Knowledge and other norms for assertion , action , and belief : A teleological account

Here I advance a unified account of the structure of the epistemic normativity of assertion, action, and belief. According to my Teleological Account, all of these are epistemically successful just in case they fulfill the primary aim of knowledgeability, an aim which in turn generates a host of secondary epistemic norms. The central features of the Teleological Account are these: it is compact in its reliance on a single central explanatory posit, knowledge-centered in its insistence that knowledge sets the fundamental epistemic norm, and yet fiercely pluralistic in its acknowledgment of the legitimacy and value of a rich range of epistemic norms distinct from knowledge. Largely in virtue of this pluralist character, I argue, the Teleological Account is far superior to extant knowledge-centered accounts. Here I advance a unified account of the structure of the epistemic normativity of assertion, action, and belief. According to my Teleological Account, all of these are epistemically successful just in case they fulfill the primary aim of knowledgeability, an aim which in turn generates a host of secondary epistemic norms. The central features of the Teleological Account are these: it is compact in its reliance on a single central explanatory posit, knowledgecentered in its insistence that knowledge sets the fundamental epistemic norm, and yet fiercely pluralistic in its acknowledgment of the legitimacy and value of a rich range of epistemic norms distinct from knowledge. I do not argue for this view from scratch, however. From the outset, I assume the truth of the Knowledge Account, according to which an assertion, action, or belief has a certain positive epistemic status central to ordinary practice, which I noncommittally call okayness, iff it is appropriately related to knowledge. Others have assembled impressive evidence in support of this core idea, evidence which I rehearse only in the interest of bringing relevant information to the forefront of the reader’s mind (§1). Here I focus solely on the following guiding question: what is the best version of the Knowledge Account, i.e., what is the best understanding of okayness? The reader ought not be fooled by the apparent narrowness of this question, for in answering it I offer an ambitious and innovative account of the structure of epistemic normativity. Toward the end of finding the best understanding of okayness, I begin with the simplest approaches, moving to more complex ones only if these prove inadequate. In the case at hand, the simplest approach is to identify okayness with some well-understood positive normative status such as permissibility, goodness, or success. The identification of okayness with permissibility yields a broadly deontological theory, but I show that, given a minimal assumption, this theory has the bitter consequence that a belief is epistemically justified only if it is knowledge (§2). The identification of okayness with goodness, meanwhile, yields a broadly axiological theory, but I show that this theory rules out plausible claims about epistemic goods besides knowledge – goods like truth and epistemic justification – while a more permissive variant of the theory cannot explain the distinctive normative salience of knowledge (§3).