Knowledge, Misc

I begin by “deconstructing” the title and explaining that Feyerabend does not really use the word “ontology”, though he does call his position sometimes (and the “sometimes” is important) ontological realism. I explain that he talks about his position as indifferently a “general methodology” or a “general cosmology”, and that he seems to be be hostile to the very enterprise of ontology, conceived of as “school philosophy”. I then go on to say that there is perhaps a concept of a (...) different type of ontology, that I call a “diachronic ontology” that perhaps he would have accepted,and that is very different from ontology as ordinarily thought, which I claim to be synchronic ontology (having no room for the dialogue with Being, but just supposing that Being is already and always there without our contribution). I discuss Althusser and Graham Harman as exemplifying synchronic ontology, giving a reading of Harman’s recent book THE THIRD TABLE. I then discuss Feyerabend’s ideas as showing a different way, that of a diachronic ontology, in which there is no stable framework or fixed path. I end with Andrew Pickering whose essay NEW ONTOLOGIES makes a similar distinction to mine, expressing it in the imagistic terms of a De Kooningian (diachronic) versus a Mondrianesque (synchronic) approach. (shrink)

What is it to know someone? Epistemologists rarely take up this question, though recent developments make such inquiry possible and desirable. This paper advances an account of how such interpersonal knowledge goes beyond mere propositional and qualitative knowledge about someone, giving a central place to second-personal treatment. It examines what such knowledge requires, and what makes it distinctive within epistemology as well as socially. It assesses its theoretic value for several issues in moral psychology, epistemic injustice, and philosophy of mind. (...) And it offers an account of the complex content in play if interpersonal knowledge is to be understood in terms of its mental states and their functions. (shrink)

In the recent literature on the nature of knowledge, a rivalry has emerged between modalism and explanationism. According to modalism, knowledge requires that our beliefs track the truth across some appropriate set of possible worlds. Modalists tend to focus on two modal conditions: sensitivity and safety. According to explanationism, knowledge requires only that beliefs bear the right sort of explanatory relation to the truth. In slogan form: knowledge is believing something because it’s true. In this paper, we aim to vindicate (...) explanationism from some recent objections offered by Gualtiero Piccinini, Dario Mortini, and Kenneth Boyce and Andrew Moon. Together, these authors present five purported counterexamples to the sufficiency of the explanationist analysis for knowledge. In addition, Mortini devises a clever argument that explanationism entails the violation of a plausible closure principle on knowledge. We will argue that explanationism is innocent of all these charges against it, and we hope that the strength of the defense we offer of explanationism is evidence in its favor, and a reason to investigate explanationism further as the long-elusive truth about the nature of knowledge. (shrink)

I argue for three points: First, evidence of the primacy of knowledge representation is not evidence of primacy of knowledge. Second, knowledge-oriented mindreading research should also focus on misrepresentations and biased representations of knowledge. Third, knowledge-oriented mindreading research must confront the problem of the gold standard that arises when disagreement about knowledge complicates the interpretation of empirical findings.

Despite recent controversies surrounding the principle that knowledge entails truth (KT), this paper aims to prove that the principle is true. It offers a proof of (KT) in the following sense. It advances a deductively valid argument for (KT), whose premises are, by most lights, obviously true. Moreover, each premise is buttressed by at least two supporting arguments. And finally, all premises and supporting arguments can be rationally accepted by people who don’t already accept (KT).

Some philosophers think that knowledge or justification is both necessary and sufficient for rational action: they endorse knowledge-action or justification-action biconditionals. This paper offers a novel, metaphysical challenge to these biconditionals, which proceeds with a familiar question: What depends on what? If you know that p iff it is rational for you to act on p, do you know that p partly because it is rational for you to act on p, or is it rational for you to act on (...) p partly because you know that p? And a structurally similar question can be asked regarding justification-action biconditionals. I argue that proponents of these biconditionals cannot give a satisfactory answer to these questions. This is because each direction of these biconditionals strongly supports an opposite order of explanation to the one that is supported by the other direction. Given the traditional assumption that metaphysical explanations—even partial ones—are asymmetric, I argue that these biconditionals should be rejected. While knowledge might be necessary for rational action, and it might be sufficient, it cannot be both. And the same goes for justification. (shrink)

In this chapter, we defend an explanationist version of proper functionalism. After explaining proper functionalism’s initial appeal, we note two major objections to proper functionalism: creatures with no design plan who appear to have knowledge (Swampman) and creatures with malfunctions that increase reliability. We then note how proper functionalism needs to be clarified because there are cases of what we call warrant-compatible malfunction. We then formulate our own view: explanationist proper functionalism, which explains the warrant-compatible malfunction cases and helps to (...) block the above objections. We also advance a positive argument for explanationist proper functionalism. (shrink)

In this paper, I develop and motivate a novel formulation of the safety condition in terms of etiological proper function. After testing this condition against the most pressing objections to safety-theoretic accounts of knowledge in the literature, my conclusion will be the following: once safety is suitably understood in terms of etiological proper function, it stands a better chance as the right anti-Gettier condition on knowledge.

Vast archives of fragmentary structural brain scans that are routinely acquired in medical clinics for diagnostic purposes have so far been considered to be unusable for neuroscientific research. Yet, recent studies have proposed that by deploying machine learning algorithms to fill in the missing anatomy, clinical scans could, in future, be used by researchers to gain new insights into various brain disorders. This chapter focuses on a study published in2019, whose authors developed a novel unsupervised machine learning algorithm for synthesising (...) missing anatomy in extremely sparse clinical MRI scans of thousands of stroke patients. By approaching the study from a media-theoretical perspective, I analyse how its authors dis-cursively negotiated the anatomical and operative plausibility of the unobserved anatomy that their black-boxed algorithm reconstructed from the existing sparse data. My analysis fore-grounds the processual, relational, context-dependent, and essentially unstable character of the thus established plausibility of the algorithmically synthesised neuroanatomy. (shrink)

It is widely thought that knowledge is factive – only truths can be known. However, this view has been recently challenged. One challenge appeals to approximate truths. Wesley Buckwalter and John Turri argue that false-but-approximately-true propositions can be known. They provide experimental findings to show that their view enjoys intuitive support. In addition, they argue that we should reject the factive account of knowledge to avoid widespread skepticism. A second challenge, advanced by Nenad Popovic, appeals to multidimensional geometry to build (...) a case where it seems intuitive that a person knows p even though p is false. In addition, Popovic argues that we should reject the factive account of knowledge because most of us would not become widespread skeptics if we discovered that ordinary objects in our world are actually four-dimensional. In this paper, we defend the factive account of knowledge against these arguments by challenging the intuitive appeal of the cases and arguing that there is no real threat of widespread skepticism for the factive account of knowledge. (shrink)

Selim Berker argues that epistemic consequentialism is pervasive in epistemology and that epistemic consequentialism is structurally flawed. is incorrect, however. I distinguish between epistemic consequentialism and epistemic instrumentalism and argue that most putative consequentialists should be considered instrumentalists. I also identify the structural problem of epistemic consequentialism Berker attempts to pinpoint and show that epistemic instrumentalism does not have the consequentialist problem.

Ethics committees like Institutional Review Boards and Research Ethics Committees are typically empowered to approve or reject proposed studies, typically conditional on certain conditions or revisions being met. While some have argued this power should be primarily a function of applying clear, codified requirements, most institutions and legal regimes allow discretion for IRBs to ethically evaluate studies, such as to ensure a favourable risk-benefit ratio, fair subject selection, adequate informed consent, and so forth. As a result, ethics committees typically make (...) moral demands on researchers: require them to act in a way the committee considers ethically right or appropriate. This paper argues that moral demands are legitimate only if publicly justifiable; and as a result, committee decisions are subject to a public justification requirement. Ethics committees can permissibly request for more information, changes to the research protocol or that the research is delayed or even stopped only if these demands are publicly justifiable. This latter claim is in turn justified on the basis that moral demands to φ are permissible only if we are in a position to know that the addressee ought to φ and that we are in a position to know a proposition only if it is publicly justifiable. This argument suggests that ethics committees must consciously and explicitly appeal to public reasons in their decision-making. In cases where public reasons cannot be offered, committees would not be permitted to reject a given study or make approval conditional on an amendment. (shrink)

Edmund Gettier (1963) argued that there can be justified true belief (JTB) that is not knowledge. I question the correctness of his argument by showing that Smith of Gettier’s famous examples does not earn justification for his incidentally true beliefs, while a doxastically more conscientious person S would come to hold justified but false beliefs. So, Gettier’s (and analogous) cases do not result in justified _and_ true belief. This is due to a tension between deductive closure of justification and evidential (...) support. For being justified, any believing, disbelieving, or withholding of deductively inferred propositions must be distributed proportionally to given evidential support. This proportionality principle has primacy over deductive closure in case of conflict. My argument does not save the JTB-account. But, instead of merely referring to an intuition, it explains why subjects in Gettier situations do not earn knowledge. (shrink)

From antiquity through the twentieth century, philosophers have hypothesized that, intuitively, it is harder to know negations than to know affirmations. This paper provides direct evidence for that hypothesis. In a series of studies, I found that people naturally view negations as harder to know than affirmations. Participants read simple scenarios and made judgments about truth, probability, belief, and knowledge. Participants were more likely to attribute knowledge of an outcome when framed affirmatively than when framed negatively. Participants did this even (...) though the affirmative and negative framings were logically equivalent. The asymmetry was unique to knowledge attributions: it did not occur when participants rated truth, probability, or belief. These findings show new consequences of negation on people’s judgments and reasoning and can inform philosophical theorizing about the ordinary concept of knowledge. (shrink)

Hope, in its propositional construction "I hope that p," is compatible with a stated chance for the speaker that not-p. On fallibilist construals of knowledge, knowledge is compatible with a chance of being wrong, such that one can know that p even though there is an epistemic chance for one that not-p. But self-ascriptions of propositional hope that p seem to be incompatible, in some sense, with self-ascriptions of knowing whether p. Data from conjoining hope self-ascription with outright assertions, with (...) first- and third-person knowledge ascriptions, and with factive predicates suggest a problem: when combined with a plausible principle on the rationality of hope, they suggest that fallibilism is false. By contrast, the infallibilist about knowledge can straightforwardly explain why knowledge would be incompatible with hope, and can offer a simple and unified explanation of all the linguistic data introduced here. This suggests that fallibilists bear an explanatory burden which has been hitherto overlooked. (shrink)

In this paper, I defend an epistemic requirement on fitting hopes and worries: it is fitting to hope or to worry that p only if one’s epistemic position makes it rational to suspend judgment as to whether p. This view, unlike prominent alternatives, is ecumenical; it retains its plausibility against a variety of different background views of epistemology. It also has other important theoretical virtues: it is illuminating, elegant, and extensionally adequate. Fallibilists about knowledge have special reason to be friendly (...) to my view; it can help them explain why it can be unfitting to hold on to hope and worry in the face of overwhelming evidence, and it can also help them explain the sense in which knowledge that p and hope that –p are in tension with one another. (shrink)

This chapter explores an unappreciated psychological dimension of intellectual humility. In particular, I argue there is a plausible connection between intellectual humility and epistemic egocentrism. Epistemic egocentrism is a well-known cognitive bias – often called ‘the curse of knowledge’ – whereby an agent attributes his or her own mental states to other people. I hypothesize that an individual who exhibits this bias is more likely to possess a variety of traits that are characteristic of intellectual humility. This is surprising because (...) intellectual humility is often regarded as an antidote to cognitive biases, whereas I claim that a particular cognitive bias (namely, the curse of knowledge) may help foster an intellectual virtue. (shrink)

We investigate claims about the frequency of "know" made by philosophers. Our investigation has several overlapping aims. First, we aim to show what is required to confirm or disconfirm philosophers’ claims about the comparative frequency of different uses of philosophically interesting expressions. Second, we aim to show how using linguistic corpora as tools for investigating meaning is a productive methodology, in the sense that it yields discoveries about the use of language that philosophers would have overlooked if they remained in (...) their "armchairs of an afternoon", to use J.L. Austin’s phrase. Third, we discuss facts about the meaning of "know" that so far have been ignored in philosophy, with the aim of reorienting discussions of the relevance of ordinary language for philosophical theorizing. (shrink)

This paper argues that a necessary condition on inferential knowledge is that one knows all the propositions that knowledge depends on. That is, I will argue in support of a principle I call the Knowledge from Knowledge principle: (KFK) S knows that p via inference or reasoning only if S knows all the propositions on which p depends. KFK meshes well with the natural idea that (at least with respect to deductively valid or induc- tively strong arguments) the epistemic status (...) of one’s belief in the conclusion of an argument is a function of the epistemic status of the attitudes one has to the premises of that argument. One gets what one puts in: S’s belief in the conclusion C of an argument A has epistemic status E for S only if S’s belief in each of the premises C depends on also has epistemic status E.1 This is compatible, of course, with the epistemic status of S’s conclusion being greater than the epistemic status of the premises on which the conclusion of her reasoning depends. Furthermore, even though KFK applies more straightforwardly to non-suppositional inferences, we can also plausibly apply the principle to sup- positional reasoning if we treat S’s assuming for the sake of argument that p,2 as S assuming for the sake of argument that she knows that p.3 Although extremely plausible, philosophers have failed to present a concerted case in support of KFK. Most of their energy goes to articulating and/or defending some form of closure principle for knowledge.4 What is more, recently versions of this principle have been dismissed as problematic but I think without the reasons in its support been fully appreciated. This paper is an e fort to change the current state of affairs. Its focus is positive, however: my goal is to make the best case I can in support of KFK.5 To that end, the paper presents the reasons we have to accept KFK (§1), consid- ers an objection to the principle (§2), and situates the principle in the broader normative context of knowledge norms (§3). (shrink)

Recently John Turri (2015b) has argued, contra the orthodoxy amongst epistemologists, that reliability is not a necessary condition for knowledge. From this result, Turri (2015a, 2017, 2016a, 2019) defends a new account of knowledge - called abilism - that allows for unreliable knowledge. I argue that Turri's arguments fail to establish that unreliable knowledge is possible and argue that Turri's account of knowledge is false because reliability must be a necessary condition for knowledge.

What role does ‘ordinary language philosophy’ play in the defense of common sense beliefs? J.L. Austin and Ludwig Wittgenstein each give central place to ordinary language in their responses to skeptical challenges to common sense beliefs. But Austin and Wittgenstein do not always respond to such challenges in the same way, and their working methods are different. In this paper, I compare Austin’s and Wittgenstein’s metaphilosophical positions, and show that they share many metaphilosophical commitments. I then examine Austin and Wittgenstein’s (...) respective takes on the problem of other minds and the problem of our knowledge of the external world. Interestingly, we find Wittgenstein employing methods more frequently associated Austin and vice versa. Moreover, we find that a variety of defenses of common sense beliefs are compatible with ‘ordinary language philosophy.’. (shrink)

The notion of relevance plays a role in many accounts of knowledge and knowledge ascription. Although use of the notion is well-motivated, theorists struggle to codify relevance. A reasonable person standard of relevance addresses this codification problem, and provides an objective and flexible standard of relevance; however, treating relevance as reasonableness seems to allow practical factors to determine whether one has knowledge or not—so-called “pragmatic encroachment.” I argue that a fuller understanding of reasonableness and of the role of practical factors (...) in the acquisition of knowledge lets us avoid pragmatic encroachment. (shrink)

Abstract The purpose of this paper is twofold: (i) we will argue that formal semantics might have faltered due to its failure in distinguishing between two fundamentally very different types of concepts, namely ontological concepts, that should be types in a strongly-typed ontology, and logical concepts, that are predicates corresponding to properties of, and relations between, objects of various ontological types; and (ii) we show that accounting for these differences amounts to a new formal semantics; one that integrates lexical and (...) compositional semantics in one coherent framework and one where formal semantics is embedded with a strongly typed ontology; an ontology that reflects our commonsense knowledge of the world and the way we talk about it in ordinary language. We will show how in such a framework a number of challenges in the semantics of natural language are adequately and systematically treated. (shrink)

Some epistemologists and philosophers of mind hold that the non-epistemic perceptual relation of which feature-seeing and object-seeing are special cases is the foundation of perceptual knowledge. This paper argues that such relations are best understood as having only a technological role in explaining perceptual knowledge. After introducing the opposing view in §1, §2 considers why its defenders deny that some cases in which one has perceptual knowledge without the relevant acquaintance relations are counterexamples, detailing their case for lurking inferential epistemology. (...) §§3-4 suggest that this strategy fails in many other cases. While there is a computational tale that might be deemed ‘inferential’ in these cases, there is no corresponding tale in epistemic structure, not even if one rejects what Siegel (2017) calls the ‘Reckoning Model’ of inference. §5 offers a more fundamental dilemma. §6 concludes that there is only a technological role for non-epistemic perception in grounding perceptual knowledge, but allows that it might play a more-than-technological role elsewhere. (shrink)

This paper advances our understanding of the norms of assertion in two ways. First, I evaluate recent studies claiming to discredit an important earlier finding which supports the hypothesis that assertion has a factive norm. In particular, I evaluate whether it was due to stimuli mentioning that a speaker’s evidence was fallible. Second, I evaluate the hypothesis that assertion has a truth-insensitive standard of justification. In particular, I evaluate the claim that switching an assertion from true to false, while holding (...) all else objectively constant, is irrelevant to attributions of justification. Two pre-registered experiments provide decisive evidence against each claim. In the first experiment, switching from mentioning to not mentioning fallibility made no difference to assertability attributions, thereby disproving the criticism concerning fallibility. By contrast, switching an assertion from true to false decreased the rate of assertability attribution from over 90% to less than 20%, thereby replicating and vindicating the original finding supporting a factive norm. In the second experiment, switching an assertion from true to false decreased the rate of justification attribution from over 80 to 10%, thereby undermining the hypothesis that assertion’s standard of justification is truth-insensitive. The second experiment also demonstrates that perspective-taking influences attributions of justification, and it provides initial evidence that the standard of justification for assertion is stricter than the standard for belief. (shrink)

How children seek knowledge and evaluate claims may depend on their understanding of the source of knowledge. What shifts in their understandings about why scientists might disagree and how claims about the state of the world are justified? Until about the age of 41/2, knowledge is seen as self-evident. Children believe that knowledge of reality comes directly through our senses and what others tell us. They appeal to these external sources in order to know. The attainment of Theory of Mind (...) (ToM) at this age is commonly seen as the significant shift in development in understanding disagreements in knowledge claims. Children attaining ToM understand that someone exposed to incorrect or incomplete information might have false beliefs. Disagreement, then, is still attributed to objective sources of knowledge. The current study examines the later developing Interpretive Theory of Mind (iToM) as the basis for children’s understanding of how people with access to the same information might disagree and what this means for how to provide justification for a knowledge claim. Fourteen 2nd graders with the most iToM responses to four tasks and 14 with the fewest iToM responses were selected from a larger sample of 91. In analyses of interviews about a story in which two experts make different claims about a scientific phenomenon, those in the high iToM group noted subjective perspective and processes as the source of disagreement and suggested the need for investigation as the means to knowing. In contrast, those in the low iToM group mostly could not explain the source of disagreement and held that knowledge is acquired from external sources. A comparison of the interviews regarding the science story 2 years later allows for a qualitative description of the development. Those in the low iToM group showed more general recognition of subjective and constructive processes in knowing whereas those in the high iToM group identified interpretive processes and the relativity of perspectives with implications for how observations were conducted and interpreted. Only those in the high iToM group referred to the importance of evidence as a basis for knowledge claims at either point in the study. (shrink)

ABSTRACTDoes knowledge entail belief? This paper argues that the answer depends on how one interprets ‘belief’. There are two different notions of belief: belief as such and belief for knowledge. They often differ in their degrees of conviction such that one but not both might be present in a particular case. The core of the paper is dedicated to a defense of this overlooked distinction. The beginning of the paper presents the distinction. It then presents two cases which are supposed (...) to back up the claim that there is an important distinction here; I also offer some explanations concerning the structure of these cases. Finally, I add further considerations in support of the core thesis, and discuss objections. The distinction is important as such but also has interesting implications concerning the much discussed ‘entailment thesis’ according to which knowledge entails belief. It is argued here that even if knowledge entails belief-for-knowledge, it does not entail belief-as-such. This constitutes an interesting middle position and compromise in the philosophical debate about the entailment thesis. One further implication of this paper is that the discussion about the entailment thesis needs to take degrees of conviction seriously. Still another implication is that epistemic contextualists can deal very well with the relevant phenomena. (shrink)

This paper develops a new challenge for moral noncognitivism. In brief, the challenge is this: Beliefs — both moral and non-moral — are epistemically evaluable, whereas desires are not. It is tempting to explain this difference in terms of differences in the functional roles of beliefs and desires. However, this explanation stands in tension with noncognitivism, which maintains that moral beliefs have a desire-like functional role. After critically reviewing some initial responses to the challenge, I suggest a solution, which involves (...) rethinking the functional relationship between desire and belief. (shrink)

Hope is an attitude with a distinctive epistemological dimension: it is incompatible with knowledge. This chapter examines hope as it relates to knowledge but also to probability and inductive considerations. Such epistemic constraints can make hope either impossible, or, when hope remains possible, they affect how one’s epistemic situation can make hope rational rather than irrational. Such issues are especially relevant to when hopefulness may permissibly figure in practical deliberation over a course of action. So I consider cases of second-order (...) inductive reflection on when one should, or should not, be hopeful for an outcome with which one has a long record of experience: in other words, what is the epistemology behind when one should, if ever, stop hoping for outcomes which have failed one many times in the past? (shrink)

Extended cognition theorists argue that cognitive processes constitutively depend on resources that are neither organically composed, nor located inside the bodily boundaries of the agent, provided certain conditions on the integration of those processes into the agent’s cognitive architecture are met. Epistemologists, however, worry that in so far as such cognitively integrated processes are epistemically relevant, agents could thus come to enjoy an untoward explosion of knowledge. This paper develops and defends an approach to cognitive integration—cluster-model functionalism—which finds application in (...) both domains of inquiry, and which meets the challenge posed by putative cases of cognitive or epistemic bloat. (shrink)

Conspiracy theories are often portrayed as unwarranted beliefs, typically supported by suspicious kinds of evidence. Yet contemporary work in Philosophy argues provisional belief in conspiracy theories is—at the very—least understandable (because conspiracies occur) and if we take an evidential approach—judging individual conspiracy theories on their particular merits—belief in such theories turns out to be warranted in a range of cases. Drawing on this work, I examine the kinds of evidence typically associated with conspiracy theories, showing that the evidential problems typically (...) associated with conspiracy theories are not unique to such theories. As such, if there is a problem with the conspiracy theorist’s use of evidence, it is one of principle: is the principle which guides their use of evidence somehow in error? I argue that whatever we might think about conspiracy theories generally, there is no prima facie case for a scepticism of conspiracy theories based purely on their use of evidence. (shrink)

One challenge for moderate invariantists is to explain why we tend to deny knowledge to subjects in high stakes when the target propositions seem to be inappropriate premises for practical reasoning. According to an account suggested by Williamson, our intuitive judgments are erroneous due to an alleged failure to acknowledge the distinction between first-order and higher-order knowledge: the high-stakes subject lacks the latter but possesses the former. In this paper, I provide three objections to Williamson’s account: i) his account delivers (...) counterintuitive verdicts about what it is appropriate for a high-stakes subject to do; ii) the high-stakes subject doesn’t need iterated knowledge in order to be regarded as appropriately relying on the relevant proposition in practical reasoning; iii) Williamson’s account doesn’t provide a good explanation of why the high-stakes subject would be blameworthy if she were relying on the relevant proposition in her practical reasoning. (shrink)

The existential insecurity of human beings has induced them to create protective spheres of symbols: myths, religions, values, belief systems, theories, etc. Rationality is one of the key factors contributing to the construction of civilisation in technical and symbolic terms. As Hankiss (2001) has emphasised, protective spheres of symbols may collapse – thus causing a profound social crisis. Social and political transformations had a tremendous impact at the end of the 20th century. As a result, management theories have been revised (...) in order to deal with transition and uncertainty. Francis Fukuyama's (2000) approach is supportive of hierarchical organisation as the best solution when facing a 'disruption'. The notion of Homo Hierarchicus has been based on, allegedly, rational presumptions. This paper contributes to the discussion on hierarchy within contemporary organisations. It criticises so-called 'natural' and 'rational' necessities justifying hierarchy. A key issue identified by the paper is the formalisation of language in claiming value-free knowledge and 'detached' observation as the basis for neutral rationality and aspired efficiency. This should be seriously reconsidered as hindering rather than aiding understanding of social complexity. All in all, Homo Hierarchicus appears to be misleading rather than helping symbolic sphere or construct. (shrink)

In this discussion note, I put forth an argument from the factivity of knowledge for the conclusion that knowledge is epistemic certainty. If this argument is sound, then epistemologists who think that knowledge is factive are thereby also committed to the view that knowledge is epistemic certainty.

The paper highlights how a popular version of epistemological disjunctivism labors under a kind of 'internalist challenge'—a challenge that seems to have gone largely unacknowledged by disjunctivists. This is the challenge to vindicate the supposed 'internalist insight' that disjunctivists claim their view does well to protect. The paper argues that if we advance disjunctivism within a context that recognizes a distinction between merely functional and judgmental belief, we get a view that easily overcomes the internalist challenge.

Over 40 years ago I read a small grey book with metaphysics in the title which began with the words “Metaphysics is dead. Wittgenstein has killed it.” I am one of many who agree but sadly the rest of the world has not gotten the message. Shoemaker’s work is nonsense on stilts but is unusual only in that it never deviates into sense from the first paragraph to the last. At least with Dennett, Carruthers, Churchland etc. one gets a breath (...) of fresh air when they discuss cognitive science (imagining they are still doing philosophy). As W showed so beautifully, the confusions that lead to metaphysics are universal and nearly inescapable aspects of our psychology. They occur not only in all thinking on behavior but throughout science as well. It’s easy to find examples in Hawking, Weinberg, Penrose, Green, who of course have no idea they have left science and entered metaphysics, that the statement they just made is not a matter of fact at all but a matter of conceptual (linguistic) confusion. “Law, event, space, time, force, matter, proof, connection, cause, follows, physical”, etc., all have clear uses in certain technical contexts, but these blend insensibly into quite different uses that have little in common but the spelling. Since it is pointless to waste time deconstructing Shoemaker line by line, showing the same errors over and over, I will describe some facts about how our psychology (language) works and with this outline and the references I give it is quite straightforward to give a meaningful description of the world in place of the metaphysical fantasies. If I were to debate Shoemaker we would never get beyond the title. Horwich gives one of the most beautiful summaries of where an understanding of Wittgenstein leaves us that I have ever seen. “There must be no attempt to explain our linguistic/conceptual activity (PI 126) as in Frege’s reduction of arithmetic to logic; no attempt to give it epistemological foundations (PI 124) as in meaning based accounts of a priori knowledge; no attempt to characterize idealized forms of it (PI 130) as in sense logics; no attempt to reform it (PI 124, 132) as in Mackie’s error theory or Dummett’s intuitionism; no attempt to streamline it (PI 133) as in Quine’s account of existence; no attempt to make it more consistent (PI 132) as in Tarski’s response to the liar paradoxes; and no attempt to make it more complete (PI 133) as in the settling of questions of personal identity for bizarre hypothetical ‘teleportation’ scenarios.” Those wishing a comprehensive up to date framework for human behavior from the modern two systems view may consult my book ‘The Logical Structure of Philosophy, Psychology, Mind and Language in Ludwig Wittgenstein and John Searle’ 2nd ed (2019). Those interested in more of my writings may see ‘Talking Monkeys--Philosophy, Psychology, Science, Religion and Politics on a Doomed Planet--Articles and Reviews 2006-2019 3rd ed (2019) and Suicidal Utopian Delusions in the 21st Century 4th ed (2019). (shrink)

Philosophers have debated whether it is possible to knowledgeably infer a conclusion from a false premise. For example, if a fan believes that the actress’s dress is blue, but the dress is actually green, can the fan knowledgeably infer “the dress is not red” from “the dress is blue”? One aspect of this debate concerns what the intuitively correct verdict is about specific cases such as this. Here I report a simple behavioral experiment that helps answer this question. The main (...) finding is that people attribute knowledge in cases where a true conclusion is inferred from a false premise. People did this despite judging that the premise was false and unknown. People also viewed the agent as inferring the conclusion from the premise. In closely matched conditions where the conclusion was false, people did not attribute knowledge of the conclusion. These results support the view that the ordinary knowledge concept includes in its extension cases of knowledge inferred from false premises. (shrink)

We report the results of four empirical studies designed to investigate the extent to which an epistemic closure principle for knowledge is reflected in folk epistemology. Previous work by Turri (2015a) suggested that our shared epistemic practices may only include a source-relative closure principle—one that applies to perceptual beliefs but not to inferential beliefs. We argue that the results of our studies provide reason for thinking that individuals are making a performance error when their knowledge attributions and denials conflict with (...) the closure principle. When we used research materials that overcome what we think are difficulties with Turri’s original materials, we found that participants did not reject closure. Furthermore, when we presented Turri’s original materials to non-philosophers with expertise in deductive reasoning (viz., professional mathematicians), they endorsed closure for both perceptual and inferential beliefs. Our results suggest that an unrestricted closure principle—one that applies to all beliefs, regardless of their source—provides a better model of folk patterns of knowledge attribution than a source-relative closure principle. (shrink)

In this paper I defend a unified approach to knowledge and understanding. Both are achievements due to cognitive abilities or skills. The difference between them is a difference of aspects. Knowledge emphasizes the successful aspect of an achievement and the exclusion of epistemic luck, whereas understanding emphasizes the agent's contribution in bringing about an achievement through the exercise of one's cognitive skills. Knowledge and understanding cannot be separated. I argue against the claim that understanding is distinct from knowledge because the (...) former is compatible with environmental luck. Achievements rule out environmental luck because abilities can be exercised only in their proper environment. I also reject the intellectualist claim that understanding requires the ability to explain what one intends to understand. The understanding of an item is reflected in our ability to solve cognitive tasks using that item. The more tasks one can deal with by using an item, the deeper is one’s understanding of that item. Being able to explain why a claim holds is not necessary for possessing understanding, even though it may be necessary for accomplishing some very specific tasks. Neither understanding nor knowledge require any kind of second-order cognition by default. (shrink)

Judging the warrant of conspiracy theories can be difficult, and often we rely upon what the experts tell us when it comes to assessing whether particular conspiracy theories ought to be believed. However, whereas there are recognised experts in the sciences, I argue that only are is no such associated expertise when it comes to the things we call `conspiracy theories,' but that the conspiracy theorist has good reason to be suspicious of the role of expert endorsements when it comes (...) to conspiracy theories and their rivals. The kind of expertise, then, we might associate with conspiracy theories is largely improvised—in that it lacks institutional features—and, I argue, ideally the product of a community of inquiry. (shrink)

This is the second book by Baz that aims to show that a big chunk of contemporary philosophy is fundamentally misguided. His first book, When Words Are Called For: A Defense of Ordinary Language Philosophy (2012) adopted a therapeutic approach (in the Wittgensteinian style) to problems in contemporary epistemology, arguing that when properly thought through, the way philosophers talk about ‘knowing’ that something is the case ultimately does not make sense. Baz’s goal in his second book is less therapeutic and (...) more constructive: he aims to start a methodological revolution (in the Kuhnian sense)—to shake contemporary philosophers out of the unconscious habits of normal science and provoke them into making a radical change in the methods they use to do philosophy and the basic assumptions that motivate those methods. (shrink)

Una de las bifurcaciones en el debate contemporáneo sobre la legitimidad de la democracia explora si ésta ofrece ventajas distintivamente epistémicas frente a otras alternativas políticas. Quienes defienden la tesis de la democracia epistémica afirman que la democracia es instrumentalmente superior o equiparable a otras formas de organización política en lo que concierne a la obtención de varios bienes epistémicos. En este ensayo presento dos (grupos de) argumentos a favor de la democracia epistémica, que se inspiran en resultados formales: el (...) teorema del jurado de Condorcet [TJC] y el teorema ‘diversidad supera habilidad’ [DSH]. Pese a su gran atractivo, sostengo que estos argumentos son incapaces de respaldar dicha tesis: no brindan razones para considerar que la democracia es epistémicamente superior (o equiparable) a algunas alternativas políticas no democráticas. En su lugar, sugiero que, sin requerir un cambio radical en nuestras formas de organización política, la epistemología democrática –el estudio de las ‘circunstancias epistémicas de la democracia’– puede ofrecer valiosas lecciones de sobre cómo optimizar, en nuestra situación, instituciones y procedimientos de toma de decisiones. Para ello, primero distingo entre varias maneras de evaluar procedimientos de toma de decisión colectiva. Argumento que, al considerarlos como formas de organización política, un factor importante en la evaluación de tales procedimientos involucra asuntos fácticos sobre los cuales puede aspirarse a obtener o promover algunos bienes epistémicos. En este contexto, presento algunos de los argumentos más importantes a favor de la democracia epistémica. A continuación, reúno algunas de las objeciones sobre la aplicabilidad de dichos argumentos y ofrezco razones independientes para dudar de que ofrezcan apoyo a la tesis de la democracia epistémica. Finalmente, defiendo que la epistemología democrática puede desempeñar un papel significativo en la legitimación de formas de organización colectiva que podrían denominarse ‘democráticas’. (shrink)

A principal conclusion supported by convergent evidence from cognitive science, life science, and philosophy is that knowledge is a central norm of assertion—that is, according to the rules of the practice, assertions should express knowledge. That view has recently been challenged with new experiments. This paper identifies a critical confound in the experiments. In the process, a new study is reported that provides additional support for the view that knowledge is a central norm of assertion.

El proceso de aprehensión de lo cognoscible, en la filosofía contemporánea, ha sido tratado desde diversas perspectivas, entre ellas la fenomenológica y la analítica. Cada una de estas perspectivas aportan unos presupuestos filosóficos y procesos metodológicos que nos proporcionan marcos de trabajo para indagar en las vías de aprehensión del conocimiento; sin embargo, empleadas por separado son insuficientes y limitadas. En absoluto se trata de procurar un método universal, sino de integrar e indagar sobre diversos presupuestos, procesos, patrones y estructuras (...) para avanzar en la indagación de la aprehensión del conocimiento. En este sentido, en la primera parte, abordaremos la necesidad de tener reglas (definitorias y estratégicas) para ser parte y avanzar en cualquier «juego», en especial el del conocimiento. En la segunda y tercera, describiremos los «métodos» desarrollados por José Ferrater Mora (operaciones filosóficas) y Nicolai Hartmann (pensar sistemático), los que pueden ser un punto de partida, vías a considerar en este proceso. En la parte final, a modo de contraste, se ofrece en un gráfico un esquema metodológico de los dos métodos analizados. (shrink)

Whether truth, morality, and beauty have an objective basis has been a perennial question for philosophy, ethics, and aesthetics, while for a great many relativists and skeptics it poses a problem without a solution. In this essay, the author proposes an innovative approach that shows how cognitive intelligence, moral intelligence, and aesthetic intelligence provide the basis needed for objective judgments about truth, morality, and beauty.

Pascal Engel (2008) has insisted that a number of notable strategies for rejecting the knowledge norm of assertion are put forward on the basis of the wrong kinds of reasons. A central aim of this paper will be to establish the contrast point: I argue that one very familiar strategy for defending the knowledge norm of assertion—viz., that it is claimed to do better in various respects than its competitors (e.g. the justification and the truth norms)— relies on a presupposition (...) that is shown to be ultimately under motivated. That presupposition is the uniqueness thesis—that there is a unique epistemic rule for assertion, and that such a rule will govern assertions uniformly. In particular, the strategy I shall take here will be to challenge the sufficiency leg of the knowledge norm in a way that at the same time counts against Williamson’s (2000) own rationale for the uniqueness thesis. However, rather than to challenge the sufficiency leg of the knowledge norm via the familiar style of ‘expert opinion’ and, more generally, ‘second-hand knowledge’ cases (e.g. Lackey (2008)), a strategy that has recently been called into question by Benton (2014), I’ll instead advance a very different line of argument against the sufficiency thesis, one which turns on a phenomenon I call epistemic hypocrisy. (shrink)

Relativists about knowledge ascriptions think that whether a particular use of a knowledge-ascribing sentence, e.g., “Keith knows that the bank is open” is true depends on the epistemic standards at play in the assessor’s context—viz., the context in which the knowledge ascription is being as- sessed for truth or falsity. Given that the very same knowledge-ascription can be assessed for truth or falsity from indefinitely many perspectives, relativism has a striking consequence. When I ascribe knowledge to someone (e.g., when I (...) say that, at a particular time, “Keith knows that the bank is open”), what I’ve said does not get a truth-value absolutely, but only relatively. If this semantic thesis about the word “knows” and its cognates is true, what implications would this have for epistemology, the philosophical theory of knowledge? e present aim will be to engage with this mostly unexplored question, and then to consider how the epistemological conclusions drawn might bear on the plausibility of a relativist semantics for “knows”. (shrink)

Anti-intellectualists about knowledge-how insist that, when an agent S knows how to φ, it is in virtue of some ability, rather than in virtue of any propositional attitudes, S has. Recently, a popular strategy for attacking the anti-intellectualist position proceeds by appealing to cases where an agent is claimed to possess a reliable ability to φ while nonetheless intuitively lacking knowledge-how to φ. John Bengson & Marc Moffett (2009; 2011a; 2011b) and Carlotta Pavese (2015a; 2015b) have embraced precisely this strategy (...) and have thus claimed, for different reasons, that anti-intellectualism is defective on the grounds that possessing the ability to φ is not sufficient for knowing how to φ. We investigate this strategy of argument-by-counterexample to the anti- intellectualist’s sufficiency thesis and show that, at the end of the day, anti-intellectualism remains unscathed. (shrink)