Liam Patell: 'Too Fragmented? Greco on Fragmentation and Higher-order Evidence'
Akratic beliefs -- beliefs of the form "p, but I shouldn't believe that p" -- are often considered paradigmatically irrational. Yet the possibility of gaining evidence about what your evidence supports seems to imply that, at least sometimes, epistemic akrasia can be rational. Daniel Greco offers a seductive response to this tension between higher-order evidence and epistemic akrasia by appealing to the view that our beliefs, and thus our bodies of evidence, can be fragmented. This talk will lay out Greco's proposed solution and then argue that it cannot defuse the trouble for the core cases of peer disagreement and misleading higher-order evidence that motivate the problem of epistemic akrasia. I appeal to recent work by Elga and Rayo (2019) and Dan Hoek (2022) to argue that Greco's model amounts to kicking the can down the road: we remain stuck with the problem of what, if anything, higher-order evidence should do to our first-order beliefs.
