Pr Nick Hughes "How Does ‘Ought’ Imply ‘Can’ In Epistemology ?"

Le mardi 5 mai, à 11 h, le Professeur Nick Hughes (Université d’Oslo) donnera une conférence intitulée "How Does ‘Ought’ Imply ‘Can’ In Epistemology ?"

Abstract
The ’ought implies can’ principle in epistemology holds that if one cannot be in doxastic state D, then one is not epistemically required to be in D. This generates a puzzle. On the one hand, something like this principle must be true, since we’re not rationally required to think like supercomputers. But on the other hand, it also seems to imply that any belief is rationally permissible, no matter how epistemically egregious, just so long as the believer can’t do any better — and surely that can’t be right. I argue that the puzzle can be solved once we recognise that there is a (somewhat surprising) asymmetry in the way that the demands of epistemic normativity are constrained by one’s abilities : positive requirements to believe things obey an ought-implies-can principle, but negative requirements to not believe things do not. This asymmetry is grounded in two knowledge norms — that one ought to believe what one can know, and ought not to believe what one cannot — which together enable us to navigate between the twin dangers of an absurdly demanding and an absurdly permissive epistemology.

Vous êtes tous les bienvenus. Le professeur Hughes, invité par l’équipe « Normes épistémiques », sera présent à l’Institut Jean Nicod tout le mois d’avril et début mai. N’hésitez pas à le contacter ou à contacter notre équipe pour le rencontrer et échanger avec lui.