Richard Pettigrew (2025), PhilArchive preprint (listed as “In Preparation” on the author’s homepage) — https://philpapers.org/rec/PETWIP
Key takeaways
- What we ought to believe “epistemically speaking” is fixed by the norms whose broad adherence across an epistemic community would give the best epistemic results — a transposition of Susan Wolf’s rule consequentialism — which explains why we separate epistemic from all-things-considered oughts.
Seeded from the abstract alone, not a reading. What follows is what the work says about itself.
Pettigrew asks what separates what we ought to believe simpliciter from what we ought to believe epistemically speaking, and why we draw that line. He motivates the question with examples and rejects existing answers. He proposes that purely epistemic norms are those whose general adherence across one’s epistemic community would be best from an epistemic point of view — a version of Susan Wolf’s rule consequentialism applied to belief — and argues that norms telling us to believe only what we epistemically ought to follow from it. A coda offers an account of the function of knowledge ascriptions that he presents as an improvement on Edward Craig’s.
Standing in the record
Filed from the 2026-09-26 sweep of the papers-feed tracker for philosophy: 55 seconds of active reading over 2 sessions. Deferred because nobody has read it closely here yet, not on merit.
Priority for a deeper reading: medium — t=55s over two sessions and it links to LIT-198, but the full text was unreachable; worth one retry from a network that can reach PhilArchive.
What a deeper reading should check:
- Pairs directly with LIT-198 (SEP, Rule Consequentialism): check whether Pettigrew’s rule-selection criterion inherits rule-consequentialism’s collapse problem, and verify that “Wolfian” refers to Susan Wolf, as the search snippets say: she is better known for meaning in life and “Moral Saints”, so the attribution needs confirming at source.
- The community-level criterion bears on social epistemology and on the norms one would want AI information sources to follow; check how the paper defines “broad adherence”.
- Tagging gap: the subject is epistemology; ethics is honest only because the framework is metaethical (normativity, rule consequentialism). The vocabulary has no epistemology topic.
Access when seeded: philpapers.org and philarchive.org (record and PDF) return Cloudflare 403 here. The author’s homepage lists the paper under “In Preparation” with the opening of the abstract and links only to the PhilPapers PDF. The rest of the abstract (the Wolfian rule-consequentialist proposal and the coda on Craig) is known only from search-engine snippets of the PhilPapers record, so treat it as secondhand. A search snippet says the record was added in 2025, which is unverified; the paper was presented at a Lisbon (CFUL/LanCog) seminar in the 2025–26 series. Year and published date are therefore unverified. published: is the date the papers-feed tracker captured the PhilPapers record (2025-10-29): an upper bound, not the date of first appearance, which could not be reached.