Speaker: Professor Mona Simion (Glasgow)

Talk: 'Resistance to Evidence and the Normativity of Inquiry'

Abstract: This talk looks at a puzzle affecting views that take epistemic norms to be zetetic norms - i.e. norms of inquiry: since garden variety epistemic norms and straightforward norms of inquiry often come in conflict, and since it is implausible, for any given normative domain, that it should be such that it is peppered with internal normative conflict, it cannot be that epistemic norms are inquiry norms. I look at three ways to escape the puzzle, I argue that they don't work, and put forth my own account. On this view, one is only the subject of epistemic normativity proper insofar as one is in a position to know. As such, I argue, normative conflicts do not arise in situations in which one is not in a position to know that p in virtue of inquiring into whether q.