Berislav Marušić's research while affiliated with Brandeis University and other places
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Publications (10)
There is often something wrong with merely promising to try to ϕ. In this article I explain what is wrong with such promises. I argue that a promise to try to ϕ, when it is entirely up to us to ϕ, is always wrong because it hides a possible choice under the veil of our susceptibility to circumstances beyond our control. I furthermore argue that thi...
In the First Meditation, the Cartesian meditator temporarily concludes that he cannot know anything, because he cannot discriminate dreaming from waking while he is dreaming. To resist the meditator’s conclusion, one could deploy an asymmetry argument. Following Bernard Williams (1978), one could argue that even if the meditator cannot discriminate...
If we hold that perceiving is sufficient for knowing, we can raise a powerful objection to dreaming skepticism: Skeptics assume
the implausible KK-principle, because they hold that if we don’t know whether we are dreaming or perceiving p, we don’t know whether p. The rejection of the KK-principle thus suggests an anti-skeptical strategy: We can sac...
We often promise to ϕ despite having evidence that there is a significant chance that we won’t ϕ. This gives rise to a pressing philosophical problem: Are we irresponsible in making such promises since, it seems, we are insincere or irrational in making them? I argue that we needn’t be. When it’s up to us to ϕ, our practical reasons for ϕ-ing partl...
Suppose you decide or promise to do something that you have evidence is difficult to do. Should you believe that you will do it? On the one hand, if you believe that you will do it, your belief goes against the evidence—since having evidence that it’s difficult to do it constitutes evidence that it is likely that you won’t do it. On the other hand,...
The ethics of belief is concerned with the question what we should believe. According to evidentialism, one should believe something if and only if one has adequate evidence for what one believes. According to classic pragmatism, other features besides evidence, such as practical reasons, can make it the case that one should believe something. Acco...
An influential view, defended by Thomas Scanlon and others, holds that desires are almost never reasons. I seek to resist this view and show that someone who desires something does thereby have a reason to satisfy her desire. To show this, I argue, first, that the desires of some others are reasons for us and, second, that our own desires are no le...
Skepticism seems to have excessive consequences: the impossibility of successful enquiry and differentiated judgment. Yet if skepticism could avoid these consequences, it would seem idle. I offer an account of moderate skepticism that avoids both problems. Moderate skepticism avoids excessiveness because skeptical reflection and ordinary enquiry ar...
Citations
... The point can be strengthened by considering choices between arbitrarily many equally good options. (For a defence of the strong cognitivist view that an intention to A is a belief that one will A based on practical reasoning seeMarušić and Schwenkler 2018.) Since the ass cannot fairly be charged with invalid practical reasoning, its intention to eat the right bale first is not the conclusion of reasoning at all. ...
Reference: Acting on knowledge-how
... 38 For a defence of this claim, see Marsili (2016); cf. Marušić (2012;2015, chap. 2). ...
Reference: Group Assertions and Group Lies
... This traces back most prominently to the debate between Clifford (1877) and James(1897). For a contemporary overview of this debate seeMarušić (2011) andChignell (2018).8 Here I am granting, for the sake of argument, that there are instrumental or practical reasons to believe. ...
Reference: Should epistemology take the zetetic turn?
... 6 See Stich (1990), McCormick (2015), Rinard (2019) and Maguire & Woods (2020). 7 See James (1897/1979), Feldman (2000), Marušić (2013), Reisner (2008), (2009), Howard (2020), and Leary (2017Leary ( , 2020. While all these authors defend the view that there are both practical and epistemic reasons for belief, some of them disagree about whether these two kinds of reasons are comparable in the first place, and if so, how exactly they together determine what one all-things-considered-ought to believe (more on this in § 2). ...
... For example, Scanlon (1998) has argued that desires are almost never reasons. Yet as Marusic (2010) has asserted when people desire something they invariably have a reason or reasons to satisfy that desire. The reasons they give for wanting to perform an action therefore provide a clue to what they desire, even though the informants may at times seek to deceive others, and they may even deceive themselves. ...
... 4 It seems that in order to even get started in considering what would or wouldn't count as knowledge we need to appeal to what is widely or ordinarily thought about knowledge. Without that, it is hard to see how to proceed epistemologically without running the risk of any subsequent theory being idle insofar as it bears no relevance to our epistemic lives (Marušić, 2010). On the other hand, if we are to take our ordinary practices and our ordinary conception into account when producing a theory of knowledge, we need to take the full range of ordinary evidence into account. ...
Reference: Anti-Skepticism Under a Linguistic Guise
... Lacking a satisfactory answer on this score, the rational attitude to endorse is one of suspending judgment on whether something is the case because we cannot defend our beliefs as we ought to. Not doing so would be nothing short of arbitrary and would show the resulting beliefs as lacking epistemic authority (Leite, 2004b, 234;Maruŝić, 2013Maruŝić, , 1986. ...
Reference: Motivating (Underdetermination) Scepticism
