surprising that the discussion of permissivism by both advocates and opponents has effectively taken such principles for granted. If we reject the assumption that there is a state-oriented principle relating the beliefs of rational agents to their epistemic grounds, however, a novel approach to permissivism presents itself A dynamic process-oriented norm takes as its jurisdiction not the question of which beliefs, intentions, or other mental states we may be in at any given time, as state-oriented norms do, but rather the operation of mental processes - temporally extended activities, like reasoning or consideration, through which we manage our cognitive economy. These norms are not merely norms that mention states at multiple times, demanding, for instance that if we have some attitudes at a time ti, we must have some other attitudes at a later time t2. Though a norm like this is diachronic or intertemporal, it still takes our states as their fundamental object. Though this is one way of departing from the synchronic principle, the view I would like to explore goes further. Genuine process norms take processes, a very different kind of mental entity from a state like belief, as their object, telling us when and how a particular process operates in a rational agent, and how it interacts with the rest of our cognitive universe. 84 The dynamic view I have in mind, like non-evidential permissivism, denies premise (1) in the evidence-pointing argument. Also like that view, it recognizes the importance of a replacement principle connecting our beliefs to the considerations that support them. But instead of replacing it with another state-oriented norm policing our mental attitudes, it replaces it with a set of norms that are dynamic and process-oriented in the sense just described. While norms on attitudes are mostly limited to telling us which attitudes or combinations thereof we may hold, process norms come in at least t\vo types - norms governing when a process is to be initiated, and norms governing how it is to operate once initiated. In particular, I want to focus on the process of considering whether Pis true. My proposed replacement for the State-oriented Evidential Support principle is the following: Dynamic Evidential Support: It is rational to form or reaffirm a belief that P as the conclusion of a process of consideration-whether-P only if Pis supported by the evidence one takes into account during consideration. Two important questions must be answered before we can see the consequences of this kind of dynamic norm; First, when is a rational agent required to consider whether P? And second, what evidence must they take into account when considering? Not every possible combination of norms on consideration leads to an interesting form of permissivism. In particular, combining extremely demanding norms like "whenever an agent gets new evidence that has any bearing on whether P, they are rationally required to consider whether P" and "whenever an agent considers whether P, they are rationally required to consider their total evidence" will, with the principle above, lead agents to quickly recalibrate in line with other agents with the same evidence whenever they learn something new. 85 But I think those norms are overdemanding in at least two ways. First, it is not very plausible that any bit of relevant evidence is enough make it rationally required for us to consider a question - we learn many things all the time that have at least some small evidential relevance to countless beliefs, and we do not have time to consider all of them. Second, though perhaps more controversially, it is implausible we are required to be responsive to all of our evidence whenever we consider a question. Our total evidence, the full range of information we could, in principle, bring to bear on a question, is a very large set, and in considering what to believe, taking evidence into account is costly in both time and cognitive resources. Sometimes, limited agents like us must get by while taking into account only parts of our total evidence. There is a tradition in formal epistemology that takes the norms of rationality to describe the behavior of ideal agents not subject to the kinds of cognitive limitations faced by human beings 33 . Adherents to this ideal picture of rationality will not be moved by worries about overdemandingness. The debate over idealization in the study of rational norms is beyond the scope of this chapter, so I will merely note that the view I am developing is not neutral regarding this point, and suggest only that the ordinary intuitions about rational behavior to which I appeal do seem to take constraints posed by our limitations seriously. And we will at least learn something about how theoretical commitments about the relation of rational norms to cognitive imperfection constrain the forms of permissivism available to us. 34 If we take these thoughts on board, we are in a position to discover a path towards a robust kind of permissivism. In the following sections, I will make what I take to be some pretheoretically plausible claims about the norms on initiating consideration and on taking evidence into account, and 33 See, for exmnple, Christensen (2007) on "rational ideals". 34 I owe an appreciation of this point to an anonynious referee. 86 use them to illustrate how, on a dynamic picture, rational agents with the same evidence may come to differ in their beliefs. 4.1. Non-evidential Factors My first suggestion is that non-evidential factors make a difference both to when an agent is required to consider whether P, and to how much of their evidence they are required to take into account. This can happen in a number of ways, but I will just mention two. First, external practical pressures can preclude consideration or limit how much evidence the agent must consider. Suppose it is a typical Thursday, and an educational program on the radio I am listening to provides me with some evidence which I suspect has significant bearing on the thesis of a paper I am writing. This gives me sufficient reason to reconsider whether the thesis is true. Now imagine a case that is identical, except that I am receiving this new evidence through the radio at the same time that my apartment is in the process of being consumed by a fire. In this second case, I am required not to consider whether my thesis is true. There are simply more pressing matters to attend to. It may be that in both cases, the new evidence I have acquired since the last time I considered the question is such that, were I to consider, I would change my mind on the topic. But because in one case I rationally consider and in another case I rationally do not, I will end up with different beliefs, despite my total evidence bearing on the question being the same (the fire, we are assuming, does not itself bear evidentially on the thesis of my paper). Similarly, if I am at home considering something on a lazy day with little else to do, I may rationally take a great deal of time exploring my evidence when thinking about a question, and so am permitted or required to take a great deal of my evidence into account. On the other hand, if I have a doctor's appointment upcoming, I may only feasibly have time to take the most salient evidence into 87 account. Suppose that deep down in my evidence, there is some subtle clue such that if I were to take it into account, it would change my mind on the topic. In the first case, where I have time to explore my evidence thoroughly, I rationally do take it into account, and in the other, I rationally do not. So I will end up with different beliefs despite my total evidence bearing on the question being the same (again, we may postulate that the question on which I am reflecting is evidentially independent of whether I have a doctor's appointment or a lazy day ahead). Another way non-evidential factors can make a difference to rational consideration is by raising the stakes. Suppose an acquaintance tells me that she is pretty sure she saw Joe at a party last weekend, and I form the belief that he was there on that basis. Some time passes, and I've encountered subtle clues, in the form of passing comments by partygoers that would, if I considered the question and took those clues into account, be sufficient to undermine my confidence that Joe was at the party. But normally, we may imagine, I have no reason to reconsider such a question. Or, if I consider it, I have no reason to look deep enough into my evidence to notice the subtle clues. So I hold on to my belief But now imagine that I am at a murder trial where the defense rests its case on the possibility that Joe, and not the defendant, committed the murder on the very night I believe he was at the party. Now it is very important that I get the answer right. So I am rationally required to reconsider the question of whether Joe was at the party, and when I consider it, to take as much of my evidence into account as time reasonably allows, which may lead me to take into account the subtle clues I would otherwise have missed. Again, I might end up with different beliefs in the two cases, despite having the same evidence. 4.2. Order Matters My second suggestion is that the order in which we receive evidence can be relevant to the 88 norms on considering and taking into account. One way this may happen is motivated by the following thought: receiving a large chunk of evidence relevant to a proposition often makes it rational for us to reconsider whether that proposition is true. But receiving a tiny bit of evidence relevant to a proposition does not. We just don't have time to consider all those questions when over ninety-nine times out of a hundred it will make no difference to what we believe. Now imagine two agents who begin with the same evidence and form a belief in P. One of the agents then receives a huge chunk of evidence which is, in total, sufficient to undermine his belief, and perhaps even form the opposite belief The other agent slowly, once a month, over a period of twenty years, is fed tiny bits of evidence. Each bit in some barely significant way counts against P. After twenty years, this evidence in sum is equal to the chunk received by the first agent. It would, intuitively, be irrational for the first agent to fail to respond to the massive influx of evidence bearing on her belief But it seems rational for the second agent, each month, not to respond to some tiny new evidence regarding P. Since each month she is rational in not responding to the negligible change in her evidence, she will still be rational after twenty years. Again, they end up evidentially symmetric but with different beliefs. One might worry that I am taking advantage of some sort of Sorites-related difficulty here, but the similarity to Sorites cases is only superficial. We can assume it is perfectly clear at what point the balance of the agent's total evidence begins to weigh against P. What's doing the work in this case is that whether one is required to reconsider whether Pin response to some new evidence bearing on P, a precondition for taking into account the overall bearing of our evidence, is not a matter of how the agent's total evidence bears on P, but a matter of how significantly the new bit of evidence bears, or seems to bear, on P. For we should reconsider in response to some new evidence only if we think there's some good chance that that evidence makes a difference. Importantly, we do not generally keep track of all the times in the past some barely significant evidence bearing on a question came into our 89 possession. And each decision to reconsider is taken independently. So if each new piece of evidence doesn't meet the threshold of seeming like it would make a difference, then we end up rationally never reconsidering even though bit by bit the justification provided by our total evidence has been largely siphoned away. In another, similar case, suppose that there are three pieces of evidence, El, E2, and E3, which bear on whether P. And suppose that individually, they are not significant enough that one is required to reconsider whether P upon getting that piece of evidence, but that any two of them together are significant enough that one must reconsider. Finally, assume that El and E2, together with my old evidence, justify believing P, but that El and E3, together with my old evidence, justify believing not P. Now, if I get El andE2 as a single chunk of evidence, and then get E3 later, I will end up rationally believing P. If I get El and E3 as a chunk, however, and then get E2 later, I will end up rationally believing not-P, even though my total evidence, in the end, is the same in each case. 4.3. Doing Better than You Need The final way I'll mention that plausible norms on processes lead us towards a permissive picture comes from the thought that you're often not rationally required to consider a question or take some evidence into account, but that it is not a mark against you if you do. Suppose A and B are agents with the same evidence and beliefs regarding P, and neither is in a position where they are required to consider them, but that if they were to reconsider, they would rationally change their mind. It is the weekend, and A doesn't have much better to do, so he considers whether P, and consequently changes his mind. B would rather spend her weekend playing tennis. So, they end up with different beliefs. Alternatively, imagine A and B have the same evidence and beliefs, and are both considering 90 whether P. Moreover, there is a subtle clue buried deep enough in their evidence that they are not required to notice it, but which, it turns out, is decisive in favor of not-P, while the less subtle evidence looks decisive in favor of P. Now suppose in the middle of her consideration, B notices a billboard that reminds her of the subtle clue. B, it seems, must take this clue into account and therefore form the belief that P, while A, permissibly not noticing the subtle clue, forms the belief that not-P. Once again, they find themselves with different ultimate beliefs. 35 4.4. Why Dynamic Permissivism? We have seen a number of ways a dynamic view might allow evidentially symmetric agents to rationally diverge. The distinctive way in which the dynamic view works, I want to suggest, carries very different commitments from other permissive views and is especially well-placed to avoid some of their worries. First, dynamic permissivism does not entail that individual agents have rptions about what to believe. Indeed, dynamic permissivism is consistent with a strong kind of uniqueness thesis: Uniqueness of Evidential Support". Any set of evidence supports exactly one set of doxastic attitudes, for any agent. Together with Dynamic Evidential Worth Believing, this uniqueness thesis means that there will never be more than one way for an agentto conclude their reasoning- the outcome is fully determined by the evidence they consider. I did appeal in the previous section to the thought that agents are 35 One may be wondering, at this point, whether the sort of considerations just sketched make room for permissive philos,?ph.1cal disagreements. There is some reason to think that the extent to which they do is comparatively limited. This is because for people who are active participants in an academic dispute, it won't be the case that the agents differ because one of them rationally hasn't considered the issue, or hasn't considered it deeply. That comes with the job, so to speak. And those are the main ways in which agents can, on the view described, end up permissibly disagreeing on the smne evidence. 91 allowed to be more conscientious than they need to be in considering a question or taking evidence into account. But the choice to think harder about a question or to dig deeper for evidence is a kind of practical permission - representing options about what to do. And claiming that agents with the same evidence cannot rationally differ in what they do would be a highly implausible position. So it avoids the objectionable features of options-permissivism. Second, dynamic permissivism avoids commitment to lower-level arbitrariness. Starting point and standards permissivism were able to say that given an agent's non-evidential commitments, their beliefs were not arbitrary. But, while they might be able to make the unexciting claim that the agent's own standards or starting points aren't arbitrary from the standpoint of those standards or starting points themselves, there is a clear sense in which they are arbitrary from an objective or third-person point of view. Dynamic permissivism makes no such commitments. Relatedly, dynamic permissivism has the best response to the arbitrariness argument. The key premise, we recall, is (B). Consider what it means, for the dynamic permissivist, to be in a permissive case. All that means is that there is some way of rationally considering and taking into account evidence, or not considering, or not taking into account evidence, by which someone may have come to a different opinion. But this may well happen because they didn't considera question that we considered, or because they didn't take as much evidence into account. It seems clear that if that's the reason they have a difference of opinion, it gives me no reason to be skeptical of my own belief nor does it look, from a third-person point of view, as arbitrary from the standpoint of truth. It is much like learning that someone else who is less informed than I am rationally holds different views. It is only when I learn that my rational evidential peer holds a different view due to more or equally diligent consideration that should, plausibly, lead me to worry, and therefore motivate me either to reconsider the question in 92 depth or modify my confidence. 36 So being in a permissive case is not enough to make one think one's belief is arbitrary from the point of view of the truth. Next, dynamic permissivism is able to recognize a sense of the supremacy of the evidence. Although practical factors related to our human limitations can affect the attention we are able to give to a doxastic question, the dynamic view allows that in the end, what to believe is decided by a function of the evidence that I manage to consider alone. No non-evidential factors weigh against the evidence. If something about the thought that evidence should reign supreme when it comes to rationality of belief is right, this is an advantage over the non-evidential view. Finally, Uniqueness of Evidential Support and Dynamic Evidential Worth Believing together represent, I believe, the best concession any form of permissivism is able to make to supporters of evidential uniqueness. Options-permissivism flouts any obvious kind of uniqueness thesis. Background-Relative Permissivism can accept that evidence uniquely justifies (though given the possibility of permissive standards, standard permissivism has some work to do), but only relative to an agent's commitments, which are rationally open. Cross-agentially, uniqueness disappears. The non-evidential permissivist can accept the uniqueness of evidential support, but must admit that the evidential support is not decisive. Dynamic permissivism, by contrast, can say that evidence points exactly one way, that it does so even from an objective, cross-agential point of view, and that it is in an important sense decisive for belief 36 On the dynamic view, the disagreement of others might have bearing in at least two ways - first, on whether one reconsiders a question, and as potential evidence during the consideration itself. Plausibly, learning someone, particularly someone who has similar or better evidence, or considered a question as carefully as you did, disagrees with you is a reason to reconsider. And plausibly, the testimony of experts as well as of equals has some evidential force. But this leads us into contentious territory - the overall dynamic permissivist approach is strictly compatible with many different views about the evidential bearing of the beliefs of others. 93 4.5. Dimensions of Permission Mileage may vary regarding how worrisome the reader may find the challenges for traditional permissivist views I've raised. I certainly don't take them to be conclusive. But I think there is good reason to get excited about dynamic permissivism even if one is absolutely convinced that there are genuine epistemic options, that there are many permissible standards or starting points, or that there are non-evidential reasons bearing on belief I have presented these views as alternative permissivist models, but this is perhaps misleading, since they can, in fact, be combined. They are more like dimensions along which doxastic difference between evidential equals may be permitted. One may even hold all of them together. But it is important to at least make the distinction; lumping them all under the heading of "permissivism" obscures many important differences. I(.eeping them separate allows one to make subtle distinctions between types of permissive cases that may be important when mapping the contours of the full permissive landscape. Perhaps, for instance, moderate permissivism is true along one of the dimensions of permissivism, like the options dimension, and extreme permissivism is true along another, like the dynamic dimension. Skeptics of permissivism should pay attention to these distinctions as well. As we've seen, different forms of permissivism are vulnerable to different sorts of objections, and manage to recapture uniqueness-friendly intuitions and principles to various degrees. Each may have its own peculiar vulnerabilities, but they differ in their structure in ways that make it unlikely that any blanket objection to permissivism as a whole will do the job. Permissivism, I have argued, represents a diverse family of views with little in common except their name and their basic commitment to the existence of rational disagreement, and one paints them with the same brush at one's own peril. At the least, I hope that I have succeeded in producing a 94 portrait of this family that accentuates those differences. After this, I hope that I have introduced the reader to a cousin they have never met before. And lastly, I hope I have motivated the thought that this cousin, odd though they may be, is worth getting to know a little better. 95 Chapter Four Rational Delay This chapter will argue that the assessment of an agent's rationality is primarily concerned with processes rather than states. To understand this view and the question it tries to answer, it will be helpful to consider it in relation to a more familiar question about whether norms or requirements (I use these terms interchangeably) of rationality are synchronic or diachronic. Most recent discussion of rational requirements on mental behavior concerns, explicitly or implicitly, norms that are !Jnchronic, governing the combinations of attitudes or states that agents have at individual times 37 . Some so-called "time- slice" theorists have gone so far as to propose that all rational norms are of this kind 38 . Other philosophers insist that we supplement such synchronic norms with those of a diachronic sort, governing agents' temporally extended behavior in a way not reducible to demands on individual time- slices. At least one has suggested that all norms are of this latter kind. 39 The view I'll be arguing for is committed to the view that rationality is fundamentally diachronic. But it is committed to more. The diachronic norms most commonly discussed, like conditionalization, and the clearest endorsements of pure diachronism, agree with the synchronists in taking rationality to be concerned with states. In this chapter, however, I will be arguing against both kinds of state-oriented view. 40 37 A long list of such norms is defended by Broome (2013). See also Reisner (2009) and Lord (2014). 38 See, e.g. Hedden (2015), Moss (forthcoming). 39 Carr (2015) and Titelbaum (2015) are recent examples of those who argue for diachronic norms in addition to synchronic norms. Lmn (2007) is, as far as I mn aware, the only example of someone who defends a purely diachronic view, though I<olodny (2005, 2007) makes gestures in the smne direction without endorsing that view. 40 Throughout, I will be understanding rational norms as giving conditions under which agents are irrational. However, the norms I will discuss are sometimes frmned instead as giving conditions under which or other mental states are irrational. I will be operating under the natural assumption that if an agent's beliefs or other mental states are irrational, 96 In the course of my argument, I will present a very general challenge to synchronic norms connecting our attitudes arising from a phenomenon I call rational delay- the fact that it takes time for agents like us to update our attitudes in response to changes in our mental state. But I will go on to argue that the closest diachronic replacements for these norms, including those diachronic norms commonly defended in the literature, also fail to adequately account for this phenomenon. Defenders of diachronic norms, I suggest, have failed to appreciate a crucial distinction that applies to diachronic norms - these norms can be, like synchronic norms, state-oriented, concerned with which (possibly intertemporal) combinations of states or attitudes the agent has at various times, or they can be process oriented, concerned fundamentally with the operations of mental processes such as reasoning or consideration. The conceptual space, consequently, will distinguish at least three types of norms - !Jnchronic state-oriented norms, diachronic state-oriented norms, and diachronic process-oriented norms. Those who propose diachronic requirements (Kolodny (2005, 2007), Reisner (2009)) or whose views are ambiguous between synchronic or diachronic readings (Way (2009)) share with the synchronists the more general state-oriented approach as common ground. Ultimately, I will argue, only a system of norms in the third category, process-oriented norms, promises an adequate solution to the problem of rational delay. then this is a respect in which the agent herself is irrational. 97 State-Oriented We will get a better understanding of this tripartite distinction later in the chapter, but a quick gloss will be helpful. For the defender of a synchronic state-oriented picture of rationality, being rational is being rational at each individual time, where this is a matter of having ones' attitudes and reasons at that time related to each other in the right ways. The norm of belief consistency, which demands that at each time, an agent not hold beliefs that are inconsistent with each other, is a paradigmatic norm of this sort. A proponent of diachronic, state-oriented norms holds that rationality is not just about having ones' attitudes and reasons stand in the proper relations at individual times, but that sometimes, rational norms govern the relation between states or attitudes held at two or more times. Conditionalization, which holds that an agent's credal state at one time must stand in the right relation to her credal state at earlier times (in particular, that her credence in P, once she has evidence E, is equal to her prior conditional credence in P /E), is a paradigmatic example from this class. Finally, process-oriented norms place demands directly on an agent's processes and not the mere relations between attitudes. An example of this sort of norm would be the following norm on the process of consideration: When considering whether P, one is rationally required to take into account only the 98 evidence for and against P, and conclude by believing P only if the evidence considered sufficiently favors P. This chapter is structured as a progressive march rightwards across our diagram, motivated by an attempt to adequately characterize the rationality of agents who exhibit rational delay. In the first part, I will argue that a synchronic state-oriented account of norms governing the relations bet\veen our attitudes treats anyone who takes time to update our attitudes as irrational, and that this is a consequence we should reject. In the second part, I argue that a fully-spelled out diachronic state oriented approach to those norms will either fall to modified versions of the objection from rational delay or else bear an explanatory burden best met by understanding such requirements as the mere shadows of norms on processes. In the third and final part, I will sketch what a plausible process oriented picture might look like, and the distinctive way it handles problems that plague the state- oriented views. Throughout I will be relying on ordinary intuitive judgments about what limited agents can be rationally required to do. There is a strain of thought that views rational norms as "ideals" in a very strong sense (Christensen 2005, 2007) which will resist those judgments; I doubt what I have to say here will be sufficient to dislodge someone from this theoretical alignment. The judgments are, on the other hand, congenial to the picture sometimes called "epistemic deontologism", which takes rational norms to concern something like epistemic duties. I do not, however, mean to be assuming any specific background view about the nature of rationality. I take the judgments to which I will appeal to be pretheoretically attractive. An assessment of the virtues and vices of these various higher conceptions of the nature of rationality is beyond the scope of this chapter. 1. Synchronic State-Oriented Norms Although my ambition is to say something very general about rational norms governing our attitudes, I will begin by narrowing our focus, and consider a specific and important kind of norm - 99 one tying our attitudes to the reasons we have favoring those attitudes. These are sometimes called norms of substantive rationality and distinguished from coherence or structural requirements, which concern the relationship between different attitudes, rather than between attitudes and reasons. 41 Looking at reasons norms will allow us to see in a particularly vivid way the structure of the argument from rational delay, and I will later explain how the argument can be extended to other norms in the synchronic class. Most philosophers accept that the behavior of rational agents reflects some kind of connection bet\veen our attitudes and the reasons for them 42 , and if we are thinking D'nchronical!J, a formulation like the following naturally presents itself: Synchronic State-Oriented Reasons (SSR): If an agent's reasons 43 favor attitude X at t, she is rationally required to have X at t. If her reasons disfavor attitude X at t, she is rationally required not to have X at t-" This norm is state-oriented because it governs a state of the agent, something she may or may not be in at a particular time, in this case her having or lacking an attitude, in contrast to a process, a dynamic activity which unfolds over time, like reasoning. 45 It is synchronic because it is wholly 41 This distinction, or something like it, can be found in Broome (2013) Scanlon (2007), and Worsnip (forthcoming), among others. It is worth noting that the debate between synchronists and diachronists has typically been over so-called 'structural' norms, but the distinction applies just as well to substantive reasons requirements. 42 See, eg., Lord (2014), Way (2009). 43 To give SSR the fairest shake, these reasons should be understood as reasons that are, in some sense, available to the agent (to exclude reasons that stem from facts about the world to which the agent has no access and which do not plausibly bear on their rationality), as 'normative' or justifying reasons (in contrast to merely motivating reasons), and also as reasons 'of the right kind' (to exclude, for instance, Pascalian reasons for belief). 44 This principle takes what is sometimes called a "narrow-scope" form. Because the problem I will put forth depends only on claims about the conditions under which agents are irrational, and wide and narrow scope versions of these norms have identical implications for this (as noted in I<olodny 2007), what I have to say w111 apply equally to both kinds of formulation. This is not to say that the distinction between wide and narrow scope has no interesting relation to question of whether norms are synchronic or diachronic. Lord (2013) and Worsnip (2015) have argued, for instance, that there are problems combining a wide-scope view with a diachronic approach, at least while preserving the motivations for the former. 45 Even if one holds a metaphysical view on which attitudes like belief are ongoing mental activities, there is still a distinction between the low-level, self-sustaining activity of believing and the managerial operations of processes like reasoning. We can understand the state-oriented/process-oriented distinction as discriminating between norms governing 100 concerned with features of her time-slices individually - each violation occurs purely in virtue of her attitudes and reasons at some particular time. A common narrow version of this norm takes beliefs as the relevant attitude, and evidence as the kind of reason relevant to that attitude 46 , but it may be applied just as well to reasons for intention, desire, gratitude, or other attitudes on which reasons might bear. We expect a complete picture of rationality to provide some account of our relation to our reasons. Indeed, some have suggested that there is nothing more to rationality than this relation, and that other norms are simply derivative (Lord 2013). I will begin by arguing that this connection is not best captured in synchronic terms. I do not mean to suggest that those in the literature who have discussed reasons norms would, on reflection, commit themselves to a synchronic interpretation, though it is the most natural one when no reference to different times is made explicit - they may simply not have had issues of time at the forefront of their mind. Nor do I mean to prejudice the case against synchronic norms in general by considering this one example. Other synchronic norms may be more plausible for independent reasons. But once we understand why the synchronic version of the reasons norm fails, we will be in a position to see wider implications for the rational landscape. 1.1. Rational Delay The problem with norms like SSR, I claim, is that they have misguided implications about the rationality of agents like us when we update our attitudes. In particular, I want to focus on the ways that updating is extended in time. Notice that it often takes a considerable amount of time, upon being introduced to new reasons, for our attitudes to be fully updated. This is for a number of reasons. We have to notice, consider, and evaluate the considerations that bear on the change in attitude. Moreover, when the activities of the former kind from those governing activities of the latter kind. 46 Hedden (2015) commits explicitly to a synchronic norm of this type. 101 reasons we have just been introduced to are substantial, or when they have extensive implications, we do not take them into account all at once. Instead, we reason in steps, working through the changes in our attitudes bit by bit, starting from the most salient or pressing updates and then moving outward. To see this in action, consider a case where we gain reasons that warrant a significant revision in our attitudes. Imagine Othello learns that Iago, someone that he has long trusted, has in fact been manipulating and deceiving him on a grand scale in order to get him to falsely believe his friends have betrayed him and his wife has been unfaithful. This gives Othello reason to change all sorts of beliefs that he may hold on the basis of Iago's testimony, the beliefs he holds on the basis of those beliefs, his attitudes of trust and respect and gratitude towards Iago, and his attitudes towards other people, like his wife Desdemona, whose relationships with him have been colored by Iago's manipulations. It takes him time to appreciate all the bearing this new information has on his beliefs. He gradually approaches this new mental consensus, starting with the things that are more important or more noticeable or more recent, and only then noticing implications that are more obscure. He may recognize right away that he should abandon his intention to kill Desdemona. But it may take a long time before he realizes that he misinterpreted a recent innocent dinner comment because of his misinformation. If Iago's testimony infects much of Othello's views about the world, it won't be mere moments, or even mere hours, before Othello has scrubbed his beliefs clean of Iago's influence - it could take days or weeks. And we needn't imagine that Othello is particularly slow or particularly stupid in order for this process to be quite drawn out indeed. SSR entails that anyone in Othello's position is failing rationally. For it tells us that any time one has reasons without having the attitudes those reasons favor, one is being irrational. And this will be true of Othello from the moment he gains new reasons to the moment he's pruned the last leaf in his tree of attitudes. Indeed, the only way that Othello can be rational according to SSR is if all of his 102 beliefs, intentions, and other attitudes change simultaneously with him learning of Iago's treachery. 47 This consequence is extremely counterintuitive. As long as Othello is being conscientious in updating his attitudes as they become salient, we typically think he is behaving fully rationally. Certainly he doesn't seem irrational merely in virtue of taking any time at all to update his attitudes. So cases of rational delay are at least prima facie counterexamples to principles like SSR. And I think we can press this counterintuitiveness further in at least two ways. First, the sort of behavior called for by SSR is psychologically impossible in a way that makes it objectionably demanding. Second, it is incompatible with our attitudes being re.ponses to our reasons. 1.2. Demandingness The criticism I've given involves an accusation that SSR is in a certain respect too demanding. But demandingness objections to normative principles come in many forms, and I think it's important to distinguish this objection from other superficially similar worries one may have, to see why it is especially difficult to set aside. Sometimes, views like utilitarianism in ethics are accused of being too demanding for requiring too much personal sacrifice, or too much attention from the agent to one kind of value at the expense of others, or because it's unrealistic to expect agents to be motivated to satisfy them. The objection from rational delay is not an objection of this sort. An agent will fall short of SSR no matter how much effort, attention, and motivation they direct towards the goal of full rationality - it is not a question of values or of motivation or of virtue. Humans do not have the psychological ability to responsibly satisfy the norm, even in the short run, because we do not have the capacity to change 47 One might resist this argwnent by suggesting that something doesn't become a reason, or a reason the agent possesses immediately when it is learned, but only when it has been processed and its implications drawn out. But I think this is a very unpromising move. In order to avoid the problem, a defender of this strategy will have to claim that an agent gains a reason for an attitude only once the attitude has been formed. Anything earlier than this still comes wi.th a delay. This gets things entirely backwards, however. Othello comes to believe the consequences of the information he's learned because of the reasons he has to do so - he does not come to have those reasons in virtue of forming those beliefs. Thanks to an anonymous reviewer for suggesting this line of defense. 103 wide swathes of our attitudes concurrently with gaining reasons to do so. So SSR is not overdemanding merely in the way a command to give all one's possessions to charity is overdemanding. We have the ability to follow the latter, however difficult or rare it might be for us to do so. The obstacle to our satisfying SSR is much more fundamental. We have no psychological mechanism available to us by which our attitudes, in general, shift simultaneously with the reasons for them. So at best, we would satisfy SSR only if our attitudes changed concurrently by coincidence. And this would not be rational. 1.3. Reasons-Responsiveness We can say a little more about what would be wrong with an agent whose attitudes happened to change concurrently with their reason. While their attitudes might match their reasons, they would not be responses to their reasons. 48 This brings out a second facet of the problem of rational delay. Even if we did not have the cognitive limitations that make updating so time-consuming, and even if our attitudes could change instantly and all at once, our attitudes are formed in response to the considerations we have received. And so they will always follow whatever it is they are responding to. Whether this is a matter of metaphysical or merely psychological necessity will depend on the outcome of disputes over whether simultaneous causation (through, for instance, quantum entanglement) is metaphysically possible. 49 It will suffice here to note that wherever one comes down on that controversy, updating our whole mental state simultaneously with gaining reasons to do so, as a response to those reasons, is not a causal power available to the human mind, and this psychological impossibility is enough to threaten SSR. This means our failure is not something that could be rectified by making us a little, or even a lot faster, or smarter. No matter how fast we update our beliefs, we are going to end up being irrational 48 It may be disputable whether an attitude has to be a response to a reason in order to be based on a reason. I do not take a stand here, except to emphasize that 49 See, e.g. Mellor (1995). 104 to some extent - even if we react instant!J to our new reasons, we will be irrational in the moment they arrive. The only way for us to avoid being irrational when presented with new reasons if SSR is true would be for us to change our attitudes at the same time we gain our reasons. But this makes our attitudes no longer responses to our reasons at all. And this is more than a change of degree - a creature which doesn't respond to the reasons for its attitudes in anything like the way human beings can, but only has its states conveniently covarying as though tied together by a tether with no slack, is a creature whose cognitive behavior is no longer recognizably human, and it seems perverse to treat its behavior as a constraint on us. I take this to be worrying enough on its own, but it is even worse if we accept some independently attractive auxiliary claims. For an agent to be fully rational, it is generally thought, it takes more than having attitudes that match ones' reasons - the agent must also base her attitudes on her reasons. 50 And many common accounts of the basing relation holds that in order to be based on a reason, an attitude must bear a causal relation to the agent's possession of that reason. 51 If simultaneous causation of the relevant sort is, as I have suggested, metaphysically or psychologically impossible, then some degree of delay turns out to be necessary for proper basing, and is therefore called for by rationality itself The assumptions about basing and causation at work in this last argument are controversial, and there is not space to assess them here, so I would not rest my hat on this version of the problem, but it helps bring out how central our nature as responsive agents is to our rational life. To further sharpen the point made in the last two sections, consider what it is to become irrational. Since irrationality is a position of normative deficiency, to go from being rational to being irrational is in some way to fail normatively, to make some kind of normative misstep. Because human 50 This comes up commonly as a condition on "doxastic justification" (See e.g. I<vanvig 1990). But it is also plausible as a condition on rationality, even if there is some theoretical reason to distinguish these two notions. 51 For example, Moser 1989 or more recently, McCain 2012. 105 agents generally get their reasons before they get the attitudes those reasons justify, according to SSR, they become irrational at the moment they gain those reasons. But we should not think that for a human agent to gain a reason involves or entails a normative failure. One does not make a mistake, commit an error, or misstep, when one, say, receives new evidence for a proposition one doesn't yet believe. One fails only if one doesn't react to those reasons in the right way. For a synchronic norm like SSR, however, any reaction is already too slow. In order not to fall afoul of SSR, every time I gain new reasons, I would have to form at the same time every attitude supported by those reasons. This feat is simply not one human agents can accomplish, and I could hardly be properly responding to those reasons even if I managed it. Consequently, the only way for me to avoid the charge of irrationality is to avoid getting any new reasons at all. However enjoyable a life in an empty, soundless, lightless cave sounds, though, it doesn't seem like the sort of thing that should be a precondition for avoiding irrationality. 1.4. Closure We may now begin to consider how the objection we have raised against SSR can be generalized as an argument against a far wider class of proposed synchronic principles, including structural requirements on attitudes. Consider, for instance, the rational pressure many have thought exists for agents to believe the logical consequences of their beliefs. A first-pass synchronic norm codifying this thought might look like: State-Oriented Synchronic Closure: If Q follows from the beliefs that an agent holds at t, then the agent is rationally required to believe that Q at t. But in the same way that in ordinary human behavior, our attitudes are formed after the reasons 106 we have for them, beliefs in the consequences of our beliefs are typically formed after those beliefs themselves. It takes time for those consequences to be drawn out. When I acquire a new belief, it can take quite a while before I can recognize the way this new belief interacts with the beliefs I already possess. And any agent who needs any time at all to draw out the consequences of her beliefs will violate the closure principle above. This is, as before, an implausible constraint on rational behavior. Similarly, it follows from this view that anyone who forms any individual new belief without simultaneously forming beliefs in all the consequences of that new belief (something we cannot do) thereby becomes irrational. But, again, intuitively, an agent who forms a belief like this for good reasons does not fail normatively. 1.5. Weak Synchronic Norms and Why They Don't Help That requirements of the form we have considered might be too demanding has been suggested before (Harman 1986, Broome 2013, Schroeder 2004). But the problem these authors address is not quite the problem raised here. They are worried by the fact that a norm like closure implies that a rational agent must believe all the consequences of their beliefs. There are, of course, an infinite number of logical consequences of any given set of beliefs, and having an infinite number of beliefs is plausibly psychologically or even physically impossible. Even if it is not, Harman suggests that limited cognitive agents like us should avoid the "mental clutter" of useless information; we have to prioritize what's important. So some limits, these authors conclude, should be placed on which logical consequences there is rational pressure to accept. Similar concerns might be raised for a norm like SSR, given the wide range of attitudes our reasons potentially bear upon. This kind of worry is distinct, however, from our worry, which concerns the time that it takes to draw those consequences out. Since the objection I have given is also a kind of overdemandingness objection, though, it might be hoped that some weakening of the sort these authors suggest could help the synchronic view. There are of course countless qualifications one might add to the principles discussed and I 107 cannot consider them all here. But here are some natural candidates. First, we might add to the antecedent of our principles something like a condition that the agent cares about the question (Broome (2013)). So a modified version of closure might read "If Q follows from the beliefs that an agent holds at t, and the agent cares about whether Q, then the agent is rationally required to believe that Q at t". This makes the principle less demanding, since it takes strictly more to violate the requirement. Or instead of adding a conative attitude like caring, we might limit the antecedent of the closure norm to those beliefs of which, or of whose logical relations, the agent is aware. Or perhaps we should limit our principle to explicit attitudes only (Harman (1986)) or attitudes that we are now actively considecing (Schroeder 2004). These qualifications can be understood as ways of adding conditions of salience, and all of them make it easier for cognitively limited agents to satisfy the demands of rationality. I think there is something right about the line of thought these modifications reflect. Our implicit attitudes and hidden reasons are so numerous and so deeply buried that norms that require strict and broad sensitivity to them all will be far too demanding for us to satisfy. Unfortunately, while the rational delay objection is especially visible when applied to strong norms like the unmodified SSR and closure norms, it cannot be avoided with the synchronic strategy of incorporating these kinds of weakening conditions. This is because adding conditions of caring or salience or explicit consideration to the antecedent of the norm of closure (or SSR) does not change the fact that in normal, intuitively rational attitude updating behavior, the antecedent gets satisfied before the consequent. Not only do we form beliefs before we draw out the consequences of them, but we are aware of those beliefs, care about whether the consequence is true, or have considerations become salient to us in some other way before we go about forming the new belief as well. The salience or awareness is a trigger for the formation of 108 the consequent attitude and so occurs prior in time. To further press the point, we can imagine a case where the only thing an agent is missing to count as irrational according to the modified closure norm is the added antecedent qualification. That is, perhaps they have beliefs that entail Q, lack the belief that Q, but do not care, are not aware of the beliefs, are not actively considering whether Q, etc. But this means that I could become irrational merely by becoming aware of a belief, having it be made salient, beginning to actively consider a question, or starting to care about the matter. But this is not, intuitively, a circumstance in which one fails rationally. As long as we are considering a conditional norm where, in rational attitude-updating behavior, we have the antecedent attitude before the consequent attitude, as we do whenever the latter is a response to the former, the synchronic approach is vulnerable to our objection, All this suggests that the sense in which SSR and synchronic closure are too demanding is deeper and more serious than the sense indicated by superficially similar complaints. It is a problem that persists even for norms that are qualified in ways that suffice to deal with these other objections. 1.6. Generalization I've argued, then, that the existence of rational delay is a problem for SSR and synchronic state-oriented closure. But it does not take much work to see that these are just especially striking cases of a much more general problem both with substantive norms relating our attitudes to our reasons, and structural norms relating our attitudes to each other. In addition to a connection between attitudes and the reasons for them, or between beliefs and their consequences, philosophers have proposed rational requirements tying together: 1) Your belief that you ought to X and the intention to X. 2) Your (intention to X and belief that Ying is necessary for Xing), and the intention to Y 3) Your (conditional credence c in Q given P and your certainty that P), and the same credence c in Q. 109 4) Your belief that rationality requires you to have attitude A and A. 52 Each of these has a natural synchronic, state-oriented interpretation which judges an agent irrational whenever they have the attitude(s) on the left without having the attitude on the right. For instance, the first would give us: Synchronic State-Oriented Enkrasia: You are rationally required, if you believe that you ought to X at t, to intend to X at t. But notice that each of these shares the key features of SSR which made it vulnerable to the objection from rational delay. In each case, in ordinary updating cases, we acquire the attitude on the left (we'll call it the antecedent attitude), before acquiring the attitude(s) on the right (the consequent attitude), and acquire the latter as a response to the former. As long as we acquire the attitude on the right in a diligent and timely way, it is likewise intuitive that we are not irrational. And it is again implausible that coming to have the attitude on the left before the attitude on the right is a way of failing normatively, and therefore of becoming irrational. This is enough to reconstruct the rational delay argument in its full glory. Someone dedicated to the preservation of synchronic norms might, at this juncture, point out that all of the norms so far discussed have something in common - they all involve consequent attitudes that are called for, in some sense, by antecedent attitudes or reasons, and therefore try to capture the pressure there is to add to our stock of attitudes by identifying a problem with holding the antecedent without the consequent. Not all synchronic norms that have been proposed have this structure, however. Some, like norms of belief consistency, are rather prohibitions on having certain 52 1 don't suggest this list is exhaustive, but it is representative. Versions of many of these can be found in Broome (2013). 110 combinations of attitudes. Perhaps the problem of rational delay is only a problem for norms of the former sort, and the proper jurisdiction of synchronic norms is as these latter sorts of prohibitions. Unfortunately for the synchronist, the problem of rational delay is not limited to conditional norms of the sort discussed above. Consider a norm of belief consistency, a synchronic interpretation of which might look like: Synchronic State-oriented Consistency (SSC): You are rationally required, for any inconsistent set of beliefs X and time t, not to have X at t. But now recall: reflection on the norm of closure suggested that there's no rational failure involved in taking time to draw out logical consequences of newly formed beliefs. It would be perverse to insist that it's rationally okay to take time to draw out Q as a consequence of newly formed belief that P, but not okay to take any time at all in throwing out the belief that not-Q. It is often precisely because we have just drawn out Q as a consequence that we are in a position to reject our belief in not- Q as inconsistent. So concerns about rational delay suggest that the rational norm of belief consistency, like the other norms we've discussed, is not synchronic. 53 Similar reasoning will apply to other norms prohibiting combinations of attitudes, like those forbidding incoherent intentions. Just as rational delay is allowed when the formation of one attitude calls for the adoption of another, it is allowed when the formation of one attitude calls for the rejection of another. 53 A special case of the norm of consistency, a norm prohibiting contradictory beliefs, is a little harder to counterexmnple using rational delay, because it is more difficult to imagine someone rationally coming to the belief that P without first rejecting the belief that ~p But I think such cases can be found, when someone rationally comes to the belief that P not through reasoning but through some immediate perception, before recognizing that they already also have the belief that~ P. If such cases are impossible, it seems to me, it is because it's simply not possible to believe contradictions at all, in which case a norm prohibiting doing so would be vacuous. In any case, we expect the pressure against believing contradictions to be of a kind with the more general pressure against believing inconsistencies. If we must look for an alternative to synchronic accounts of the latter, then we should also look for alternatives to the former. 111 1.7. Putting Things Together The problems arise even for these norms in isolation, but it's worth noting how bad they get when we start to put many of these norms together. Consider the following banal story: Today, I am thinking about what I ought to do this weekend, and learn at tl that my brother will be in town and that he has very little to do. As soon as I can, on the basis of this information, which we will assume is decisive, at t2 I form the belief that I ought to take him out to a nice dinner. On the basis of this belief, I quickly form, at t3, the intention to take him out to a nice dinner. At t4, on the grounds of my belief that in order to take anyone out to a nice dinner I must make a reservation, I conclude that in order to take my brother out to a nice dinner I must make a reservation - something which, since my brother was never in town before, had never occurred to me. On the grounds of this belief and my recently formed intention, at tS, I form the intention to make a reservation. This seems to me perfectly ordinary and rationally respectable behavior. But if the synchronic norms we have introduced are correct, or at least in the right ballpark, I have been irrational during the entire interval. Throughout tl to t2 I have reasons that support a belief without having that belief Throughout t2 to t3 I have a belief about what I ought to do without having the right intention. Throughout t3 to t4 (indeed, long before then) I have a belief without having the logical consequences of that belief And throughout t4 to tS I have an intention and a means-end belief without having the appropriate consequent intention. But this just seems wrong. I am doing the best I can. It does not ring true to say even that I was being rational in some respects during that extended bout of reasoning but irrational in many others. 112 Every time I gain new reasons, according to one norm, I would have to form simultaneous!J every attitude supported by those reasons. Not to violate another, any time I form a belief, I would have to simultaneously form every logical consequence of that belief According to others, every time I form a new belief, or a new intention, I would have to concurrently form many other intentions which interact with those attitudes. To say that these requirements together are unmanageable is an understatement. Consequent attitudes in one norm might be antecedent attitudes in others, generating propagating, potentially infinite demands which must all be met at once. Forming a belief will require the simultaneous formation or abandonment of countless other beliefs that bear logical relations to it, the formation or abandonment of all sorts of intentions that might depend on those beliefs, new intentions appropriate to those intentions, and so on. In our example, at tl I would have to have to form at the same time the belief that my brother will be in town, the belief that I ought to take him out to dinner, the intention to take him out to dinner, the belief that in order to take him out to dinner I must make a reservation, and the intention to make a reservation. And that is just a start. Such behavior is no standard to which we might be reasonably held. 2. Diachronic State-Oriented Norms We've argued that the synchronic attempt to capture the connection between our attitudes falls victim to the rational delay objection, even when weakened in the ways some have recommended. In our diagram of the logical space, then, we may eliminate the leftmost box: 113 State-Oriented There is still, surely, some important connection between the antecedent states and the consequent states in the norms we discussed. It is natural, then, to look for the minimal modifications we might make to insulate our rational requirements from these sorts of objections. We had been assuming that rational requirements are synchronic - that they concerned the relation between states had at a single time. But this feature of a synchronic picture precluded there being any room for rational delay. So we might hope to avoid this problem by moving to the middle box in our diagram - to diachronic state-oriented norms. These norms, recall, govern the relations bet\veen our mental states (being, therefore, state-oriented) at different times (being, therefore, diachronic). Perhaps the most commonly discussed diachronic state-oriented norm is the bayesian norm of Conditionalization, which relates an agent's later credal state with her earlier credal state. One way to formulate it is as follows: Conditionalization: An agent is rationally required, for any times tl and t2 where tl <t2, to have credence at t2 in P equal to her conditional credence at tl in P /E, where E is the total evidence she 114 acquires from tl to t2. 54 But although this principle mentions two times, it does not have the right structure to avoid the argument from rational delay even in its original form. The synchronic reasons-responsive view failed, remember, because it did not allow any time to pass between when an agent got their reasons and when they were supposed to finish updating their attitudes. Conditionalization, as formulated above, does not, however, allow for any lag between one's acquiring evidence and one's changing credences. If an agent acquires evidence at t2, then she is required to have her new credence at t2. 55 But this is precisely what led synchronic views to ruin. What this shows is that in order for a reference to a second time to help avoid the argument from rational delay, the two times distinguished in a state- oriented diachronic norm must be the time at which we have acquired our reasons (or evidence, or other antecedent states), and the time at which we are required to have updated in response to those reasons. That is, we need something like: Better Conditionalization: An agent is rationally required, if she has newly acquired evidence E at tl, to have credence in Pat t2 (some appropriate time after tl) equal to her conditional credence at tl in P/E. Or a corresponding diachronic adjustment of SSR: 54 See Lewis (1999) for a formulation along these lines 55 1 mn assuming that evidence acquired at t2 is "evidence acquired between tl and t2". If one reads conditionahzation as referring to evidence acquired in the open interval between tl and t2, then it will still demand that an agent update her beliefs arbitrarily quickly, for evidence acquired at times vanishingly close to t2. 115 Diachronic State-oriented Reasons (DSR): You are rationally required, if your reasons favor attitude X at tl, to have attitude X at t2 (some appropriate time after tl). 2.1. How Long is Too Long? Similar modifications can be made to the other synchronic norms in Part I. These norms look like they may help with rational delay concerns because they allow time to pass between the state to which we respond when we update our attitudes, and the state which is our response. But "some appropriate time" in the principle is a placeholder that needs to be filled in. How far away from tl is t2? We have a few options, and each is problematic. If we read the norms as applying to times t2 arbitrarily close to tl, the norms will be too demanding, because they require that we update our attitudes arbitrarily fast. This approach has a better chance of making room for the metaprysicalpossibility of our consequent attitudes being rational responses to our antecedent states than the synchronic view, since at least the former follow the latter in time and therefore potentially in the causal order. But the instantaneous updating demanded by this view is still not psychologically possible. Certainly it will not come close to capturing our intuitions about the substantial permissible lag in cases like Othello's. So they suffer the brunt of the argument from rational delay. We could read the norms as demanding only that at some t2 > tl in the future the agent has the consequent attitude. But this is not demanding enough. It permits an agent to exhibit sluggishness, and fail to update their attitudes even when they have plenty of time to do so, as long as someday they get around to it. We could try to identify some particular threshold that sets tl and t2 an appropriate distance apart, such that only agents who take longer than this threshold are held irrational. But it is hard to see how a threshold could be chosen in a way that isn't utterly ad hoc. Moreover, any such view must 116 navigate between Scylla and Charybdis - if the threshold is too short, then the problem of rational delay will recur - the view becomes too demanding, and judges as irrational agents who are intuitively rational. If the threshold is too long, then the principle will be too weak to convict agents who exhibit irrational cognitive sluggishness. To make things worse, it is plausible that for any particular choice of threshold, we can imagine some agent who takes longer than that amount of time to update their attitudes and is not irrational. A wizard may cast a spell upon an agent that causes all of their activity, including mental activity, to happen in slow motion, capping their cognitive processing speed at some value too low for them to form their new attitude in time. Or, more mundanely, one may be temporarily knocked unconscious by a baseball before one can finish updating. Such an unfortunate agent does not seem irrational, if they are doing the best they can. What delay counts as too lax or too demanding, moreover, will depend on many features of the particular agent and the particular question at stake - some are brighter than others, or more effective at certain kinds of reasoning, or are in a position to reason in fewer steps, or otherwise have access to cognitive shortcuts unavailable to others. This will be true even if we say the threshold is vague, like the point at which day becomes night, with some delays being clearly too short to threaten the agent's rationality, and others clearly too long to preserve it, with a band of vagueness in the middle. Even a fuzzy threshold will be affected by features of the agent like those metnioned above - what would be clearly sluggish for one agent might be in the fuzzy area, or even clearly too soon, for another with lower processing speed. Furthermore, there is a problem that plagues any norm of this kind that demands successful completed formation of the consequent attitude 56 . They are all too demanding because they preclude the possibility of something happening after tl that absolves the agent from ever forming an attitude. And there seem to be many ways this could happen. The agent might become aware of new relevant considerations sufficient to undermine the required change of attitude, or suddenly drop into a coma, 56 Kolodny's view (2005, 2007) has this feature. 117 and end up without the consequent attitude without having committed a rational mistake. To avoid these problems, it seems, we must make the difference between tl and t2 sensitive to all the considerations we've discussed that can affect the time it is reasonable for an agent to take to update their beliefs, and we must include a clause (of the sort introduced by Broome (2013) and Lord (2013)) that allows the agent to escape the requirement if some appropriate "cancelling event'' occurs. This leaves us with something like: DSR*: You are rationally required, if your reasons favor attitude X at tl, and t2-tl is a duration appropriate to the agent's cognitive abilities as applied to the problem under consideration, and no cancelling or delaying event happens between tl and t2 to preclude or forestall the need to form X, to have attitude X at t2. I do not want to deny that some ugly variation of this form might be true. But it is so opaque, and contains so many variables which call out for independent explanation, that it is a very poor candidate for being a fundamental rational norm. With ineliminable references to potential, and obscure, cancelling events and an agent-relative variable determining processing speed, it no longer simply relates an agent's states and times, and so abandons the attractive simplicity of a pure state-oriented approach. 57 I will argue in the next section that we can understand DSR* as a mere consequence of a much less cobbled-together and much more explanatorily rich view that takes cognitive processes as the basic units of rational assessment, but this portion of my argument must wait until the process picture has been properly introduced. To summarize, if what we have argued so far is correct, while we can't quite say that there are 57 Chris Meacham (2015) has made some related points about various formulation of conditionalization, eventually settling on the original, no-rational-delay version precisely to avoid these problems. 118 no state-oriented norms whatsoever, it does seem that there is no good reason to accept independent state-oriented norms (synchronic or diachronic) that connect different states of mind to each other. The italicized qualifications are added firstly, because as I have suggested, it may be that some state-oriented norms are a corollary of more fundamental process norms, and secondly, because the rational delay argument concerns norms governing the relations between different mental states, and therefore has nothing to say about state-oriented norms that do not govern the relations between different states at all, such as a blanket prohibition on ever having the individual belief "P & ~ P". 3. Process-Oriented Norms State-Oriented The attempts to capture the rationally significant connection between the antecedent and the consequent attitudes with a state-oriented approach have hit a brick wall. If there are any rational norms at all concerning the relation between these attitudes, then, we will have to take a different tack. In the final part of this chapter, I propose a very different way of approaching norms on rational behavior. On this process-oriented picture, rationality does not, fundamentally, govern states of mind like belief and intention at all. It governs processes such as reasoning and deliberation. 119 Others have made claims that are suggestive of this way of approaching rationality. In particular, in an exchange with John Broome, Niko Kolodny (2005, 2007) describes his view as involving 'process requirements', to be distinguished from 'state requirements' defended by Broome. But the norms he goes on to propose do not live up to this characterization, and they will not help with the problem of rational delay. 58 At his most careful, Kolodny frames his norms in terms of what the agent must do 'going forward', given the state they are in. But what the agent must do, going forward, according to I(.olodny, is acquire, abandon, or avoid attitudes. So even these so-called process norms are still concerned with the relation between an agent's mental states. 59 The contrast between these and what he calls 'state requirements' are that state requirements only govern the way an agent is at a time. That is, Kolodny's distinction between state and process requirements is really the distinction we have made between !Jl!Chronic state-oriented requirements and diachronic state-oriented requirements. So it should not be surprising that Kolodny's view runs into the problem of rational delay. How long, we can ask, does the agent have to form or abandon the relevant attitudes 'going forward', before the agent is convicted of irrationality? Kolodny does not say, and any answer will run into the worries we've already raised for the diachronic state-oriented view. 60 58 Hussain (ms.) also makes remarks that suggest a process-oriented picture, claiming that rational requirements tell us "how reasoning ought to proceed" (pg. 46). But the norms Hussain endorses are all synchronic state-oriented norms we have already discussed. These do not have a procedural character, and so it is difficult to see the sense in which they describe the process of reasoning. It cannot be that a rational agent must satisfy these norms while they are reasoning - if an agent already satisfied the norms when they began reasoning, the reasoning itself would be pointless. Cases of rational delay happen precisely when agents rationally do not have the relevant states until efter an extended bout of reasoning is complete. Hussain sometimes speaks of agents reasoning "with" or "according to" these requirements, but it is not clear what this involves. So I do not think we find the materials for a distinctively process-oriented account here either. 59 Broome (2007, pg. 366) himself points out that I<olodny's favored norms seem, despite his protestations, to have an awful lot to do with states and very little with processes. 60 I<olodny also stops short of denying that state requirements exist; he simply thinks the debate over wide and narrow scope isn't profitably understood in terms of states. The closest thing to an argument for a process-oriented view over a state-oriented one he gives is the suggestion that rational requirements should be guiding, and only norms about what to do and not norms about how to be can fill this role. But it seems to me one can be moved equally well by an injunction not to be on the grass as by an injunction not to step on it. 120 This muddling of the synchronic/diachronic and the state/process distinctions has, I believe, led philosophers to miss a promising and distinctive approach that is concerned with processes in a much more robust way. I'll begin by setting up the general process-oriented way of thinking, and then discuss how it might help with the problem of rational delay. Processes are not features of agents at particular times, as are the time slices under the purview of the synchronist. Neither are they mere combinations of attitudes at different times, as are the jurisdiction of state-oriented diachronic norms. They are causally continuous activities - ways of reflecting upon and questioning attitudes or performing other cognitive labor. And their most visible representative, explicit reasoning, is a paradigm candidate for governance by rational norms. The norms on states we've discussed tell you what states you rationally can and cannot be in, either at a single time, or over time. There is considerably more variety in the way processes can be rationally governed. We'd expect there to be, at least: 1) norms governing appropriate initiation conditions for a process. 2) norms governing when a process may be interrupted. 3) norms governing how the process should unfold, including a list of the steps of that process and the order in which they should be performed. 4) norms governing the assignment ef cognitive resources to certain processes, when such resources are limited. 5) norms governing appropriate conclusions to a process. All these norms and their interaction may be quite complex - a process of logical deduction may have different outcomes depending on whether it begins from a proposition that is believed or merely entertained, or whether its conclusion conflicts with prior beliefs or does not. They are not, in general, mere pipes from one attitude to another. But the attitudes do interact importantly with processes in our mental economy - attitudes can, among other things, trigger a process, serve as inputs 121 in that process, or serve as outputs of that process. But importantly, the attitudes themselves, on the robustly process-oriented view, are not subject to norms. This differentiates the view from those like Broome's (2013), which grant a normative status to processes which is secondary, derivative, and subordinate to fundamental rational norms on states. In the same way our physical actions produce scars on our bodies, our mental activities produce attitudes in our minds. But scars, and correspondingly, attitudes themselves, are not on the process-oriented picture, norm-governed - only the activities that give rise to and manage them are. If fully rational agents, in virtue of their rationality, satisfy some regularities in their attitudes, it is because those patterns are the shadows cast by properly functioning processes. 3.1. Rational Delay Revisited The sketch I have given so far of the process-oriented view is very abstract. Working out the concrete details of the full picture is a difficult project. We should not expect a simple one-to-one correspondence between the state-oriented norms people have found attractive and process-oriented norms. There may be multiple processes which mediate the relationship between, say, our beliefs and their consequences, or which help us weed out contradictions, and each one will have norms of all the kinds described above governing them. Neither should we expect a serious development of this picture to be possible without deep engagement with the cognitive sciences. Before we can speculate in an informed way about the norms on processes, we need to know things like which kinds of processes are available to human agents, what sorts of access those processes have to other parts of our mind, and what the nature and the limitations are of the cognitive resources, like attention or willpower, that engaging in those processes requires. Because of the complex ways in which processes operate and interact with each other, and how sensitive they will be to the contingent design features of particular kinds of agents, the full 122 process-oriented picture will probably have little of the beguiling elegance of the simplest state oriented norms. But when reality is complicated, the theory must follow. And I have tried to show that the problem of rational delay is a serious motivation to look for alternatives. I will not be presenting anything like a complete account of the norms governing a process, which would be a monumental task for the reasons I've suggested. Nevertheless, something needs to be said to make it plausible that the process-oriented view has an advantage over state-oriented views. And it is not immediately obvious that it does. The fact that some proposed norm refers to processes is no guarantee that it will help with the problems associated with rational delay. For example, a norm of the form "if an agent begins process X at tl, they must complete it by t2" will be subject to similar problems of threshold choice as diachronic state-oriented views. This is good reason not to formulate process norms in this way. My task here will be to make a case that we can get interesting and substantive requirements on processes that are not subject to the same problem, and which can do at least some of the work philosophers wanted out of state-oriented principles. Take one particular process, that of considering whether a proposition Pis true. This kind of process plays an important role in managing to connect the beliefs of agents with the reasons for those beliefs (though it is not the only such process), so we'd expect the norms on this process to provide a partial replacement for the work done by state-oriented norms connecting reasons and belief Here are some claims a process-oriented theorist might make about this process: A) It is permissible to initiate the process of considering whether Pin response to a recognition that it is of practical significance whether P and one has recently come into substantial evidence that plausibly bears on whether P. It is impermissible to initiate this process when one is aware that it does not matter whether P. B) While engaging in the process of considering whether P, an agent is required to perform steps in the following order: Take the most salient consideration bearing on P, assess whether it 123 bears positively or negatively on whether P, and store the weight of the reason it provides for or against P. Next, do the same thing with the next most salient consideration whether P. When all salient considerations have been taken into account, if the weight of reasons for P meets a threshold, next conclude the process by believing P. If the weight of reasons against P meets that threshold, next conclude the process by believing ~ P. If it does neither, next conclude the process by withholding judgment on P. C) When considering whether P, an agent is required only to take into account evidential considerations bearing on P. D) It is permissible to interrupt the process of considering whether P in response to a recognition that new and substantial evidence bearing on P is shortly forthcoming. It is impermissible to interrupt the process of considering whether P in response to a recognition that the truth about P is likely to be uncomfortable. 61 It is not important whether these are correct about the proper operation of the process of consideration. They are ahnost certainly not. B), for instance, ignores that the fact that consideration of subsequent reasons can lead us to revise the weight contributed by earlier reasons. My aim is just to illustrate how a process-oriented approach to updating might look, and how it allows us to make substantial rational assessments of an agent's behavior without falling prey to concerns about rational delay. Claims like A) can distinguish agents who begin processes in appropriate ways from those who do not. Claims like B) can distinguish agents who respect the weight of their reasons from those who ignore it. Claims like C) can capture the thought that evidence, and not practical considerations, play 61 One might wonder what or these process-oriented norms. It would be nice to have some general theory about how to come up with the requirements governing any given process. One approach would be to come up with an account of the function of a process, and then to suggest that the norms on a process are those the following of which conduces to the performance of its function. But this is raises all kinds of difficult questions (about, for instance, how to identify the function of a process), and I will not be able to address them here. Giving a unified account of process-oriented norms may be at least as hard as giving a unified account of state-oriented norms, something about which there is very little agreement despite the long entrenchment of the state-oriented approach. So it seems fair to put it off here. 124 a special role in epistemic rationality. And claims like D) can distinguish agents whose path towards updating their attitudes ends prematurely for good cause from those who shut down this process inappropriately. An agent who begins this process and follows the norms will eventually end up with beliefs that are supported by the epistemic reasons they have for those beliefs. These are recognizably the sorts of things state-oriented norms relating belief and evidence aimed to capture. But importantly, none of these norms tell us directly how long this process should take, or how long an agent must take in moving from one step to the next. This means that they do not require agents to update instantaneously, like the synchronic state oriented views. Nor do they refer to some threshold duration, like the diachronic state-oriented views. On a state-oriented picture, the norms need to say something about the relationship between the times of the states involved in order to say anything at all, and for us to be able to judge when an agent has fallen short. And as we saw, views about this relationship come with problematic commitments about how long updating must take. But there are all kinds of interesting things we can say about the proper structure of a process of updating without committing ourselves to the time the updating must take. One might worry that by abandoning norms with implications for the duration of updating condones sluggishness. But just because process norms do not directly contain a prohibition on 'taking too long' doesn't mean they have nothing to say about agents who we ordinarily judge to be objectionably lax about updating their attitudes. We must look to the explanation for the delay. If the agent took a long time because they interrupted an updating process for an inappropriate reason, a process norm can convict them. If they took too long because there is something weird going on in the operation of that process, such as the agent taking into account too many things, a process norm can convict them. If they took too long because they failed to assign the appropriate cognitive resources to a process, a process norm can convict them as well. If nothing like this is going on, because the agent's delay is due, for instance, simply to their slow processing speed, then the process picture 125 will say they are rational. And this is, it seems, the correct thing to say. 62 3.2. DSR * Revisited Let us turn back now and reconsider the last stand for state-oriented norms against the problem of raitonal delay, the norm we called DSR*. The unnatural additions it adds to the simple diachronic state-oriented approach are a) an agent-relative processing speed variable and b) the reference to "cancelling events". These additions are out of place for a state-oriented picture, as evidenced by the fact that they are rarely included in discussions of diachronic norms, and they have the whiff of the ad-hoc about them. But they flow very naturally from a process-oriented approach. Process norms will determine when an agent is required to allow a process to unfold. If a rational agent is in a situation where she is required to keep a process going, her processing speed works its way in automatically to determine how long it is before she forms an attitude as a conclusion of that process. From the contingent facts about her abilities, and the norms that tell her to keep turning the cognitive crank, it will simply follow that if she is rational (and therefore continues cranking), she will form her new attitudes at a time proper to her capacities and circumstance. No special agent-relative variable needs to finds its way into the norm itself Furthermore, it is easy to understand what a cancelling event is supposed to be, on the process- 62 One might worry that the process norms we have discussed do not yet /om an agent to initiate a process when some condition is met, that we need norms of this kind, and that such norms will fall prey to rational delay all over. I think this tells us that we should not formulate these norms as something like "if an agent is in state S at tl, then they are rationally required to initiate process P at t2". My preferred understanding of norms requiring the initiation of a process is that they are best conceived as norms describing successive stages of a distinct higher order monitoring process, in the way B) describes successive stages of the process of considering whether P. They tell us that when some condition is met, the next step in the monitoring process is to initiate the process one level down. It allows therefore that agents who are slower may permissibly take longer to initiate the process, while still convicting agents who interrupt this process of irrationality. This way of understanding initiation involves thinking that there are only norms on initiation of a process if there is a higher order monitoring process whose function is to initiate it, which is a substantial commitment. But I think it is plausible. Eventually, on this 'processes all the way down' model, the chain of processes initiating processes will bottom out in some very basic monitoring systems which will have no norms on their initiation - either agents are engaging in them, and therefore subject to norms on their operation, or they are not. This is speculative, but it seems plausible to me that some very basic kinds self-monitoring might even be a necessary condition on agency itself. 126 picture. It's simply anything that makes it permissible to interrupt or delay that process, like a raging fire in the room, or a sudden influx of new relevant information. Processes are characteristically the sort of thing that can be interrupted or stopped, and this is exactly something that we'd expect to be norm-governed from a process-oriented perspective. So on the process picture, cancelling events do not drop in late in the game as unpleasant ad hoc necessities, as they have in the state-oriented tradition. They're among the first things a process theorist would look for in their theory. Moreover, investigation into cancelling events becomes much easier once we recognize their nature as permissible process interruptions. It is not easy to know where to begin, on a state-oriented picture, to answer a question like "how do the cancelling events between antecedent beliefs and beliefs in their consequences differ from cancelling events between an antecedent intention and an intention for the necessary means, and why?" But once we see that what we are looking for concerns permissible process interruptions, we can investigate the structure of the processes involved in each kind of transition and hope to explain differences in relevant cancelling events through differences in these processes, discovering patterns we might miss if we conceived of cancelling events only as "an event that happens after an agent has attitude A at tl which make it no longer irrational for them to have attitude B at t2" We look at So the process picture demystifies the normative relevance of cancelling events, and tells us where to look if we want to figure out what they are. As long as we have norms about when the process is triggered, when it can be interrupted, and how it concludes (and these are among the most basic candidates for norms on processes), then, it follows as a mere corollary that a rational agent who is in the state that triggers the process will form an attitude that is the output of that process at a time determined by her processing speed and as long as no cancelling event occurs. This is, of course, just what DSR * asserts. So the process view has every indication of being explanatorily fundamental in relation to state-oriented diachronic norms. We can see, now, how a process view has the resources to avoid the argument from rational 127 delay. Such a view does not place direct demands on how long it must take for agents to update beliefs. The kinds of cases where rational delay is most conspicuous, moreover, are precisely those where a process is permissibly interrupted, or slow to run with many steps or complicated inputs, or where multiple processes must operate in succession. A filled-in process-oriented account, then, doesn't just allow rational delay - it promises to explain why, when, and to what extent rational delay occurs. 3.4. Enkrasia There is some normative connection, it seems, between the belief that one ought to do something and the intention to do it. We'd like to say that there's something special, from the point of view of rationality, about agents who are enkratic- who properly respect this connection. Different visions of rational norms give us a different picture of what it is for an agent to be enkratic. On the synchronic state-oriented model, being enkratic is a way you are at a time - when your normative beliefs and intentions match in the right way. On the diachronic state-oriented model, being enkratic is a matter of exhibiting a pattern of attitudes over time. On the process-oriented model I'd like to sketch, being enkratic is not a matter of being in a state or having a sequence of attitudes - it is more robustly something you do. Enkrasia is a kind of cognitive act or activity. It takes, as its key input, a normative belief, and when completed, produces as output an intention. It is special from the perspective of rationality because unlike a process like the formation of intentions to X on the basis of beliefs that one ought not to X, it is a process that is sometimes rationally permissible or rationally obligatory to undergo. It is, like many processes, governed by several kinds of rational norms - including norms concerning how the process is initiated, norms concerning how the process is to operate, and norms concerning how the process is b . d 63 to e 1nterrupte . 63 Broome's most recent work (2013) describe both a state-oriented enkratic norm and correctness conditions on a process of enkratic reasoning. This kind of hybrid view can accommodate the view of enkrasia, and the suggestion I go on to 128 The enkratic process is fairly quick - it comes as the last, automatic step in longer chains of practical deliberation. Relatedly, its operation is relatively straightforward - there are not many steps between the triggering of the process and the formation of the intention and its result, when run to completion, is always the same. Because it is so quick and so straightforward, there are few norms governing its operation and few chances for its interruption. So the most interesting norms governing the process concern how it is to be initiated. Among the conditions that trigger the enkratic process in rational agents, plausibly, is a direct awareness or other cognitive access of ones' normative belief But it is not always rationally required to initiate the process when one has such an awareness. There will be conditions under which this process will not be activated - like when there are more urgent needs, cognitive or otherwise. 3.5. Scope Given this admittedly very rough picture, we are in a position to appreciate something new about a very messy recent debate - between "wide-scopers" (Broome (2007, 2013), Way (2010)) and "narrow-scopers" (K.olodny (2005, 2007), Schroeder (2004, 2013), Lord (2010). The bone of contention is the proper form of various conditional requirements of the sort we have discussed. In the case of enkrasia, narrow-scopers hold that: Narrow Enkrasia: If you believe you ought to do X, then you are rationally required to intend to do x. Wide scopers hold instead that: make in the next section. By holding on to state-oriented norms, instead of jettisoning them in favor of a pure process oriented picture, however, it does not avoid the problem of rational delay. 129 Wide Enkrasia: You are rationally required to be such that if you believe you ought to do X, then you intend to do X. Parallel distinctions can be made for the other conditional norms. This distinction may seem hairsplittingly subtle, and its implications are both non-obvious and hotly contested. I have ignored it when formulating the principles in this chapter because when it comes to synchronic norms, wide and narrow scope versions have identical consequences for when an agent is violating a rational norm, and this was sufficient to generate the problem of rational delay (In the case of enkrasia, one violates either norm when one believes one ought to do X and does not intend to do it). It is for this reason that Kolodny (2005, 2007) tries to reinterpret the dispute as one over diachronic norms instead. But in general, parties to the debate are greatly concerned by the fact that there is only one way to be doing what you are rationally required to do under a narrow scope (in our case, enkratic) norm: intending to do X, and two ways of doing what you are rationally required to do under a wide scope norm: intending to do X, and not believing you ought to do X. There are many motivations at play in the wide-scope/narrow-scope debate, but I want to focus on one. Narrow-scopers characteristically attack certain wide-scope norms for failing to respect some important a!Jmmetries bet\veen the t\vo ways of satisfying wide-scope requirements (Schroeder (2004, 2013), Kolodny (2005, 2007), Lord (2013)). Wide-scopers, on the other hand, attack narrow- scope norms for treating the antecedent attitude as a fixed point (Broome (1999)) 64 - that is, for precluding the possibility that it is the presence of the antecedent attitude, rather than the lack of the consequent attitude, that is problematic. I want to suggest a way the process picture allows us to understand a sense in which each view is capturing something correct. I have suggested that enkrasia is a process that only ends up completed one way - with the 64 Though Broome (2013, Ch. 8) seems to have backed off of this style of argument against narrow scope norms. 130 formation of an intention. It differs from some processes, like considering what to believe, which have many possible end results. In particular, enkrasia, when activated, doesn't result in the abandonment of the normative belief This is a genuine asymmetry in the way rationality treats the relation between normative belief and intention, and it is not coincidental that enkrasia is one of the phenomena for which the narrow-scopers' concerns about asymmetry have seemed especially vivid (means-end coherence is another). This observation gives us a sense in which the narrow-scopers are right. On the other hand, enkrasia is not always initiated whenever we have a belief about what we ought to do. The normative belief in a case of enkrasia may be a fixed point with respect to the operation of the process itself, but it is not a fixed point in general. In this sense, the wide-scopers are right. We can illustrate this further by considering the following objection John Brunero (2010) raises against the narrow-scope view. Imagine that Annie believes that she ought to do X, but lacks sufficient evidence to believe that she ought to do X. A narrow-scope enkrasia norm will tell us that she is rationally required to intend to X. A narrow scope norm that tells us to respect our evidence will tell us that she is rationally required not to believe that she ought to do X. But this seems wrong - surely she can't be required both not to believe she ought to do X and to intend to do it. Whether or not this objection is fatal to traditional narrow-scopers, the process view is able to avoid the reductio while holding on to the kinds of asymmetries narrow-scopers enjoy. On our view, the epistemic process that starts with Annie's reasons will, treating those as a fixed point, lead her to abandon her belief about what she ought to do (and there is no process that goes the other direction). And the enkratic process that starts with Annie's belief about what she ought to do will, treating that belief as a fixed point, lead her to intend to do it (and there is no process that goes the other direction). They are in this sense asymmetric. But remember that a characteristic feature of rational human agents is that we update our attitudes in steps. So Annie could begin either with the update of her belief, or 131 with the update of her intention. If she starts by updating her belief, then she will not end up with the intention to do X, because there is no longer a normative belief from which enkrasia can begin. As long as this is at least an option for her (it may well be required, for instance by some norm that tells us when we have two processes on the mental docket, we should engage the ones involving belief first, but this is stronger than we need), she is not forced by rationality into the awkward position Brunero describes. I do not know that committed wide or narrow-scopers will find this an adequate way to capture the distinctive virtues of their view - but agnostics who detect the fragrant undertones of truth in both views may find it an attractive compromise. Conclusion I hope I have shown that there is a very large class of commonly accepted state-oriented rational requirements, of both synchronic and diachronic forms, which fail to capture the intuitive facts about what rationality can demand of finite human agents like us. There are, it must be said, those who would reject the kind of intuitions I am appealing to. As mentioned earlier, there is a view of rational requirements, in particular, on which they are to be understood as ideals in a strong sense - able to be met only by agents with cognitive resources and abilities far beyond those of any human, and whose behavior we may approach only as the pale shadow of an approximation (See e.g. Christensen 2007, Broome 2013). On such a view, it is no objection to a proposed requirement that no human agent could meet it. I cannot, unfortunately, take up the challenge of refuting this picture here. I think the intuitions to which I have appealed are pretheoretically attractive, and I am heartened by the fact that even some who explicitly commit themselves to what I am calling the 'ideals view' are uneasy about its implications 65 . I do not think I have given someone who for theoretical reasons 65 "However, I am loth to adopt a requirement that goes so far beyond the abilities of human beings." (Broome (2013), pg. 155) 132 strongly endorses the ideals view grounds for them to change their mind. But I hope that I have, at least, provided a helpful map of the conceptual terrain, pointed out the danger rational delay poses to those on the paths typically traveled, and cleared the brush away from the process-oriented alternative. 133 Chapter Five Rational Norms and Rational Ideals A rational notm, as I understand it, describes conditions in virtue of which agents are rationally criticizable. In earlier chapters, I argued that common state-oriented principles are not genuine rational norms in this sense, because agents can violate their conditions without being irrational. In particular, I have argued that purported norms on our states fail to reflect how the ways we are cognitively limited constrain how we can be rationally assessed. While the use of cognitive limitations as a lever against a state-oriented picture of rationality is new, this is not the first time norms have been criticized for excessive idealization; this complaint is especially familiar to formal epistemologists defending a Bayesian picture of rationality for credences. A defender of state-oriented principles might hope, then, to find grounds to resist the challenge from cognitive limitations in this more familiar debate. The primary aim of this chapter is to motivate skepticism about the prospects of this strategy for advocates of heavily idealized rational principles in general and state-oriented principles in particular. To this end, I will address two questions. First, why should we take our cognitive limitations seriously in theorizing about rationality? Second, if we do take these limitations seriously, what role can there be for principles that are heavily idealized - in the sense that only beings without our cognitive limitations are able to satisfy them? 134 This chapter has three parts. First, I will attempt to motivate the thesis that rational norms should be sensitive to our cognitive limitations by making a case for a high-level view about the nature of rationality on which rational criticism is analogous to moral blame, which, I suggest, has the thesis as a consequence. Second, I will consider and respond to some objections to the blame model of rationality and the thesis it is meant to motivate. Third, I will consider a retreat position for defenders of idealized principles, which reconceives these principles as something other than notms as I've defined them, labeling such an alternative conception one of rational ideals. I will consider three possible views about what rational ideals might be capturing, if not conditions of rational criticism. Two of these views, I will argue, rob these principles of their philosophical interest. The third assigns rational ideals a role that is better served by objective ideals such as truth. 1. Why Should Rationality Respect Our Limits? Throughout this dissertation, I have tried to show that if we take it as a constraint on rational norms that they do not place demands on us that outstrip our cognitive ability to satisfy them, we will be drawn to reject state-oriented norms of rationality in favor of process-oriented ones. We have not yet asked in a general way, however, why we should take our cognitive limitations to place boundaries on our normative theorizing. I will suggest three sources of motivation for such a constraint. The first motivation comes from noting that many of systems and activities of the human mind only exist because of our cognitive limitations. Most obviously, this includes activities like prioritizing cognitive tasks and employing time and effort-saving heuristics, but it is also arguably true of some of the most basic elements of human cognitive behavior, like responding to reasons (see Chapter Four), believing (Ross/Schroeder 2014, Holton 2014), and intending (Bratman 1999). All of these are behaviors we expect a complete theory of rationality to cover - telling us the right and wrong 135 way to engage in them. But a being unconstrained by our cognitive limitations - one capable, for instance, of updating a complete, precise set of credences synchronously with new information and acting moment by moment according to their expected utilities - would arguably have no need of coarse doxastic states like belief, no need to set up plans in advance in the form of future-directed intentions, and no need to coordinate activities like reasoning or deliberation that are extended in time. Their cognitive behavior would be of a fundamentally different type than our own, and there may be nothing interesting to say about how agents like that should engage in more familiar kinds of activity. If our rational norms do not take into account our cognitive limitations, then, we risk being unable to give an account of norms governing those activities whose role in our mental life is explained by those very limitations. 66 The second, and more basic motivation for taking limitations seriously is simply that our ordinary intuitive judgments about the rationality of agents are responsive to considerations of this kind. I have in earlier chapters argued that our intuitions about rational criticism allow an agent to take some small amount of time to update their beliefs when acquiring new evidence, that rational agents are sensitive to the costs of belief revision, and that our cognitive behavior should be structured in significant ways around the fact that we cannot hold an infinite number of beliefs in our head and that we are liable to forget our reasons for what we believe. (See also Harman 1986, McGrath 2007) These intuitive judgments, which I will not discuss again here in detail, seem to me sufficient to motivate taking cognitive limitations seriously in theorizing about rationality. But if an independently plausible theoretical conception of the nature of rationality were available with the same implications about the relevance of cognitive limits, the theory and the intuitions would buttress each 66 We could, perhaps, insist that norms on those activities whose role is essentially connected to our cognitive limitations be sensitive to those limitations, but deny this for norms on other activities, but then our picture of rationality looks objectionably fractured and wildly variant in its demandingness. 136 other and make the case that much stronger. I will briefly sketch such a conception here, then, as a third motivation for taking cognitive constraints seriously. It is important to keep in mind, however, that the motivations already discussed do not depend on the account I give being correct. 1.1. The Blame Conception The general picture I have in mind takes rational criticism to be roughly analogous to moral criticism or blame. I will call this the blame conception of rationality. 67 Many philosophers have found the blame conception or something very nearby plausible (Heller 2000, Steup 2000, Ginet 2001, Setiya 2004, Nottelman 2007, Peels/Booth 2014). The idea that there is a close connection between rationality and morality is not new - both the Kantian and Hobbesian traditions in ethics seek to subsume morality under rationality. While the blame conception is not committed to a relation quite so strong, if moral and rational criticism are fundamentally of a kind, this would go some way in explaining why such views might be appealing, as well as other connections philosophers have drawn between, for instance, rational capacities and the conditions for blame (Smith 2004). There are, moreover several independent reasons to be attracted to the blame conception. Moral criticism, it seems, is appropriate precisely for those agents that act in a way that is, in some distinctive way, not properly responsive to moral considerations. But whatever the relation is that we bear to moral considerations when we fail in this distinctive way, it seems like we can equally bear that relation to nonrnoral considerations, like, for instance, considerations of prudence. An agent may ignore her prudential reasons against spending her salary on lottery tickets in much the same way she may ignore her moral reasons against failing to keep her promise to a friend. It is plausible, then, 67 This is related to the view called epistemic deontologism, but that label is also used to describe vie\VS which draw a connection between rationality and moral notions other than blame (such as duty). 137 that there is a parallel failure occurring, and it would be surprising if we had no name for this failure. The only thing that seems, to me, to be even a prima facie plausible candidate in our vocabulary for this kind of failure is precisely "irrational". Furthermore, there are positive signs that our ordinary attributions of irrationality are this kind of normative analogue. First of all, like our judgments of moral blameworthiness, our judgments of irrationality are sensitive to considerations within the agent's ken, rather than those outside of it. I am not blameworthy for giving my child a poisoned drink if I have no evidence that suggests it is poisoned. Likewise, I am not irrational for drinking a poisoned drink myself if I have no evidence that suggests it is poisoned. If judgments of irrationality were analogous to judgments of blameworthiness, this would help explain why an agents rationality, unlike, for instance, their knowledge, is determined in this internal way. Along these lines, Kieran Setiya (2004) argues that judgments of irrationality and judgments of blame are both appropriate only when there is a legitimate expectation that the agent avoid the conditions of criticism. Another reason to suspect a connection bet\veen blame and rational criticism is that failing rationally can trigger self-regarding or other-regarding negative attitudes which at least partially resemble those associated with guilt or blame. If Alice spends her salary on lottery tickets, her mother will wag her finger at her with a disapproving glare. Alice herself may bang her head against the wall saying "Stupid! Stupid! What have I done!?" when the time for paying the rent comes along. These do not merely have the character of regrets for undesirable states of affairs, the way we might regret that we were not gifted with perfect pitch - they are directed towards agents in virtue of some particular failing of theirs - we are upset with them (or ourselves) for what they (or we) did, not merely upset that it happened. Even if we think that in the end these responses are not worth having (they may, for instance, be counterproductive), it is plausible that one necessary condition for these responses to make 138 any sense at all is that they are responses to a failure of a kind roughly analogous to that involved in moral blame, where similar responses are paradigmatically justified. If the blame conception of rationality is correct, then rational norms ought to take our cognitive limitations into account in at least the following way: not requiring us to behave in ways that are beyond our cognitive abilities. This follows from the extremely plausible idea that blame in general is inappropriate when the agent did not have the ability to do what was demanded (and from Setiya's stronger claim that legitimate expectation is required). If I do not have the physical ability to fly into the air and deflect an asteroid, I cannot be morally blamed for failing to do so. Similarly, then, if I do not have the psychological ability to hold infinitely many beliefs in my head, I cannot be rationally blamed for failing to do so. It is worth noting that the kind of ability relevant to moral assessment is stronger than mere physical or psychological possibility. Suppose I can only save someone's life by hitting a bullseye with an arrow from three hundred yards away. Ir s certainly possible for me to do that. But I do not, in an important sense, have the ability to do it - I'm simply not reliable enough. And it is this stronger ability that is required in order for me to be blameworthy for failing to hit the target. We should expect something similar to be true, then, for rationality. To return to the type of case we considered in the previous chapter, even if it's possible for me to have attitudes supported by my reasons as soon as I have my reasons, it doesn't follow that I have the ability to make this so - I do not. Like hitting the bullseye, if it happened, it would be a matter of pure luck. And so we should not expect this to be something for which I could be rationally criticized. Though it is no dialectical help in the context of a dispute over state-oriented and process oriented rationality, it is worth noting that there is at least one additional reason for someone attracted to a process-oriented picture to find the blame conception appealing. If rational norms govern processes alone, then we would like to have some explanation for what is going on when people seem 139 to rationally criticize agents for their states. But we may make two helpful observations - first, that beliefs, intentions, and other mental states for which we seem to be rationally criticized are typically the consequences of processes, and second, that it is natural, in the moral domain, to talk of being blameworthy for consequences of ones' activity in virtue of being blameworthy for the activity. This suggests a simple explanation of our practice of rationally criticizing agents for their states - it is just the nonmoral analogue of a familiar practice of criticizing agents for consequences. 1.2. Defenses of Idealized Norms I have argued that there are strong reasons to take our cognitive limitations seriously as a constraint on the demands of rational norms (understood, again, as providing conditions of rational criticism). There are, however, a number of objections both to this thesis directly and to the blame conception of rationality, which I have used to motivate it. I will consider some of these objections here. First, let us look at some prima facie reasons for skepticism of the blame conception. William Alston (1989) provides an argument against the view on the grounds that we do not have the sort of voluntary control over our beliefs that we do over our actions, a control which is necessary for the assignment of praise and blame. But beliefs are paradigmatically subject to rational norms, the thought goes, and therefore rational norms must be distinct from norms of responsibility, praise, and blame. The success of this argument, however, depends on which account of the control required for praise and blame is correct. If we demand that in order to be morally assessable, acts must be volitional or intentional, then the argument has force. But it is open to the defender of the blame conception to endorse a more permissive view of control. Steup (2000), for instance, argues that on the influential view of responsibility endorsed by Fischer/Ravizza (1998), on which one is responsible for the output 140 of reasons-responsible mechanisms, there is no reason to doubt that one is sometimes responsible for one's beliefs. 68 To fully assess this strategy is outside the scope of this chapter; for our purposes it will suffice to note that there is a response to Alston's argument available to the defender of the blame model. What I would like to call attention to here is a special advantage a process-oriented theorist has over a state-oriented one with respect to this reply. Nate that while the Steup strategy gives us a plausible account of how our beliefs can sometimes be under our control in the sense relevant to blame, it's less clear that it gives us reason to think that our beliefs are always under our control. At least sometimes, it seems, our beliefs are not the product of some reasons-responsive mechanism of ours - if they have been knocked into our heads by an errant baseball, for instance. In such a case, we cannot be blamed for our belief On a traditional state-oriented model of doxastic rationality, however, there are standing rational requirements to have beliefs that match ones' evidence, not to have inconsistent beliefs, and so on. Anyone who violates these norms is irrational and therefore, on the blame conception, epistemically blameworthy. These claims are inconsistent. We can't hold both that there is a general rational requirement to have beliefs that match our evidence and that we are blameless for beliefs generated by errant baseballs, for the baseball may give us a belief that doesn't match our evidence. The process-oriented picture can avoid this problem. Since it denies any standing rational requirements to believe according to ones' evidence, it can allow that one is blameless, and not irrational, for beliefs that bypass the reasons-responsive part of our psychology. Indeed, it can 68 Similarly, Hieronymi (2008) provides a defense that appeals to the thought that what is necessary for praise and blame is answerability to demands for reasons, and Zagzebski (1996) presents an account that ties praise and blame to virtues and vices, both of which may be expressed without voluntaristic control. 141 plausibly claim that reasons-responsive processes are precisely the ones governed by the norms of rationality, and thereby guarantee that rational failure always goes together with some failure in exactly the kind of mechanism Fischer and Ravizza propose is necessary for responsibility. A second worry for the blame conception are cases where intuitive judgments about rationality seem to come apart from anything like blameworthiness. The seriously mentally incompetent, for instance, are intuitively less rational than we are, but if anything, their incompetence protects them from blame, rather than subjecting them to it. And angels with capacities that far outstrip our own, like the ability to hold infinitely many beliefs and to be fully aware of any inconsistencies in their beliefs no matter how obscure, are, it is natural to think, rationally superior to human agents, no matter how blameless in their cognitive activity. To account for these cases, I think we must distinguish two uses of"rational". The sense of irrationality I am concerned with, and the one that is analogous to blameworthiness, is the one connected with the rational assessment of the behavior of agents on particular occasions. But there is another use of "rational" which, I suggest, is taxonomic - it doesn't distinguish the behavior of agents on particular occasions according to their successes or failures, but rather distinguishes types of agents according to their cognitive capacities. It is this use of"rational" that features in Aristotle's claim that man is the rational animal - it is not a claim that that humans succeed or fail by the standards of rationality more frequently than other animals do - rather, it is a claim about the capacities human agents possess which are necessary for rational assessment in the first place. When beings do not possess these capacities, like lower animals or small children, it is more appropriate to call them arational 69 than irrational. 69 I borrow this terminology from Setiya (2004). 142 I propose further that this taxonomic use of "rational" is not only binary, distinguishing the rational from the arational - it comes in degrees. There are types of entities, like rocks or plants, that are, in virtue of their capacities (or lack thereof) utterly arational. There are others, like some higher animals and small children, who are, in virtue of their capacities, minimally rational. And beings with very sophisticated capacities, like angels, are categorized, as a type, rationally more advanced than we are. All this, however, is orthogonal to the sense of"rational" which has interested philosophers - the one relevant to assessment of behavior on a particular occasion. An angel may be, in virtue of their sophisticated capacities, very rationally advanced in the taxonomic sense, while using those capacities poorly and being, in virtue of their behavior, quite rationally criticizable. When we judge the mentally incompetent as less rational than we are, I suggest, our intuitions are picking up on the taxonomic sense. Indeed, to the extent that their capacities are compromised to the point where we are inclined to excuse them from blame altogether, they are best seen as arational and not the proper subjects of rational assessment at all. Finally, this picture of rationality may seem to face a challenge from radical extemalists about rationality, most notably Timothy Williamson (2010, 2013), who holds that rationality requires one to believe only what one knows. Because there are Gettier cases where one fails to satisfy this norm while being blameless, this is inconsistent with the blame model of rationality. Why think, though, that this norm is really a norm of rationality? One factor at work in Williamson's turn towards externalism is a skepticism of internalist requirements motivated by the thought that norms of a certain kind must appeal only to mental states that are luminous to the agent - ones that the agent is always in a position to know that they are in. Williamson (2000) presents powerful arguments that no interesting conditions are luminous, and so no interesting intemalist norms appealing to a luminosity constraint can be found. But the luminosity 143 constraint is no part of the blame model as such - it is open to us to claim that an agent can be blameworthy even if they are not in a position to know they are blameworthy - indeed, when we assess agents morally, we typically don't care about their judgments about their own blameworthiness, as opposed to the wrongness of their act, at all. This may seem odd if we assume that an agent relates to rational norms by trying to satisfy them, but I think we can and should reject this claim. Rational norms simply describe the processes an agent must undergo in order to be rational, whether or not they are trying to do so or whether they are in a position to know they are undergoing them. Without the anti-luminosity argument, and given that Williamson (2013) accepts that there is are more or less internalist conditions of blame and excuse in addition to his knowledge norm, what is left except a verbal dispute over the use of"rational" on which Williamson (not entirely consistently, as Cohen and Comesana (2013b, pg. 407) point out) finds himself on the side opposite ordinary use? I think what remains is Williamson's conviction that conditions on blame are derivative in some straightforward way from what he takes to be genuine norms. He suggests (forthcoming) that for a given genuine norm, there will be secondary norms demanding that one be disposed to satisfy the original norm, and tertiary norms demanding that one act in the way so disposed, and facts about an agents blameworthiness are explained by these derivative norms. If it were that simple, then norms governing blameworthiness deserve no independent consideration. But he does not argue in depth for that claim and I am skeptical that blameworthiness, moral or epistemic, is that simple. Take Williamson's fundamental epistemic norm of believing only what one knows. I am epistemically blameless, on the offered picture, if I am disposed to believe what I know and act as someone so disposed. But this doesn't explain why an angel, who has greater cognitive capacities than mine, but similar dispositions, would be more epistemically blameworthy than I am for making the same mistakes. 144 So something more is going on, and so I see no reason to think investigating conditions of blame as an independent normative phenomenon is a waste of time. 70 1.3. The Argument From Rational Necessity There is at least hope, I conclude, for defending the blame conception. But even if it is false, we saw other reasons to think that rational norms should respect our cognitive limitations. So it is important for a defender of idealized rational norms to deal with this more general claim. An argument raised by both John Broome (2013) and Brian Hedden (2015) is meant to accomplish this. Broome suggests that we take a stringent view of rational norms in light of the fact that "most requirements of rationality are necessary within what I have called the domain of rationality. They apply to you at all worlds where you are a rational being. This means that if a requirement would apply to you were you to be a superior sort of being, like an angel, it applies to you as a human being." (pg. 154) And Hedden suggests that "it is appropriate to have a model of rationality which is not sensitive to our contingent cognitive limitations. First, contingent cognitive limitations vary not only between species (e.g., between humans and far smarter aliens whose belief states change all at once rather than piecemeal), but between individuals within a single species. A model of rationality which is sensitive to all these particular limitations would be objectionably disunified." (manuscript) We may reconstruct this argument as follows: 1) Rational norms apply necessarily to rational agents as such. 2) If rational norms are sensitive to cognitive limitations, then different norms apply to different kinds of rational agents. 70 A defense of independently significant internahst norms that begins with a forward-looking conception of rationality norms as serving a gniding function, rather than a backward-looking one serving a blaming function, is developed by Schoenfield (2015). 145 norms: 3) If different norms apply to different kinds of rational agents, then they do not apply necessarily to rational agents as such. 4) Therefore, rational norms are not sensitive to cognitive limitations. Consequently, if an angel is required to reason instantaneously, so is any ordinary human being. To see why this argument fails, consider the following analogous argument regarding moral 1) Moral norms apply necessarily to moral agents as such. 2) If moral norms are sensitive to physical abilities, then different norms apply to different kinds of moral agents. 3) If different norms apply to different kinds of moral agents, then they do not apply necessarily to moral agents as such. 4) Therefore, moral norms are not sensitive to physical limitations. Consequently, if Superman is required to fly into the air and stop a plane from crashing, then so is any ordinary human being. This, of course, is absurd. The flaw in both arguments, I suggest, is premise t\vo. Even if we accept that all rational norms must apply necessarily to all rational agents, just because an account of rationality takes cognitive limitations as a constraint - in the sense of making what specific behavior one is required to exhibit - doesn't mean that it invokes norms that only apply contingently. For rational norms may take an explicitly or implicitly conditional form - claiming, for instance, "if one is cognitively limited in such and such a way, do so and so. Such conditional norms could apply 146 necessarily to all rational agents, and yet they would still make the conditions of rational success or failure dependent in the relevant sense on an agent's limitations. They need not even be explicitly conditional - a norm that tells you to draw as many inferences as you can when receiving new evidence will lead rational agents with different inference-drawing abilities to act differently, just as a norm that tells you to save as many children in mortal danger as you can will lead moral humans and superhumans to act differently. We may talk of the 'norms on humans' as distinct from 'norms on angels' for convenience, but these can be read as shorthand for 'what the (more general) norms demand of humans/angels'. 2. Rational Ideals: The Retreat In part I, I tried to motivate the thesis that rational norms, conceived as conditions for rational criticism, must respect our cognitive limitations. In part II, I defended that view from several natural objections. In part III, then, I will take it as established that putative norms that do not reflect sensitivity to our cognitive limitations are not genuine rational norms. Familiar Bayesian principles that demand logical omniscience, probabilistic coherence, or precise credences are therefore excluded from normhood. In previous chapters, moreover, I showed that traditional state-oriented norms on our attitudes more generally (of which Bayesian norms are merely one example) do not reflect sensitivity to our cognitive limitations. These too, then, are excluded. But this is not yet the nail in the coffin for either the Bayesian or the state-oriented theorist. It may yet be possible to reinterpret what we previously understood as rational norms as something of comparable philosophical interest. A rational norm tells us that an agent is irrational if some condition X holds. Let us introduce the technical notion of a rational ideal, and revise our disqualified rational norms to claim instead that 147 an agent violates a rational ideal ifX holds. Instead of a norm claiming that an agent is irrational if they have beliefs that don't match the evidence, for instance, we now have a principle that claims an agent violates a rational ideal if they have beliefs that don't match the evidence. Might the conditions described in these principles, which we may call rational ideals to distinguish them from rational norms, have some other important role in a theory of rationality? This retreat position is the possibility I would like to explore for the remainder of this chapter. Though I am interested in particular in the way state-oriented ideals might feature in a theory of rationality that rejects them as rational norms per se, the discussion may also illuminate in a more general way the potential relationship between idealizations and rational norms, including discussions of the stringency of Bayesian epistemology and demands oflogical omniscience more generally. 71 What the defender of rational ideals needs is a normative job for the rational ideals, a merely technical introduction, to perform - a story about how they relate to normative concepts on which we have an independent grasp. I will consider three such stories. The first two, I will suggest, do not provide ideals with a role significant enough to justify philosophical interest. The third does provide ideals with a crucial role, but it is a role better served by familiar objective ideals than by the idealized state-oriented principles in need of saving. 2.1. Rational Norms for Angels Minimally, such ideals might describe the demands rational norms would place on agents without our cognitive limitations. That is, ideals may be rational norms for angels. But there are obstacles to understanding traditional state-oriented norms in this way. First, if, as mentioned before, the 71 For instance, in Christensen (2004, 2007), Smithies (2015) and Zynda (1996). 148 function of certain kinds of mental states, like belief and intention, is tied to our cognitive limitations, then agents without those limitations may not require those mental states at all. So there will be no interesting rational norms for angels that involve those states. More importantly, however, if this is all that rational ideals are, it is hard to see what could be their theoretical interest. We are not angels. Nor do we interact with angels on a regular basis. Knowing what norms demand of such creatures would be very little use to us unless it was easy to read off the requirements on our behavior from the requirements on theirs. But just as learning how stupid, cognitively limited creatures like ourselves ought to manage our cognitive economy doesn't tell us much about how unlimited angels ought to manage theirs, what is rational for them may differ substantially from what is rational for us. The fact that angels might be required to believe they are angels, or to instantaneously update their beliefs, does not tell us anything about what we are required to do, just as the fact that superman might be required to put his hand out to stop a runaway train in its tracks does not tell us anything about what we must do in a similar situation (See Foley 1993). Similar considerations apply to the view that rational ideals represent ideal settings for some kind of information-gathering robot. We are concerned with assessing human agents, not constructing robots, and even those interested in developing rational artificial intelligences are constrained by technological limitations similar to those faced by human brains. Rational norms for angels, then, is not an interpretation which vindicates philosophers' interest in state-oriented norms. 2.3. Good Enough For Jazz On another interpretation, ideals play a similar role in normative theories as do models in the sciences that invoke simplifying assumptions. A physicist may represent a cow or a vehicle as a point sized mass, or they may ignore the effects of friction, when modeling how a physical system might behave under certain conditions. Or an economist may make certain idealizing assumptions about the 149 way human agents make decisions to show how equilibrium emerges between supply and demand. Such idealizations are in many cases unobjectionable because their falsity in the real world does not significantly affect the accuracy of the model as a description of the phenomenon, at least at the level of precision required for our purposes. Similarly, we might take the abstraction from our cognitive limitations to provide ideals that are reasonably accurate approximations of what is really required of us. We might call this the good-enough:forjazz interpretation of rational ideals"- However, the good-enough-for-jazz interpretation has similarly poor prospects for vindicating interest in traditional state-oriented principles. First, the idealization is simply not innocent enough to serve as a reasonable approximation of the phenomenon of rational criticizability. We have seen that the behavior appropriate to agents with cognitive limitations differs significantly from that suggested by traditional state-oriented norms. In chapter 3, we saw that the attitudes of rational agents can persist unsupported by the reasons for them for extended periods of time, and in chapter 5, we noted that responses to changes in our psychology more generally can involve considerable delay in a way that makes the most common proposed state-oriented requirements poor approximations at best. Moreover, philosophers are not generally interested in mere approximations of normative principles. If to capture the phenomenon accurately and directly, we must look to process-oriented principles, then these are the proper subject of philosophical investigation. It is doubtful that defenders of state oriented principles will be happy with the good-enough-for-jazz interpretation of their project. 2.4. Ideals-First To make state-oriented ideals worth considering for those studying the phenomenon of rationality, they must have a significance that is deeper than that offered by the interpretations above. 72 I borrow the term from Colyvan (2013) 150 But they cannot themselves be rational norms. The natural way to meet these two constraints on their relevance is for these ideals to have some kind of explanatory priority relative to rational norms, without being rational norms per se. We cannot explore every possible way an explanatory relation may go, but I will try and consider the most natural understanding. There is something, one might plausibly say, bad in a certain sense about having states that violate the state-oriented rational ideals, and good about having states that satisfy them. The behavior of rational agents, furthermore, is in some way responsive to this value. An agent is rational to the extent that (on various precisifications of this general picture) their behavior aims towards, tends to lead to (Hedden 2015), or approximates (Zynda 1996) the satisfaction of state-oriented ideals. Call this the ideals-first account of rationality. If the ideals-first account is correct, then attention given to state-oriented principles is not wholly misplaced, even if I am right that they are not rational norms. The ideals will still be an important part of any complete account of rationality. This would not mean that the arguments of earlier chapters have taught us nothing, for defenders of state-oriented principles have not generally distinguished their accounts as accounts of rational ideals rather than rational norms, and sometimes explicitly or implicitly committed to a state-oriented picture of the latter (Hedden 2015). Moreover, it has not been appreciated that state oriented principles in general are in the same boat as demands more widely recognized as being idealized, such as requirements of logical omniscience or Bayesian demands that one have precise degrees of belief Nevertheless, if we can reinterpret the work of philosophers on state-oriented norms as treating ideals in an ideals-first model of rationality, then much of what I have argued is best understood as clarificatory rather than destructive of the state oriented approach. Moreover, there is independent reason to be attracted to a state-oriented ideals-first picture even if one is not motivated out of desperation to save traditional state-oriented norms. Suppose I am 151 right that we should understand rational norms as applying to processes. We still might be interested in an explanation of what distinguishes genuine process norms from impostors. The ideals-first picture promises such an explanation - real process norms are those whose satisfaction involves aiming at, or conduces to, or approximates the satisfaction of ideals. Indeed, Hedden (2015) gives precisely this sort of account of the relation between process norms and the state-oriented norms he endorses. In what follows, I will try to motivate skepticism of the ideals-first approach to defending traditional state oriented principles. 2.5. Rational Belief Formation Revisited To begin, I would like to revisit the case of my friend Minnie presented in chapter two. In that case, I have at tl conclusive evidence that Minnie will be at my birthday party. But because it takes me some time to form a belief, the earliest time at which I could form that belief in response to my evidence is t2, and at t2 I will forget a crucial fact, and my newly impoverished evidence will instead conclusively support the claim that Minnie will not be at my birthday party. In such a case, I argued, the rational thing for me to do, whether or not I know at tl that I will lose the evidence, is form the belief at t2 that she will be at my birthday party, even though that is not what is supported by my evidence at that time. In the context of that chapter, the case of Minnie was intended to show that we cannot account for our rational belief-forming behavior merely by appealing to synchronic rational norms. But this kind of case can also be used to show that our rational behavior cannot be explained by appeal to synchronic rational ideals in the way the ideals-first model recommends. On the state-oriented ideals first model, our belief-forming behavior is rational when it aims at, or tends to produce, or approximates the satisfaction of state-oriented ideals. But if we take the traditional synchronic, state- 152 oriented principle demanding that we have beliefs that match our evidence as a rational ideal, the behavior that aims at, or tends to produce, or best approximates the satisfaction of this ideal involves forming the belief that she will not be at the party. Forming that belief is not in any way beyond my ability, and I may know all of this beforehand. But it is the wrong belief. Neither is it very plausible that some diachronic state-oriented ideal relating evidence to belief explains why the rational thing for me to do is form the belief that Minnie will be at the party. Since the relevant belief is formed at t2 and the relevant evidence is possessed at tl, this would involve appealing to a rational ideal that tells us to have beliefs at later times that match our evidence at earlier times. But it is rather bizarre on its face to claim that there is something especially valuable about having beliefs at later times that conform to evidence at earlier times. Moreover, we run into the kind of problem faced by diachronic state-oriented norms in Chapter Five, where we must select a relevant time-scale. What is it that we should be aiming at - having beliefs that match our evidence one second earlier? Ten seconds earlier? Two minutes earlier? Picking any particular value will lead to counterexamples involving agents who are particularly slow or particularly fast at processing evidence. The case of Minnie can be generalized to states other than beliefs, as well. We can imagine parallel cases where I have reasons to intend something, but by the time I can form the intention, I will have forgotten some of my reasons. Again, the rational thing for me to do is to form the intention that matches my better reasons, rather than my impoverished ones, and a similar argument will suggest that state-oriented ideals connecting my intentions to my reasons for them will not explain what it is rational for me to do. Parallel cases can be constructed for other situations where attitudes are rational responses to our reasons. So the norms governing reasons-responsiveness, among the most common targets for a state-oriented approach, will not be explained via the ideals-first model. 153 2.6. Objective Ideals Finally, I want to consider the relation between traditional state-oriented ideals and what we might call objective ideals. While traditional state-oriented principles concern conditions that are internal to us, like the relations bet\veen our attitudes, oijective ideals require the world to cooperate in order for us to satisfy them. A paradigmatic objective ideal from the epistemic realm is that of believing all truths. Philosophers discussing rationality overwhelmingly take objective ideals to be fundamentally different in kind and in normative role from the principles that they propose. This is easy to explain if we take their proposals as proposals about rational norms. Rational norms provide the conditions of rational criticism, and we can be criticized for failing to satisfy some requirement only when satisfying that requirement is in some sense up to us or within our power. But satisfying objective requirements is not up to us - the world out there must cooperate. We may do everything right on our end and still fail to satisfy the objective ideal through no failure of ours, for instance, if some evil demon conspires to mislead us or to render our best practical efforts ineffective. By contrast, it is not at all clear how to distinguish rational ideals from objective ideals. Rational ideals are not themselves standards for rational criticism, so there is no similarly direct explanation for why satisfying them should be within our power. And if these ideals are anything like traditional state- oriented principles, we already know it is not within our power to satisfy them, given our cognitive limitations. Moreover, objective ideals are very plausible candidates for things that are in some sense good to satisfy and which are the aim of rational behavior. It is good to believe truths, and rational epistemic behavior is plausibly directed towards truth. Objective ideals, then, are competitors to state oriented ideals for the same normative role. 154 In fact, I argue, objective ideals are a better candidate for that normative role than traditional state-oriented ideals. We saw that we could not explain why it was rational for me to form the belief that Minnie will be at the party by appealing to state-oriented rational ideals. But believing what is supported by our better evidence even when we will lose that evidence by the time we have the belief is exactly the sort of behavior that represents aiming at, or will tend to produce, beliefs that are true. In addition, it is plausible that whatever value there is in satisfying traditional state-oriented ideals, it is derivative of the value of satisfying objective ideals. Believing in line with our evidence is, in most cases, a way to aim at, and will tend to produce beliefs that are true. And in cases where it is not, like Minnie's, rational behavior reflects an aim at truth and not at matching the evidence. Similarly, it is plausible that having intentions that match our reasons is valuable precisely because in typical cases it represents our best effort to act objectively correctly (though what that entails is far from clear). And if the value of state-oriented rational ideals is merely derivative of the value of satisfying objective ideals in this way, we can explain rational nonns, in particular, process norms, directly as representing behavior that is aimed at, or conduces to, the satisfaction of objective ideals. If that is so, then the non-objective ideals tum out to be idle middlemen in the explanatory chain. To some extent, all this may please theorists like Williamson who already take extemalist conditions like knowledge to be of fundamental importance, in his case by endorsing the belief norm "believe only what you know". But even such a view, if it has an ideals-first strategy, must explain why "believe all truths" or "know everything" do not count as rational ideals. And Bayesians and other traditional state-oriented theorists are not, in any case, externalistically inclined. The slippery slope towards objective ideals I have described is reflected, strikingly, in a paper by Jennifer Carr (forthcoming). Carr, a Bayesian, accepts that Bayesian norms are too demanding to describe the conditions for rational criticism in the ordinary sense. So she proposes to understand 155 them as a kind of epistemic ideal. But once it's clear that ideals do not serve directly as the basis for rational criticism, it becomes difficult to explain why we should not idealize even further than the Bayesian, including along the objective dimension. Consequently, she breaks from orthodoxy to endorse rational ideals preventing forgetting (traditionally seen as too objective to be a norm of rationality) and to entertain (though not outright endorse) that rational ideals come in levels of objectivity all the way up to an ideal of truth. This is, effectively, a modus ponens to the modus tollens I am proposing for the ideals-first strategy. I suspect other Bayesians may find this bullet-biting less than satisfactory. 2. 7. Sub-Ideals If objective ideals are the best candidates for playing the most fundamental explanatory role as the aim of our rational activity, and rational nonns are process-oriented and sensitive to our cognitive limitations, then if we are to make room for idealized but not-fully-objective principles, we might still try to find a role for them as some kind of intermediate sub-ideal. There are several conditions, however, that an account would have to meet in order to justify sustained philosophical interest in those principles. A sub-ideal will have to bridge two gaps - one between the sub-ideal and the objective ideal, and one between the sub-ideal and the rational norms we use to appraise real, limited agents. However it bridges those gaps, it must, first, identify a role for the sub-ideal which is not easily bypassed or factored out. If, for example, rational norms were an approximation to the sub-ideal and the sub-ideal was an approximation to the objective ideal, then we might as well drop the sub-ideal, and recognize the rational norms directly as approximations to the objective ideals. And second, the compounding of these two steps must represent an interesting relation between the norms and the objective ideal. 156 If the first of these conditions is not met, then the role of the sub-ideal is redundant. If the second is not met, then the significance of the sub-ideal is lost. In the Bayesian tradition, which has a history with the rational ideals strategy, a number of theorists have proposed ways to bridge the gap between the sub-ideals of Bayesian theory and objective ideals of truth - for instance, in the accuracy dominance argument for probabilism by Joyce (1998). But this leaves the sub-ideals tethered only at one end, and little has been done to bridge the gap between the Bayesian sub-ideal and norms sensitive to human limitations. A notable exception is work by Julia Staffel (2013), who proposes measuring how far one falls short of the sub-ideal of coherence, and then using that measure to evaluate rules of reasoning, things that might plausibly feature in rational norms applying to cognitively limited agents, in terms of whether they increase or decrease that distance. Evaluating her proposal is beyond the scope of this chapter, but it is exactly the sort of thing one would need to get the sub-ideal strategy off the ground. It will remain open, however even if we have, individually, an interesting relation bet\veen the sub-ideal and the objective ideal and an interesting relation between the sub-ideal and ordinary rational norms, whether combining the two gives us the right sort of connection between the ordinary rational norms and the objective ideal. It is far from obvious, for instance, that following rules that decrease distance from a state that is guaranteed not to be accuracy dominated is a normatively meaningful way to be related to an ideal of truth. And success for one sub-ideal is no guarantee that other traditional state-oriented norms are amenable to a similar treatment. Conclusion In summary, there is no very simple reinterpretation of familiar state-oriented principles as rational ideals that preserves their significance. I do not take myself to have shown conclusively that 157 no interesting place for them can be found along the aforementioned lines, but the strategy faces a challenge: to identify a meaningful normative job for the ideals to do in a theory of rationality that is not utterly swamped by either the role of limitation-sensitive, process-oriented rational norms, or that of fully extemalist objective ideals. 158 Closing Thoughts My hope is that this dissertation has made a compelling case for taking seriously a partially or completely process-oriented approach to rationality. Though I have tried to argue that the traditional state-oriented conception of the philosophical landscape is fundamentally mistaken, one needn't accept the most ambitious parts of this campaign in order to recognize that the lack of independent attention given to process-oriented norms is a philosophical oversight. The process-oriented picture opens the door to new ways oflooking at old problems, and because it has been so minimally explored, much is to be gained from diverting at least some attention away from the latest epicycle over familiar state-oriented principle to pick up the fruit lying on its neglected fields. I have tried to take a first step, but many avenues for development present themselves that I have not been able to explore here. The dynamic version of epistemic conservatism I have sketched, for instance, has a natural analogue in the philosophy of intention. The dynamic approach to permissivism, likewise, may change how we understand issues of peer disagreement, which many philosophers have recognized as a closely related topic. If we take the process-oriented picture on board, moreover, a number of new and interesting questions present themselves. There are questions about which processes are rationally assessable - I have mostly limited consideration to the most obvious candidates, explicit reasoning activities, but we may wonder what to say about lower-level, unconscious mental processes that play some other role in our cognitive economy. We do not generally think that perception is rationally assessable in the way explicit reasoning is, for example, and for each process in bet\veen we may ask whether it is relevantly like reasoning or like perception. There are questions about how we decide, for a given process, what 159 the norms governing it are. How closely do the norms depend, for instance, on the evolutionary or design role a process has for the type of creature we are evaluating? There are questions about specific norms and their proper formulation. I have used fairly crude and simple norms to illustrate how a process-oriented picture operates, but the best formulations of norms on consideration and deliberation may end up looking quite different. There is already a rich psychological literature looking at human cognitive processing that we may draw upon to help answer some of these questions. Kahneman and Tversky (2011) and Gerd Gigerenzer (2001) have written extensively on common cognitive heuristics and their advantages and disadvantages. Philip Koralus (2013) has developed an interesting and empirically informed account of human deductive reasoning. Arie Kruglanski (2013) has investigated the phenomenon of need for closure, which concerns, among other things, how quick we are to form settled judgments, and what implications for individual and social behavior different degrees of this tendency might have. This kind of research can clarify the role a process has in our mental life and guide our thinking about what it is for that process to be working well or poorly. Finally, if we begin looking at rationality through a process-oriented lens, the relationship between rationality and other evaluative concepts may tum out differently. On the most standard view, for example, one knows something only if one is rational in believing it. But if rationality doesn't concern itself with states like belief at all, then we must rethink this relation. Perhaps knowledge of a proposition is connected with the rationality of one or more processes leading up to the belief. But which ones? Or perhaps looking at things in the process-oriented way will show us that rationality and knowledge are more independent than has generally been thought. 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Abstract (if available)

Abstract There has recently been considerable debate over whether rational norms place constraints only on our beliefs and other attitudes at individual times, or whether they also, or instead, place constraints on the relationship between our attitudes at different times. In this dissertation, I argue that both of these views rest on the mistake of assuming that rational norms place constraints on attitudes like belief and other states of mind at all. I develop an alternative picture of the nature of rational norms on which they govern mental processes like consideration and reasoning rather than states like belief, and show how this process-oriented approach to rationality leads immediately to better versions of embattled views in epistemology and elsewhere, and offers new and promising ways to respond to challenges, both old and new, to accounts of the relationship between rationality and time.

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Creator Podgorski, Abelard (author)

Core Title Process-oriented rationality

School College of Letters, Arts and Sciences

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program Philosophy

Publication Date 07/27/2016

Defense Date 03/21/2016

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

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Advisor Schroeder, Mark (committee chair), Finlay, Steve (committee member), Ross, Jacob (committee member), Schein, Barry (committee member), Wedgwood, Ralph (committee member)

Creator Email astralabe@gmail.com,podgorsk@usc.edu

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