Taken for granted: on hinges and what matters

Our attention tends to be drawn towards things that matter to us. Yet sometimes we can take the things that matter to us for granted, such as a relationship or a moral commitment. A tragic fact of human life is that we can neglect the very things that are central in our lives. This paper draws from the literatures on hinge epistemology and on the epistemology of attention and salience to address this puzzle of neglect. According to an epistemic norm on salience, it is epistemically optimal for salience structures to be organized so as to make objects with a greater potential to reduce uncertainty more salient than objects with less potential reduction in uncertainty with respect to the agent’s inquiries. Hinge commitments however are already maximally certain, so there is no potential uncertainty to be reduced. Hinges are thus epistemically anti-salient. I argue that some hinge commitments can codify commitments to things that matter to us, such as a relationship or a moral value. The epistemic anti-salience of hinges then contributes to an explanation of the puzzle of neglect. I also argue that we can have moral reasons for attending to hinge commitments despite their epistemic anti-salience.