Overview

"It's 9:00am on a typical day. People have dressed, had their morning coffee, and are heading out to accomplish their various tasks for the day. Business people are arriving at their places of work, intent on making the day profitable; students are headed to classes to learn new things (or, at least, to figure out how to pass their courses); teachers are preparing lectures in their heads, and making copies of assignments to evaluate their students' performance; scientists are headed into their labs to test new hypotheses; and philosophers are settling into their arm chairs to try to discover deep and interesting truths. All of this is made possible by the astonishingly complex brain that each human possesses. But just what are these brains doing? According to most epistemologists, all of these people have in common the tacit goal of arriving at true beliefs by adhering to justificational norms, and the varying degrees of success their brains have in attaining this goal will (at least largely) account for their varying degrees of success in accomplishing their individual goals for the day. The ""more rational"" people will be more likely to survive crossing the street, get promoted in their jobs, pass their course exams, and get their research findings published because their cognizing better follows and conforms to the correct set of epistemic norms. Individuals who follow these norms are rewarded with the attainment of justified beliefs, and since these beliefs are justified, many of them are also, hopefully, true."

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9781835204214

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