Time–Slice Epistemology and Action under Indeterminacy

Abstract

There is a question that unifies several recent debates in epistemology, namely whether there are any essentially diachronic norms of rationality, or whether all fundamental norms of rationality are temporally local. Let us say that fans of temporally local norms advocate time-slice epistemology, where at a first pass, we define this theory as the combination of two claims. The first claim: what is rationally permissible or obligatory for you at some time is entirely determined by what mental states you are in at that time. This supervenience claim governs facts about the rationality of your actions, as well as the rationality of your full beliefs and your degreed belief states. The second claim: the fundamental facts about rationality are exhausted by these temporally local facts. There may be some fact about whether you are a rational person, for instance. But this fact is a derivative fact, one that just depends on whether your actions and opinions at various times are rational for you at those times. Suppose that perdurantism is correct, i.e. that objects have temporal parts located at different times, just as they have spatial parts located in different places. Then we can restate time-slice epistemology as a theory that concerns time slices, or instantaneous temporal parts of objects. The first claim: what is rationally permissible or obligatory for a time slice is entirely determined by the mental states of that time slice. The second claim: the fundamental facts about rationality are exhausted by facts about the rationality of time slices. There may also be derivative facts about whether temporally extended agents are rational. For instance, we could say that you are rational just in case you are composed only of rational time slices, or just in case

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