Atelier GRIN/CRÉ intitulé « Varieties of epistemic constitutivism »

Charles Côté-Bouchard (GRIN, CRÉ, Université de Montréal)

Résumé

Epistemic constitutivism (EC) seeks to ground the epistemic domain in constitutive features relevant to agency. In this presentation, I examine the prospects of EC via two distinctions within the epistemic constitutivist family. The first is between what I call requirement-constitutivism (ERC) and normative-constitutivism (ENC). This distinction is about what epistemic constitutivism should try to ground. While ERC only seeks to ground the requirements (norms, standards, rules) of epistemology, proponents of ENC want to go further and ground the normative authority of those epistemic requirements.The second distinction, which draws from recent work by Kate Nolfi and Amy Flowerree, is between belief-constitutivism (EBC) and action-constitutivism (EAC). This second distinction is about what should do the grounding in epistemic constitutivism. While EBC grounds the epistemic in what is constitutive of belief, EAC invokes the constitution of action or agency more generally. My goal is to formulate and evaluate the four possible versions of EC that we get from these distinctions. I argue that all four versions of EC face serious problems. Constitutivism is therefore not a promising approach to grounding the epistemic domain.