Chapter 3 - Contexts, Costs, and Benefits

Summary

In this chapter, I argue for a contextualist approach to epistemic norms for practical reasoning, according to which the degree of justification required for it to be permissible to treat p as a reason for action varies with context. In section 3.1, I introduce how these proposals are motivated and three questions that will shape the following discussion. In sections 3.2 to 3.4, I discuss the proposals of Brown, Gerken, and Locke in turn. The most pressing issue for current contextualist accounts is what I call the incompleteness problem, which is how context determines what degree of justification a context calls for. In section 3.5, I develop a solution to the incompleteness problem that involves a comparison of two opposing costs, the costs of error and the costs of further inquiry. Finally, I point out a context-invariant principle that will become significant in Chapter 5.