Description

Iñigo Valero (ILCLI): "Doxastic Dilemmas: A Divergence-Based Model"

November 21, 2025. 15:30.

Venue: Carlos Santamaria Zentroa, room 3.

Abstract:

Belief often sits at the intersection of competing normative pressures. In many familiar cases, a belief may seem fully justified from an epistemic perspective—well-supported by the available evidence—yet morally or pragmatically troubling. For instance, in the context of racial profiling, it may be epistemically reasonable—given base rates or stereotypes—to form a belief that someone is more likely to be dangerous or suspicious based on their race; and yet, forming such a belief may be deeply morally objectionable, both in content and in the harm it causes (Basu and Schroeder 2018). These tensions have led many philosophers to propose that moral or pragmatic considerations encroach on the epistemic status of belief. According to this family of views—commonly grouped under the label of encroachment theories—non-epistemic factors such as moral stakes or practical consequences can shape whether a belief is epistemically justified.

In this talk I will try to challenge encroachment theories and defend a divergence-based model of belief normativity. Against views that allow moral or pragmatic considerations to shape the epistemic status of belief, I argue for epistemic purism: the idea that epistemic justification is solely a matter of evidential support. However, I also reject threshold models—such as Reisner’s (2008)—that treat non-epistemic reasons for belief as silencing epistemic ones when they reach sufficient weight. Instead, I propose that epistemic and non-epistemic norms operate independently, and that doxastic dilemmas arise when their demands conflict. According to the divergence model I defend, belief is assessed by the degree to which it departs from different normative ideals, without assuming these ideals are commensurable or that a uniquely correct all-things-considered belief always exists. This framework captures the structure of real-world normative tensions—such as those involving loyalty, political commitment, or relational trust—and provides a principled way to navigate belief under moral and epistemic pressure without collapsing one domain into the other.