We often have reason to doubt our own ability to form rational beliefs, particularly when we are exposed to higher-order evidence. This book explains how disagreements with trusted friends, or learning of our own cognitive biases, can impact on our views. From there it explores a range of interrelated issues on this topic of higher-order evidence.

This book discusses current challenges in moral epistemology through the lens of higher-order evidence. Fueled by recent advances in empirical research, higher-order evidence has generated a wealth of insights about the genealogy of moral beliefs. This volume explores how these insights impact the epistemic status of moral beliefs.

This book examines the learning and development process of students’ scientific thinking skills. Universities should prepare students to be able to make judgements in their working lives based on scientific evidence. However, an understanding of how these thinking skills can be developed is limited. This book introduces a new broad theory of scientific thinking for higher education; in doing so, redefining higher-order thinking abilities as scientific thinking skills. This includes critical thinking and understanding the basics of science, epistemic maturity, research and evidence-based reasoning skills and contextual understanding. The editors and contributors discuss how this concept can be redefined, as well as the challenges educators and students may face when attempting to teach and learn these skills. This edited collection will be of interest to students and scholars of student scientific skills and higher-order thinking abilities.

This book features original essays by leading epistemologists that address questions related to epistemic dilemmas from a variety of new, sometimes unexpected, angles. It seems plausible that there can be "no win" moral situations in which no matter what one does one fails some moral obligation. Is there an epistemic analog to moral dilemmas? Are there epistemically dilemmic situations—situations in which we are doomed to violate an epistemic requirement? If there are, when exactly do they arise and what can we learn from them? The contributors to this volume cover a wide variety of positions on epistemic dilemmas. The coverage ranges from discussions of the nature of epistemic dilemmas to arguments that there are no such things to suggestions for how to resolve (or at least live with) epistemic dilemmas to proposals for how thinking about epistemic dilemmas can be used to inform theorizing in other areas of epistemology. Epistemic Dilemmas will be of interest to scholars and advanced students in epistemology working on the nature of justification and evidential support, higher-order requirements, or suspension of judgment.

This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 International licence. It is free to read at Oxford Scholarship Online and offered as a free PDF download from OUP and selected open access locations. Bad beliefs - beliefs that blatantly conflict with easily available evidence - are common. Large minorities of people hold that vaccines are dangerous or accept bizarre conspiracy theories, for instance. The prevalence of bad beliefs may be politically and socially important, for instance blocking effective action on climate change. Explaining why people accept bad beliefs and what can be done to make them more responsive to evidence is therefore an important project. A common view is that bad beliefs are largely explained by widespread irrationality. This book argues that ordinary people are rational agents, and their beliefs are the result of their rational response to the evidence they're presented with. We thought they were responding badly to evidence, because we focused on the first-order evidence alone: the evidence that directly bears on the truth of claims. We neglected the higher-order evidence, in particular evidence about who can be trusted and what sources are reliable. Once we recognize how ubiquitous higher-order evidence is, we can see that belief formation is by and large rational. The book argues that we should tackle bad belief by focusing as much on the higher-order evidence as the first-order evidence. The epistemic environment gives us higher-order evidence for beliefs, and we need to carefully manage that environment. The book argues that such management need not be paternalistic: once we recognize that managing the epistemic environment consists in management of evidence, we should recognize that such management is respectful of epistemic autonomy.

The higher-order evidence debate concerns how higher-order evidence affects the rationality of our first-order beliefs. This Element has two parts. The first part (Sections 1 and 2) provides a critical overview of the literature, aiming to explain why the higher-order evidence debate is interesting and important. The second part (Sections 3 to 6) defends calibrationism, the view that we should respond to higher-order evidence by aligning our credences to our reliability degree. The author first discusses the traditional version of calibrationism and explains its main difficulties, before proposing a new version of calibrationism called 'Evidence-Discounting Calibrationism.' The Element argues that this new version is independently plausible and that it can avoid the difficulties faced by the traditional version.

A fundamental question in philosophy of religion is whether religious belief must be based on evidence in order to be properly held. In recent years two prominent positions on this issue have been staked out: evidentialism, which claims that proper religious belief requires evidence; and Reformed epistemology, which claims that it does not. Evidence and Religious Belief contains eleven chapters by prominent philosophers which push the discussion in new directions. The volume has three parts. The first part explores the demand for evidence: some chapters object to it while others seek to restate it or find space for compromise between Reformed epistemology and evidentialism. The second part explores ways in which beliefs are related to evidence; that is, ways in which the evidence for or against religious belief that is available to a person can depend on that person's background beliefs and other circumstances. The third part contains chapters that discuss actual evidence for and against religious belief. Evidence for belief in God includes the so-called common consent of the human race and the way that such belief makes sense of the moral life; evidence against it includes profound puzzles about divine freedom which suggest that it is impossible for a being to be morally perfect.

What strength of evidence is required for knowledge? Ordinarily, we often claim to know something on the basis of evidence which doesn't guarantee its truth. For instance, one might claim to know that one sees a crow on the basis of visual experience even though having that experience does not guarantee that there is a crow (it might be a rook, or one might be dreaming). As a result, those wanting to avoid philosophical scepticism have standardly embraced "fallibilism": one can know a proposition on the basis of evidence that supports it even if the evidence doesn't guarantee its truth. Despite this, there's been a persistent temptation to endorse "infallibilism", according to which knowledge requires evidence that guarantees truth. For doesn't it sound contradictory to simultaneously claim to know and admit the possibility of error? Infallibilism is undergoing a contemporary renaissance. Furthermore, recent infallibilists make the surprising claim that they can avoid scepticism. Jessica Brown presents a fresh examination of the debate between these two positions. She argues that infallibilists can avoid scepticism only at the cost of problematic commitments concerning evidence and evidential support. Further, she argues that alleged objections to fallibilism are not compelling. She concludes that we should be fallibilists. In doing so, she discusses the nature of evidence, evidential support, justification, blamelessness, closure for knowledge, defeat, epistemic akrasia, practical reasoning, concessive knowledge attributions, and the threshold problem.

Folke Tersman explores the nature of moral thinking by examining moral disagreement.

Epistemic norms play an increasingly important role in current debates in epistemology and beyond. In this volume a team of established and emerging scholars presents new work on the key debates. They consider what epistemic requirements constrain appropriate belief, assertion, and action, and explore the interconnections between these standards.