Epistemic Normativity and Social Norms

Abstract

What kind of norms are epistemic norms? Constitutive, prudential, functional, moral? Is epistemic normativity normativity sui generis or does epistemic normativity reduce to some other kind of normativity? This chapter argues that some epistemic norms—norms with epistemic content—are social norms—norms in the sense of prescribed regularities in behavior. This is not to reduce epistemic normativity to social normativity, but to understand how some epistemic norms might also be social norms. Social norms are ubiquitous in human life. Many social norms are pro-social, prescribing socially helpful cooperative behavior. The epistemic norms isolated are norms associated with truth-telling. These epistemic norms are then prescriptions for socially helpful behavior, for we benefit by learning from others. There should be such pro-social norms for humans who have undergone group selection for helpful pro-social social norms. We should expect such norms to emerge and to persist.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 82 citations exist upstream.