Notes

Final desideratum: Is my account Genuinely Diachronic? This is a bit subtle, for on one level my account is driven by synchronic concerns. An agent engages in reasoning to meet particular synchronic demands: to make her beliefs consistent, to believe what follows from her other beliefs, to square her beliefs with her evidence. The account explains the rational value of diachronic consistency in terms of what’s required for such reasoning to be eff ective. Yet I don’t think this kind of grounding in synchronic norms makes the account a time-slice view. The diachonic norms I’ve discussed certainly don’t reduce to synchronic norms as they do on a Uniqueness account. And the rational evaluations in question supervene on genuinely diachronic relational facts. While the driving demands behind the account may be synchronic constraints on belief, much of the view’s substance derives from the pragmatic problems of an agent who must develop and maintain such representational attitudes through temporally-extended causal processes. So I would characterize the account as genuinely diachronic, but amenable to those primarily concerned with synchronic norms. 33

Perhaps an agent’s ability to keep her beliefs intact is something like an ‘executive virtue’ – given the rest of her cognitive equipment, this ability helps the agent achieve synchronic features that are signifi cant for theoretical rationality. And thinking along the lines of virtues may illuminate the relevant normative landscape as well. We are willing to recognize a character trait as virtuous or vicious even when we understand that an agent who possesses that trait may be incapable of changing it (or at least incapable any time soon). When an agent’s beliefs go missing, or change without her noticing, there may be nothing she can do about that fact. (Or nothing she can do about it after the fact .) But that shouldn’t bar us from evaluating the episode as rationally unfortunate. 34

1. The previous two paragraphs are adapted from my discussion of the Baseball case in Titelbaum ( 2013 ).