Speaker: Matt McGrath (Washington University in St Louis)

Should have Known and Epistemically Appropriate Belief
Sometimes people don’t know things they should have known. For instance, cardiologists should know about recent major developments that bear on their practice; if they don’t know, they should have. Can what a person should have known matter to what they’re epistemically appropriate to believe? Call the view that it can “should-have-known impurism.” If the cardiologist believes the usual treatment for a certain type of heart disease is best but should have known that an alternative treatment outperformed it in a recent large study, it seems the cardiologist isn’t believing as she should. In this paper, I dig into the reasoning behind or suggested by intuitions like this. Once we locate this reasoning, we can probe its structure, assess its quality, and explore variations of it, along with its relation to intuitions on the opposing “purist” side. In the end, I argue that we can capture what the impurist gets right without accepting impurism. This is important because, as I argue, impurism faces serious problems.