Lecture 1

null, Matthew McGrath (University of Missouri, Columbia)

•Title: The General Project: Motivation and Defense

•Date: 12/05

•Time: 14:30-16:30

•Abstract: This lecture sets out the general project undertaken in the lecture series. The project is to understand two sorts of normative claims about people and their beliefs. On the one hand, we often claim a person should or shouldn’t believe something, taking their evidence as given and unquestioned. Premier Chamberlain shouldn’t have believed what Hitler told him at Munich in 1938: his evidence pointed strongly against it. On the other hand, we sometimes claim that a person should or shouldn’t believe something, taking into account not only the evidence they had but also the evidence they should have had. Perhaps your doctor did believe in accord with their evidence when they prescribed you the drug that had been shown ineffective in recent trials. They didn’t know about the trials but they should have known. We can criticize them by saying they “shouldn’t have thought the drug was effective, because they should have known the recent trials showed it wasn’t effective.” The overall project is to improve our understanding these two sorts of normative claims, what determines their truth, and how they relate to one another. 

Two objections to the general project are considered and answered. The first questions whether normative notions like should and appropriate apply to us in respect of our beliefs. If they don’t, the project would seem misplaced. The second questions whether there is any distinctive normativity at issue in our investigation, as opposed to some familiar non-epistemic sort of normativity, such as moral or prudential. If there is no distinctive sort of normativity at issue here, the project would be highly constrained and would lose some of its importance.