Competence is neither necessary nor sufficient for most successes we care about. Good outcomes can result from good luck and the best, most expert efforts can be thwarted by bad luck. But what about successes like knowledge, rational belief, understanding, and morally right action? For instance, is there such a thing as incompetent knowing? A core hypothesis of this project is that cases of both competent failure and incompetent success arise for any success we might care about. In any normative domain, we must distinguish between evaluations focused on valuable success and those focused on competence.
The project demonstrates how this recognition can solve a cluster of key problems in epistemology. By furthering our understanding of the structure of epistemic normativity, the project helps answer fundamental questions about how we ought to form and revise our beliefs, what the point of a distinctively epistemic kind of criticism is, and how knowledge fits into the picture. The starting point of the project is an externalist outlook in epistemology, which is well-placed to make sense of problems created by hostile epistemic environments such as those containing fake news or biased evidence.
The project generalizes some of the lessons learnt in epistemology to the study of normativity more generally, including morality. Ultimately, what emerges is a view of the nature and structure of normativity.
The objectives of the project are:
(O1) To develop the theoretical foundations of the so-called dual evaluations approach.
(O2) To put forth a novel view in epistemology that demonstrates how recognizing both cases of competent failure and of incompetent success solves highly current problems and puzzles, reconciling two opposing theoretical starting points.
(O3) To investigate and ultimately reject as theoretically important the notion of structural rationality, offering an alternative, competence-based explanation of verdicts that seem to show the need for such a notion.
(O4) To explore generalizations of the results of the previous parts of the project to the practical and moral domains, thereby a general theory of the structure of normativity.
