The Demands of Rationality: Epistemology & Normative Guidance

Abstract

This thesis is about demandingness in epistemology. The notion of ‘demandingness’ has been thoroughly examined in ethics and political philosophy. Epistemology, like ethics and political philosophy, is a normative branch of philosophy, and yet the topic of demandingness has not received anywhere near the attention in epistemology that it has in these domains. The goal of this thesis is to begin to fill this gap by consider- ing whether epistemic norms—norms that purport to govern an agent’s cognitive attitudes—are constrained by demandingness considerations. This is interesting in its own right, but it also promises to shed light on a variety of current debates in epistemology, especially those closely connected with knowledge-first epistemology and formal epistemology. The thesis is comprised of four chapters on the topic of demandingness in epistemology. Each chapter is an independent paper that can be read as a free-standing piece of work. But, taken together, they all explore a different facet of the overarching view that demandingness considerations are legitimate in epistemology.