Lilith Mace: Kinds of doubt

Tuesday April 8 2025 @11:30 (CET)
Sala B, Edificio de Humanidades, UNED & online

Abstract
Our doubt talk is varied. We talk of having doubts that P, about doubting that P, and being in doubt with respect to P, to give a few examples. Some epistemologists have taken this variety in our ‘doubt’ talk to indicate a variety of doubt states. In this talk, I argue that this is a bad way of accruing ontological commitments in one’s epistemological theorising. I’ll propose a better one, which has to do with normative conflict between doxastic states. In short, we should be committed to as many distinct doxastic states as are required to explain genuine normative conflicts in one’s doxastic profile. Linguistic data suggests that there is a normative conflict between doubting that P and believing that P, but not between having doubts that P and believing that P, which suggests two different doubt states. I’ll consider some ways of accounting for this normative difference using extant theories of doubt, and find them wanting. I’ll then propose my own theory of the nature of doubt, which accounts for this normative difference between having doubts and doubting that P, but manages to do so without positing multiple kinds of doubt. Rather, the difference in doubt that underpins this normative difference is argued to be a difference in degrees of one doubt-state, rather than a difference in kind between doubt-states.

Bio
Lilith Mace is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow on the ERC-funded project KnowledgeLab: Knowledge-First Social Epistemology, and a Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Glasgow. Her current research focuses primarily on doubt. She also works on inquiry more broadly, and in particular on the attitudes that inquirers typically have during their inquiries, known as ‘questioning attitudes’ or ‘interrogative attitudes’ (e.g. curiosity, wonder).