Interestingly, some instrumentalist replies to the TFRO explain these judgments surprisingly well, suggesting instrumentalism might be viable despite the TFRO. Here’s the link to the preprint: philpapers.org/rec/BASNIC. This has been a great project, curious to see how the debate will develop! (4/4)

Our studies reveal that many laypeople find the cases the objection is built on to be unconvincing and hard to buy into. Still, participants generally shared the intuition they sought to elicit — they agreed that agents had reasons to believe despite a lack of ends. (3/4)

Epistemic Instrumentalism suggests that epistemic normativity is a matter of means-ends relations. But, according to a prominent objection — sometimes called the too few reasons objection — there exist cases where agents have (normative) reasons to believe despite a lack of ends. (2/4)

Lastly, I reflect on the normative upshots of the framework: To the degree that bad social norms are responsible for bad beliefs, it's primarily groups that are to be blamed for them. Individual blameworthiness depends on contextual factors, some of which I highlight. (3/3)

I develop a descriptive framework to capture how social norms influence the formation of bad beliefs. I also discuss some of the predictions the framework makes and it's implications for changing bad beliefs. (2/3)