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EPISTEMIC DUTIES 345
control over the state of affairs required by the evidentialist norm. Hence, if Steup rejects the
transparency condition, he has to reject the assumption that an epistemic “ought implies can”
principle holds for the evidentialist norm as well, since otherwise he would fall prey to
Alston’s argument against epistemic duties. But, if Steup rejects the epistemic “ought implies
can” principle for the norm of evidentialism, then this norm cannot guide the intellectual
conduct of epistemic agents and is not any longer an epistemic duty, but is a mere evaluative
epistemic norm. Thus, Steup faces a dilemma. If the norm of evidentialism is supposed to be
an epistemic duty, then it applies to epistemic agents only in very rare cases, which would
disqualify the norm to ground a viable account of epistemic justification. However, if Steup
rejects the assumption that an epistemic “ought implies can” principle holds for the
evidentialist norm, then the norm of evidentialism is not an epistemic duty.
From the discussion of the evidentialist norm above, we can conclude that the attempts of
Feldman and Steup to reject Alston’s argument and to take the evidentialist norm to be an
epistemic duty have failed. This might give us reasons to think that the evidentialist norm is
not an epistemic duty, but only an evaluative epistemic norm.
2. Are There Epistemic Duties?
According to what has been said so far, one might wonder whether there are epistemic duties
at all. The conclusion of the last section was that the evidentialist norm, which was taken to
be the paradigmatic epistemic duty, is not an epistemic duty. In what follows, I will argue that
there are epistemic duties. I will reject Alston’s argument by rejecting premise two of Alston’s
argument. An alternative approach to epistemic duties will be introduced, within which the
second premise of Alston’s argument does not hold. It will be argued that it is not the case
that Oφ is only an epistemic duty, if φ is a doxastic attitude. This allows me to claim that an
epistemic “ought implies can” principle holds for epistemic duties, which is necessary for
epistemic duties to guide our intellectual conduct, without the need to assume doxastic
voluntarism, i.e. that epistemic agents are able to bring about doxastic attitudes voluntarily.
Moreover, within the alternative approach to epistemic duties it is assumed that epistemic
duties are standards of epistemic evaluation and that they are principles, which guide our
intellectual conduct.
But, what are epistemic duties if their object is not necessarily a doxastic attitude? Since I
assume that an epistemic “ought implies can” principle holds for epistemic duties, I will argue
that the states of affairs which are objects of epistemic duties are epistemically significant
states of affairs, which can be brought about voluntarily by normal epistemic agents. A state
of affairs is epistemically significant if and only if it has a positive or a negative influence on
the pursuit of epistemic goals, like the truth-goal or the goal of understanding.
Although epistemic agents are not able to bring about doxastic attitudes directly voluntarily,
they are nevertheless able to influence the quality of their doxastic attitudes as well as the
quality of the belief-formation and -revision in various ways (cf. Nottelmann 2007) 12 . How we
gain new information and how we deal with it is in a certain sense up to us and has an
epistemically significant influence on our pursuit of epistemic goals. Thus, by bringing about
certain epistemically significant states of affairs voluntarily, epistemic agents are able to
influence their pursuit of epistemic goals in an active way. States of affairs, which influence
the evidence available for an agent like searching for and collecting information, and states of
affairs, which influence how we form or revise our doxastic attitudes and how we deal with
new information, are types of epistemically significant states of affairs. Epistemic agents
exercise doxastic control by bringing about such states of affairs voluntarily. More generally,
12
Nottelmann gives an interesting overview over exercisable kinds of doxastic control (cf. Nottelmann
2007).