Does reasoning to a certain conclusion necessarily involve a normative belief in support of that conclusion? In many recent discussions of the nature of reasoning, such a normative belief condition is rejected. One main objection is that it requires too much conceptual sophistication and thereby excludes certain reasoners, such as small children. I argue that this objection is mistaken. Its advocates overestimate what is necessary for grasping the normative concepts required by the condition, while seriously underestimating the importance of such (...) concepts for our most fundamental agential capacities. Underlying the objection is the observation that normative thoughts do not necessarily cross our minds during reasoning. I show that proponents of the normative belief condition can accommodate this observation by taking the required normative belief to guide the reasoning process and offer a novel account of what such guidance consists in. (shrink)

Here is a surprisingly neglected question in contemporary epistemology: what is it for an agent to believe that p in response to a normative reason for them to believe that p? On one style of answer, believing for the normative reason that q factors into believing that p in the light of the apparent reason that q, where one can be in that kind of state even if q is false, in conjunction with further independent conditions such as q’s being (...) a normative reason to believe that p. The primary objective of this paper is to demonstrate that that style of answer cannot be right, because we must conceive of believing for a normative reason as constitutively involving a kind of rationality-involving relation that can be instantiated at all only if there is a known fact on the scene, which the agent treats as a normative reason. A secondary objective, achieved along the way, is to demonstrate that in their Prime Time Errol Lord and Kurt Sylvan do not succeed in undermining the factoring picture in general, only a simple-minded version of it. (shrink)

Some prominent evidentialists argue that practical considerations cannot be normative reasons for belief because they can’t be motivating reasons for belief. Existing pragmatist responses turn out to depend on the assumption that it’s possible to believe in the absence of evidence. The evidentialist may deny this, at which point the debate ends in an impasse. I propose a new strategy for the pragmatist. This involves conceding that belief in the absence of evidence is impossible. We then argue that evidence can (...) play a role in bringing about belief without being a motivating reason for belief, thereby leaving room for practical considerations to serve as motivating reasons. I present two ways in which this can happen. First, agents can use evidence as a mere means by which to believe, with practical considerations serving as motivating reasons for belief, just as we use tools (e.g. a brake pedal) as mere means by which to do something (e.g. slow down) which we are motivated to do for practical reasons. Second, evidence can make it possible for one to choose whether or not to believe – a choice one can then make for practical reasons. These arguments push the debate between the evidentialist and the pragmatist into new territory. It is no longer enough for an evidentialist to insist that belief is impossible without evidence. Even if this is right, the outcome of the debate remains unsettled. It will hang on the ability of the evidentialist to respond to the new pragmatist strategy presented here. (shrink)

It is a commonly held view in contemporary epistemology that for having knowledge it is necessary to have an appropriately based belief, although numerous different views exist about when a belief’s base is appropriate. Broadly speaking, they all share the view that one can only have knowledge if the belief’s base is in some sense truth-related or tracking the truth. Baseless knowledge can then be defi ned as knowledge where the belief is acquired and sustained in a way that does (...) not track the truth. I will argue that rejecting baseless knowledge leads to controversial consequences. The problem increases if we consider contrasting persons who know because of appropriate belief forming processes but who fail to possess further epistemic virtues such as understanding. I will not argue which belief bases constitute a suffi cient condition for knowledge. Rather I will stress the point that the common assumption that an appropriate basing relation constitutes a necessary condition for knowledge has controversial consequences. (shrink)

In this paper, I defend externalist accounts of justified belief from Cohen's new evil demon objection. While I think that Cohen might be right that the person is justified in believing what she does, I argue that this is because we can defend the person from criticism and that defending a person is a very different thing from defending a person's attitudes or actions. To defend a person's attitudes or actions, we need to show that they met standards or did (...) not violate norms. Intuitions about whether we can defend a person from criticism are a poor guide when it comes to determining whether norms were violated or standards were met. It turns out that even radical forms of externalism about justification are compatible with the intuitions that Cohen's example elicits. Properly understood, those intuitions show that the believer should be excused from criticism (and excused for failing to believe with adequate justification). (shrink)

The paper is an opinionated tour of the literature on the reasons for which we hold beliefs and other doxastic attitudes, which I call ‘operative epistemic reasons’. After drawing some distinctions in §1, I begin in §2 by discussing the ontology of operative epistemic reasons, assessing arguments for and against the view that they are mental states. I recommend a pluralist non-mentalist view that takes seriously the variety of operative epistemic reasons ascriptions and allows these reasons to be both propositions (...) and truth-making facts. In §3, I turn to consider what it takes for a consideration to be an operative epistemic reason, examining three conditions – the representational, treating, and explanatory conditions – that have been proposed. I offer a novel view about the explanatory condition. In §4, I discuss the special case of inferential operative reasons and examine attempts to understand them in terms of rule-following, sketching a competence-based spinoff of dispositionalism. Finally, in §5, I consider whether there are non-inferential operative reasons, observing that one needn't countenance them to be a foundationalist but then developing a view about what they are and how they do and don't differ from inferential reasons. (shrink)

I review recent work on Phenomenal Conservatism, the position introduced by Michael Huemer according to which if it seems that P to a subject S, in the absence of defeaters S has thereby some degree of justification for believing P.

This paper considers the place of reasons in the metaphysics of epistemic normativity and defends a middle ground between two popular extremes in the literature. Against members of the ‘reasons first’ movement, we argue that reasons are not the sole fundamental constituents of epistemic normativity. We suggest instead that the virtue-theoretic property of competence is the key building block. To support this approach, we note that reasons must be possessed to play a role in the analysis of central epistemically normative (...) properties, and argue that the relation of possession must be analyzed in terms of competence. But while we diverge with reasons-firsters on this score, we also distance ourselves from those who deny reasons any important role in epistemology. For we maintain that possessed reasons do help to ground deontic facts in the epistemic domain (e.g., facts about what one epistemically ought to believe, may believe, or is justified in believing). Indeed, we present an argument that the possession of sufficient epistemic reasons is necessary and sufficient for propositional justification, and that proper basing on such reasons yields doxastic justification. But since possession and proper basing are themselves grounded in competence, reasons are not the end of the explanatory road: competence enables them to do their work, putting them—and us—in the middle. (shrink)

The dissertation examines the nature and epistemic implications of epistemic source circularity. An argument exhibits this type of circularity when at least one of the premises is produced by a belief source the conclusion says is legitimate, e.g. a track record argument for the legitimacy of sense perception that uses premises produced by sense perception. In chapter one I examine this and several other types of circularity, identifying relevant similarities and differences between them. In chapter two I discuss the differences (...) between internalist and externalist analyses of justification. I examine in detail foundationalist and non-foundationalist versions of internalism, and go on to consider how one might characterize externalism: either negatively, by denying particular internalist theses, or positively, in terms of a theory offering different conditions for justification. I discuss the views of reliabilist foundationalists at length. In chapter three I present the internalist objection to externalism that the latter mistakenly permit one to be justified in believing the conclusion of an epistemic source circular inference. I explain the externalists' response that it is not in virtue of their externalism that they permit epistemic source circularity but rather their foundationalism; thus, internalist foundationalists must permit epistemic source circularity as well. I evaluate the positions of several internalists, most of them explicitly foundationalists, and argue that they too cannot avoid permitting epistemic source circularity. In the final chapter I consider whether such circularity is vicious, even though both internalist and externalist foundationalists permit it. I argue that one can sustain an objection to epistemic source circularity by imposing a non-question-begging requirement on justification and explain how respecting this requirement leads one to a non-foundationalist view. I conclude by considering the objection that question-begging leads to a certain arbitrariness in belief formation that should give the foundationalist pause when it comes to determining, at the beginning of inquiry, which beliefs are justified and which are not. The dissertation is primarily concerned with making clear the possible skeptical and non-skeptical positions one can take towards epistemic source circularity. I do not argue for the truth of a particular metaepistemology. (shrink)

An influential view in the epistemology of testimony is that typical or paradigmatic beliefs formed through testimonial uptake are noninferential. Some epistemologists in particular defend a causal version of this view: that beliefs formed from testimony (BFT) are generated by noninferential processes. This view is implausible, however. It tends to be elaborated in terms that do not really bear it out – e.g. that BFT is fixed directly, immediately, unconsciously or automatically. Nor is causal noninferentialism regarding BFT plausibly expressed in (...) terms of belief-independent belief formation; the complex cognitive details of BFT fixation do not accord well with such a view. But perhaps the most significant issue is that the relevant causal notion of inference itself is not particularly well-defined, at least with respect to BFT. Causal noninferentialism in this domain is obscure as a result, but this does not in turn clearly vindicate any interesting version of inferentialism. (shrink)

In this paper we set out a view on which internalist proper basicality is secured by sensory experience.

What exactly is reasoning? Like many other philosophers, I shall endorse a broadly causal conception of reasoning. Reasoning is a causal process, in which one mental event (say, one’s accepting the conclusion of a certain argument) is caused by an antecedent mental event (say, one’s considering the premises of the argument). Just like causal accounts of action and causal accounts of perception, causal accounts of reasoning have to confront a version of what has come to be known as the problem (...) of deviant causal chains. In this paper, I shall propose an account of the nature of reasoning, incorporating a solution to the specific version of the deviant causal chains problem that arises for accounts of reasoning. One striking feature of my solution is that it requires that certain normative facts are causally efficacious. It might be thought that this feature will make my account incompatible with any plausibly naturalistic approach to understanding the mind. I shall argue that this is not so: my account of the nature of reasoning is quite compatible with plausible versions of naturalism. (shrink)

In her black and white room, Mary doesn’t know what it is like to see red. Only after undergoing an experience as of something red and hence acquainting herself with red can Mary learn what it is like. But learning what it is like to see red requires more than simply becoming acquainted with it. To be acquainted with something is to know it, but such knowledge, as we argue, is object-knowledge rather than propositional-knowledge. To know what it is like (...) one must know an appropriate propositional answer to the question ‘what is it like?’. Despite this mismatch between object-knowledge and knowing an answer, we believe that acquaintance is crucial to Mary’s epistemic progress. When Mary leaves her black and white room, her new knowledge tempts one to think that she must come to know a candidate answer (a coarse-grained fact) that she didn’t know in her room. Since Mary already knows all the physical facts in her room, any additional facts she might learn appear to threaten physicalism. In reply, many physicalists have been attracted to the phenomenal concept strategy according to which Mary can come to have new knowledge and hence know a new answer to the question ‘what is it like to see red?’ by entertaining a coarse-grained fact under a concept she didn’t possess in her room – Mary learns a new fine-grained fact. We believe both of these accounts of Mary’s epistemic progress are mistaken. As we argue, Mary could know every fact (coarse-grained and fine-grained) that might serve as an answer to the question ‘what is it like to see red?’ and still not know what it is like. The physical world leaves no leftover coarse-grained facts for Mary to learn and because concepts are sharable, easy to possess, and easy to introduce, there are possible situations in which Mary, while in her black and white room, has every concept that might make a fine-grained difference. In short, even when Mary is granted a great deal of factual knowledge and vast conceptual resources, she may still not know an appropriate answer to the question ‘what is it like to see red?’. But in any such situation, Mary lacks acquaintance with red and on this basis we argue that in order to know what it is like, in order for Mary to know an appropriate answer, Mary’s propositional knowledge must be appropriately related to her acquaintance with red. (shrink)

In a series of papers, Adam Leite has developed a novel view of justification tied to being able to responsibly justify a belief. Leite touts his view as faithful to our ordinary practice of justifying beliefs, providing a novel response to an epistemological problem of the infinite regress, and resolving the “persistent interlocutor” problem. Though I find elements of Leite’s view of being able to justify a belief promising, I hold that there are several problems afflicting the overall picture of (...) justification. In this paper, I argue that despite its ambitions, Leite’s view fails to solve the persistent interlocutor problem and does not avoid a vicious regress. (shrink)

Recent knowledge first epistemology features a number of different accounts of justified belief, including a knowledge first reductionism according to which to believe justifiably is to know Sutton, Littlejohn, Williamson, a knowledge first version of accessibilism Millar and a knowledge first version of mentalism Bird. This paper offers a knowledge first version of virtue epistemology and argues that it is preferable to its knowledge first epistemological rivals: only knowledge first virtue epistemology manages to steer clear of a number of problems (...) that its competition encounters. (shrink)

This paper advances the debate over the question whether false beliefs may nevertheless have warrant, the property that yields knowledge when conjoined with true belief. The paper’s first main part—which spans Sections 2–4—assesses the best argument for Warrant Infallibilism, the view that only true beliefs can have warrant. I show that this argument’s key premise conflicts with an extremely plausible claim about warrant. Sections 5–6 constitute the paper’s second main part. Section 5 presents an overlooked puzzle about warrant, and uses (...) that puzzle to generate a new argument for Warrant Fallibilism, the view that false beliefs can have warrant. Section 6 evaluates this pro-Fallibilism argument, finding ultimately that it defeats itself in a surprising way. I conclude that neither Infallibilism nor Fallibilism should now constrain theorizing about warrant. (shrink)

The epistemic basing relation is the relation which must hold between a person's belief and the adequate reasons for holding that belief if the belief is to be epistemically justified by those reasons. Although the basing relation is a fundamental component of any adequate theory of epistemic justification, it has received scant attention in the literature. In this paper, I propose a novel causal analysis of the basing relation, one which helps to characterize an intemalist element which, I shall argue, (...) is required of any successful account of epistemic justification, and which confirms current trends away from coherentist and reliabilist theories of justification. (shrink)

The Humean theory of motivation remains the default position in much of the contemporary literature in meta-ethics, moral psychology, and action theory. Yet despite its widespread support, the theory is implausible as a view about what motivates agents to act. More specifically, my reasons for dissatisfaction with the Humean theory stem from its incompatibility with what I take to be a compelling model of the role of motivating reasons in first-person practical deliberation and third-person action explanations. So after first introducing (...) some assumptions about the nature of agency in section one, I will turn to articulating and defending this account of motivating reasons in sections two through four of the paper. Section five then provides some background on the Humean theory before I argue directly against it in section six and critically examine the leading arguments for the view in section seven. Given limitations of space, however, I save the task of developing a positive anti-Humean view for another occasion. (shrink)

Consider the argument: Circus-1 Men in clown suits are handing out tickets. So, probably: Circus-2 There’s a circus in town. So: Circus-3 There’s an entertainment venue in town. Presumably you’d be able to warrantedly believe Circus-2 on the basis of Circus-1. And we can suppose you’re reasonably certain that wherever there are circuses, there are entertainment venues. So you’d seem to be in a position to reasonably go on to infer Circus-3.

Philosophers tend to assume that we have excellent knowledge of our own current conscious experience or 'phenomenology'. I argue that our knowledge of one aspect of our experience, the experience of visual imagery, is actually rather poor. Precedent for this position is found among the introspective psychologists of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Two main arguments are advanced toward the conclusion that our knowledge of our own imagery is poor. First, the reader is asked to form a visual (...) image, and it is expected that answering questions about certain basic features of that experience will be difficult. If so, it seems reasonable to suppose that people could be mistaken about those basic features of their own imagery. Second, it is observed that although people give widely variable reports about their own experiences of visual imagery, differences in report do not systematically correlate with differences on tests of skills that psychologists have often supposed to require visual imagery, such as mental rotation, visual creativity, and visual memory. (shrink)

Externalism1 is the thesis that some propositional attitudes depend for their individuation on features of the thinker’s (social and/or physical) environment. The doctrine of self-knowledge of thoughts is the thesis that for all thinkers S and occurrent thoughts that p, S has authoritative and non-empirical knowledge of her thought that p. A much-discussed question in the literature is whether these two doctrines are compatible. In this paper I attempt to respond to one argument for an incompatibilist conclusion, Boghossian’s 1989 ‘Memory (...) Argument.’. (shrink)

In this paper, I argue that, contrary to the constructive empiricist’s position, observability is not an adequate criterion as a guide to ontological commitment in science. My argument has two parts. First, I argue that the constructive empiricist’s choice of observability as a criterion for ontological commitment is based on the assumption that belief in the existence of unobservable entities is unreasonable because belief in the existence of an entity can only be vindicated by its observation. Second, I argue that (...) the kind of ontological commitment that is under consideration when accepting a scientific theory is commitment to what I call theoretical kinds and that observation can vindicate commitment to kinds only in exceptional cases. (shrink)

Traditional accounts of justification can be characterized as trying to analyze justification in such a way that having a justified belief brings with it assurance of truth. The internalist offers a demanding requirement on justification: one's having a justified belief requires that one see what the belief has going for it. Externalists worry that the internalist's narrow conception of justification will lead to unacceptably radical and implausible skepticism. According to the externalist, one need not know what a belief has going (...) for it in order for that belief to be justified. Externalism, though, comes with its own problems. Ernest Sosa has attempted to bridge the divide between internalism and externalism by pairing the strengths of internalism with the strengths of externalism. Sosa distinguishes two kinds of knowledge: animal knowledge that is essentially externalist in character and reflective knowledge that is intended to capture our best intellectual procedure in regards to knowledge. On Sosa's view, one gains reflective knowledge by building upon animal knowledge. As a result, Sosa's view seems to illustrate a bottom-up approach to the analysis of knowledge : reflective knowledge is the result of animal knowledge and some other epistemic factor. My project, in contrast to Sosa's, is to argue that one should start with an account of ideal justification and then proceed by loosening the standards on ideal justification in an effort to develop the possibility of non- ideal kinds of justification. The view that I will develop will adopt Sosa's strategy of distinguishing kinds of knowledge, but will result in a top-down approach to the analysis of justification. Instead of starting with an undemanding standard and layer levels on top, I will start with an ideal standard and strip layers away. I will also argue that my view has some important advantages over Sosa's. Not only does Sosa's view seem to run into many of the problems that threaten externalism, but his view is incapable of offering the kind of assurance that the internalist is after. The view I develop will maintain the internalist's interest in assurance while also providing a response to some of the skeptical problems that have plagued internalists. If my project is successful, then, even if the justification that results in many of the cases I will be exploring is not ideal, we can use these conceptions of justification to help explicate how one might have justified beliefs about a great number of things. The essentially internalist account that I have offered will not only illustrate a serious approach to dealing with skepticism, but it will also capture how many of our commonsensically justified beliefs are in fact justified. (shrink)

Since Sydney Shoemaker published his seminal article ‘Self-Reference and Self-Awareness’ in 1968, the notion of ‘Immunity to Error through Misidentification’ has received much attention. It crops up in discussions of personal identity, indexical thought and introspection, and has been used to interpret remarks made by philosophers from Wittgenstein to William James. The precise significance of IEM is often unspecified in these discussions, however. It is unclear, for example, whether it constitutes an important status of judgments, whether it explains an important (...) characteristic of judgments, or whether it merely marks an important characteristic of judgments. Nevertheless, reference to IEM abounds, making this obscure notion seem all the more significant. (shrink)

Most explorations of the epistemic implications of Semantic Anti- Individualism (SAI) focus on issues of self-knowledge (first-person au- thority) and/or external-world skepticism. Less explored has been SAIs implications forthe epistemology of reasoning. In this paperI argue that SAI has some nontrivial implications on this score. I bring these out by reflecting on a problem first raised by Boghossian (1992). Whereas Boghos- sians main interest was in establishing the incompatibility of SAI and the a priority of logical abilities (Boghossian 1992: 22), (...) I argue that Boghossians argument is better interpreted as pointing to SAIs implications for the na- ture of discursive justification. (shrink)

The sceptic about the external world presents us with a paradox: an apparently acceptable argument for an apparently unacceptable conclusion—that we do not know anything about the external world. Some paradoxes, for instance the liar and the sorites, are very hard. The defense of a purported solution to either of these two inevitably deploys the latest in high-tech philosophical weaponry. On the other hand, some paradoxes are not at all hard, and may be resolved without much fuss. They do not (...) contain profound lessons about the human condition. Where should we place the sceptical paradoxes? (shrink)

It has recently been argued that inference essentially involves the thinker taking his premises to support his conclusion and drawing his conclusion because of this fact. However, this Taking Condition has also been criticized: If taking is interpreted as believing, it seems to lead to a vicious regress and to overintellectualize the act of inferring. In this paper, I examine and reject various attempts to salvage the Taking Condition, either by interpreting inferring as a kind of rule-following, or by finding (...) an innocuous role for the taking-belief. Finally, I propose an alternative account of taking, according to which it is not a separate belief, but rather an aspect of the attitude of believing: Believing that p implies not only taking p to be true and taking oneself to believe that p, but also taking one's reasons q to support p, when the belief in question is held on account of an inference. (shrink)

I argue that to know that a proposition is true one must have justification for being certain that the proposition is true. That is, one must have infallible epistemic justification for believing the proposition. It is widely accepted among epistemologists that we rarely, if ever, have such strong justification for our beliefs. It follows that there is precious little that we know. That conclusion is unacceptable to many philosophers. I argue that the positions that lead to the skeptical conclusion are (...) well-motivated and that the skeptical conclusion is implicitly accepted by ordinary speakers. My dissertation has three main components: a metaphilosophical position, an epistemological position, and an error theory. First, the metaphilosophical position. One very important part of philosophy is the analysis of our ordinary concepts. Analysis of our concepts begins with reflecting on what we are inclined to say about various actual and possible cases when considered under specific descriptions. This traditional method has recently come under attack, due in part to the rise of semantic externalism. I agree with externalists that if ‘meaning is reference’ then there is little reason to think reflecting on our concepts from the armchair will provide insight to the nature of the concepts we investigate. I defend a version of semantic internalism which grounds meaning in factors with which subjects are directly acquainted. That view supports the traditional methodology. Furthermore, as the goal of philosophical analysis is to accurately describe concepts of philosophical interest, the only kind of objection that could be decisive against a proposed analysis is that it does not correctly describe our concept. That opens the door to a skeptical analysis of knowledge. Second, the epistemological position. I argue that the unacceptability of sentences of the form “S knows that p but it is possible for S that not-p” is best explained by the hypothesis that our concept of knowledge requires having justification for being certain that what one believes is true. I offer as a criterion of justified certainty the idea that when one knows a proposition is true, one is in a position to decisively answer questions about one’s knowledge of that proposition. I survey a number of competing theories of knowledge and show that they allow for the possibility of knowledge when one fails my criterion of decisive answerability. Those views fail my criterion because according to those views there is nothing the subject is aware of that guarantees for the subject that the allegedly known proposition is true. On that basis, I contend that knowledge is direct awareness of the factors that constitute the truth of the proposition one believes. Third, the error theory. Of course, we rarely have direct awareness of the factors that constitute the truth of the propositions we believe. So, our knowledge attributions are generally false. Yet, they are overwhelmingly natural to make. I argue that competent speakers are often quick to recognize knowledge attributions as a kind of ‘loose talk’ akin to the way we loosely ascribe geometric properties to ordinary objects. We regularly call objects ‘square’ that are not even close to being square, and we are quick to recognize this when challenged. I argue that we do this because we are so accustomed to communicating using strict language to make false claims that we often do not attend to the literal falsity of what we are saying. While we accept very demanding standards for knowledge, the phenomenon of recognizing that our knowledge claims are regularly false is as pervasive as our use of loose speech. (shrink)