In-Person | Knowing Our Reasons: Evidence, Counterfactuals and Normativity

Please note that the time allocated for this colloquia will be devoted to discussion.

Speaker: Dr Liat Levanon (KCL)

About the Session: Evidence law seems to align with epistemic norms rather than with practical norms. This indicates a connection between epistemology and practical rationality. But what connection exactly? The paper suggests that the connection between epistemology and practical rationality is rooted in the nature of reasons. According to this suggestion, reasons come in pairs; any practical reason to ϕ is paired by a reason to ϕ consistently with the value that grounds it. And ϕ-ing consistently with value normally requires knowledge of the reason to ϕ, and hence also of the non-normative facts that give rise to it. This suggestion indicates why counterfactuals might yield similar results in epistemology and in legally relevant practical reasoning, as noted by Enoch, Spectre and Fisher: counterfactuals capture barriers to knowledge of practical reasons; they thus capture conditions in which it is impossible to respond to pairs of legally relevant practical reasons.

About the Institute: The Institute brings together political and legal theorists from Law, Political Science and Philosophy and organises regular colloquia in terms 2 and 3. Read more about the Institute’s work.

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Photo by Jan Canty on Unsplash

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