My aim in this paper is to explore the relationship between epistemic rationality and instrumental rationality. By epistemic rationality, I mean, roughly, the kind of rationality which one displays when one believes propositions that are strongly supported by one's evidence and refrains from believing propositions that are improbable given one's evidence. Prominent epistemologists frequently em...

In the first part of the paper (sec. 1-4), I argue that Elqayam and Evan's (2011) distinction between normative and instrumental conceptions of cognitive rationality corresponds to deontological vs. teleological accounts in meta-ethics. I suggest that Elqayam and Evans' distinction be replaced by the distinction between a-priori intuition-based vs. a-posteriori success-based accounts of cogniti...

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 episte...