Practical Interests and Reasons for Belief

This chapter examines the relationship between the practical and the epistemic. It rejects two broad ways of thinking about that relationship-pragmatic encroachment and an epistemology centered on the truth norm-before offering a new approach, which explains epistemic normativity as arising from our practical commitment to a social practice that has arisen from our need to share information with one another. The chapter discusses the way in which the social practice view captures the importance of knowledge and epistemic reasons to action, while preventing our practical interests from playing a disruptive role in how we arrive at our beliefs.