Evidence and Normativity: Reply to Leite

According to one view about the rationality of belief, such rationality is ultimately nothing other than the rationality that one exhibits in taking the means to one’s ends. On this view, epistemic rationality is really a species or special case of instrumental rationality. In particular, epistemic rationality is instrumental rationality in the service of one’s distinctively cognitive or epistemic goals (perhaps: one’s goal of holding true rather than false beliefs). In my (2003), I dubbed this view the instrumentalist conception of epistemic rationality. The instrumentalist conception is in many respects an attractive view. It possesses an undeniable intuitive plausibility; indeed, it can be presented in such a way as to seem almost trivially true. It seems to offer an attractive way of integrating the theory of rational belief with a more general account of rationality; it thus seems poised to deliver the kind of illumination that is characteristic of successful reductions. Moreover, there are various other, more specific philosophical motivations that one might have for finding the instrumentalist conception attractive. For these reasons, the instrumentalist