Attention and Justification

Noga Gratvol (New York University)

Zoom link is available on request. Please email Sarah Murdoch ([email protected]) to receive it.

Philosophers have recently argued that attention can be epistemically rational or irrational, and proposed various norms on attention. However, they generally maintain that the rationality of attention is separate from traditional epistemic norms, and does not affect our justification for any resulting beliefs. In this talk, I argue against this view: some beliefs are unjustified because they are a result of irrational attention. Specifically, I argue that these failures of justification are not explained by lack of evidential support, unreliability, defeat, or faulty inference. To account for the fact that some beliefs are unjustified, we need to appeal to the rationality of attention. 

This still leaves a lot unexplained. Any comprehensive theory of the rationality of attention must account for when and how irrational attention undermines justification. In the final part of this talk, I focus on my preferred view of the rationality of attention and propose a link between irrational attention and justification. On this view, attention is subject to inquiry-based norms. So, the link to justification also has broader implications for the epistemology of inquiry and its relation to justification.