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The weight of facts: A puzzle about perception, reasons and deliberation
Author(s) -
Giananti Andrea
Publication year - 2019
Publication title -
ratio
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.475
H-Index - 29
eISSN - 1467-9329
pISSN - 0034-0006
DOI - 10.1111/rati.12227
Subject(s) - deliberation , perception , epistemology , rationality , warrant , sketch , subject (documents) , relation (database) , psychology , philosophy , mathematics , computer science , political science , algorithm , database , politics , library science , financial economics , economics , law
How should we understand the epistemic role of perception? According to epistemological disjunctivism (ED), a subject’s perceptual knowledge that p is to be explained in terms of the subject believing that p for a factive and reflectively accessible reason. I argue that ED raises far‐reaching questions for rationality and deliberation; I illustrate those questions by setting up a puzzle about belief‐suspension, and I argue that ED does not have the resources to make sense of the rationality of belief‐suspension in cases in which suspending is clearly rational. The conclusion that I draw from the puzzle is mainly negative: the epistemic contribution of perception cannot be explained in terms of a warrant‐conferring relation between perception and belief . However, toward the end, I sketch a positive picture of the epistemic role of perception in terms of a direct explanatory relation between perception and knowledge .