Judging One's Own Case

When thinkers are sophisticated enough to reflect on their own thinking, epistemological questions arise about the relation between two things: (1) what the thinker is rational to believe about their own thinking; and (2) what the thinker is rational to believe about things in general. Some have argued that evidence about one's thinking (so-called "higher-order" evidence) is generally irrelevant to what one is rational to believe about matters that have nothing direct to do with one's thinking. In Judging One's Own Case, David Christensen defends and develops the opposite view: that higher-order evidence often has dramatic effects on what it's rational to believe about matters in general. This position poses a puzzle: One must judge one's own thinking from one's own perspective-a perspective that includes the thinking to be judged. So how to avoid question-beggingly positive self-assessments? Christensen answers this question by developing a structural description of how higher-order evidence and ordinary evidence interact. He also explores some surprising implications of this position, including: limiting the power of clear deductive arguments; recognizing that rational requirements can conflict; allowing cases where it's rational to have beliefs one rationally thinks irrational; acknowledging that the correct theory of rationality may not be rationally believable; and precluding philosophers from having rational confidence in the theories they develop and defend.

David Christensen is Professor of Philosophy at Brown University. He has written on skepticism, confirmation theory, and formal epistemology. More recently, his work concentrates on the epistemology of disagreement, and, more generally, on the relationship between what a subject is rational to believe about themselves, and what they're rational to believe about things in general.