Epistemic Rationality as Instrumental Rationality: A Critique

My aim in this paper is to explore the relationship between epistemic ration- ality and instrumental rationality. By epistemic rationality, I mean, roughly, the kind of rationality which one displays when one believes propositions that are strongly supported by one's evidence and refrains from believing propositions that are improbable given one's evidence. Prominent episte- mologists frequently emphasize the disparate ways in which this term is employed and occasionally question its theoretical usefulness on this account.' With an eye towards such concerns, I will in what follows consider only examples in which the correctness of its application is more or less uncontroversial. Thus, if I have strong, undefeated evidence that the butler committed the crime, and my belief that the butler committed the crime is based on that evidence, then my belief that he did so is epistemically rational. By instrumental rationality, I mean the rationality which one displays in tak- ing the means to one's ends. Thus, if I have the goal of asking the speaker a question, and I know that I will only be able to ask the speaker a question if I raise my hand, then (all else being equal) it is instrumentally rational for me to raise my hand. How are epistemic and instrumental rationality related? Here is a particu- larly radical suggestion: epistemic rationality jusr is instrumental rationality. More precisely: epistemic rationality is a species of instrumental rationality, viz. instrumental rationality in the service of one's cognitive or epistemic goals. Call this way of thinking about epistemic rationality the instrumen- talist conception of epistemic rationality. My primary concem in this paper is to explore the instrumentalist conception of epistemic rational- ' Plantinga (1993) distinguishes five 'varieties' of rationality; Goldman (1986) explicitly