Internalists face the following challenge: what is it about an agent's internal states that explains why only these states can play whatever role the internalist thinks these states are playing? Internalists have frequently appealed to a special kind of epistemic access that we have to these states. But such claims have been challenged on both empirical and philosophical grounds. I will argue that internalists needn't appeal to any kind of privileged access claims. Rather, internalist conditions are important because of the (...) way in which we expect them to act as causal mediators between states of the world, on the one hand, and our beliefs and actions on the other. (shrink)

The paper discusses some ways in which vagueness and its phenomena may be thought to impose certain limits on our knowledge and, more specifically, may be thought to bear on the traditional philosophical idea that certain domains of facts are luminous, i.e., roughly, fully open to our view. The discussion focuses on a very influential argument to the effect that almost no such interesting domains exist. Many commentators have felt that the vagueness unavoidably inherent in the description of the facts (...) that are best candidates for being luminous plays an illicit role in such argument. The paper centres around the idea that vagueness brings with itself the prima facie plausibility of soritical principles. Using the diagnostics of sharpenings, it is first pointed out that, despite certain considerations to the contrary, the margin‐for‐error principle required by the anti‐luminosity argument may well derive all of its plausibility from an underlying soritical principle. The notion of confidence that is relevant to the argument is then isolated and sharply distinguished from the notion of subjective probability. Against this background, it is argued that the reasoning about confidence involved in the argument in favour of the problematic margin‐for‐error principle is fallacious in the same way in which sorites reasoning is. This reveals the possibility of having reliable knowledge even at the penumbral limit with falsity, a possibility for which a concrete formal model is constructed. The model in turn permits a deeper appreciation of the role played in the dialectic by the distinction between confidence and subjective probability as well as by confidence requirements on knowledge. It is concluded that careful heeding of vagueness and its phenomena, far from forcing new and surprising limits on our knowledge, actually removes one of the main barriers – unreliability – often thought to stand in its way. (shrink)

I advocate Time-Slice Rationality, the thesis that the relationship between two time-slices of the same person is not importantly different, for purposes of rational evaluation, from the relationship between time-slices of distinct persons. The locus of rationality, so to speak, is the time-slice rather than the temporally extended agent. This claim is motivated by consideration of puzzle cases for personal identity over time and by a very moderate form of internalism about rationality. Time-Slice Rationality conflicts with two proposed principles of (...) rationality, Conditionalization and Reflection. Conditionalization is a diachronic norm saying how your current degrees of belief should fit with your old ones, while Reflection is a norm enjoining you to defer to the degrees of belief that you expect to have in the future. But they are independently problematic and should be replaced by improved, time-slice-centric principles. Conditionalization should be replaced by a synchronic norm saying what degrees of belief you ought to have given your current evidence and Reflection should be replaced by a norm which instructs you to defer to the degrees of belief of agents you take to be experts. These replacement principles do all the work that the old principles were supposed to do while avoiding their problems. In this way, Time-Slice Rationality puts the theory of rationality on firmer foundations and yields better norms than alternative, non-time-slice-centric approaches. (shrink)

Since its appearance over a decade ago, Timothy Williamson's anti-luminosity argument has come under sustained attack. Defenders of the luminous overwhelmingly object to the argument's use of a certain margin-for-error premise. Williamson himself claims that the premise follows easily from a safety condition on knowledge together with his description of the thought experiment. But luminists argue that this is not so: the margin-for-error premise either requires an implausible interpretation of the safety requirement on knowledge, or it requires other equally implausible (...) assumptions. In this paper I bolster the margin-for-error premise against these attacks by recasting Williamson's own two-part defence, the first part intended to work on the assumption that there is no constitutive connection between the phenomenal and the doxastic, and the second intended to work without this assumption. Pace various luminists, I argue that the appeals to safety needed for Williamson's two-part defence are plausible. I also argue that all that is needed to generate the margin-for-error premise from these safety conditions is an empirical assumption about the kinds of creatures we are: that is, creatures whose beliefs are structured by certain dispositions. By recasting the anti-luminosity argument in this way, we can understand what is really at stake in the debate about luminosity: that is, whether we are luminous. (shrink)

If we hold that perceiving is sufficient for knowing, we can raise a powerful objection to dreaming skepticism: Skeptics assume the implausible KK-principle, because they hold that if we don’t know whether we are dreaming or perceiving p, we don’t know whether p. The rejection of the KK-principle thus suggests an anti-skeptical strategy: We can sacrifice some of our self-knowledge—our second-order knowledge—and thereby save our knowledge of the external world. I call this strategy the Self-Knowledge Gambit. I argue that the (...) Self-Knowledge Gambit is not satisfactory, because the dreaming skeptic can avail herself of a normative counterpart to the KK-principle: When we lack second-order knowledge, we should suspend our first-order beliefs and thereby give up any first-order knowledge we might have had. The skeptical challenge is essentially a normative challenge, and one can raise it even if one rejects the KK-Principle. (shrink)

Williamson has a strikingly economical way of showing how justified true belief can fail to constitute knowledge: he models a class of Gettier cases by means of two simple constraints. His constraints can be shown to rely on some unstated assumptions about the relationship between reality and appearance. These assumptions are epistemologically non-trivial but can be defended as plausible idealizations of our actual predicament, in part because they align well with empirical work on the metacognitive dimension of experience.

Questions about the transparency of evidence are central to debates between factive and non-factive versions of mentalism about evidence. If all evidence is transparent, then factive mentalism is false, since no factive mental states are transparent. However, Timothy Williamson has argued that transparency is a myth and that no conditions are transparent except trivial ones. This paper responds by drawing a distinction between doxastic and epistemic notions of transparency. Williamson's argument may show that no conditions are doxastically transparent, but it (...) fails to show that no conditions are epistemically transparent. Moreover, this reinstates the argument from the transparency of evidence against factive mentalism. (shrink)

Defined narrowly, epistemology is the study of knowledge and justified belief. As the study of knowledge, epistemology is concerned with the following questions: What are the necessary and sufficient conditions of knowledge? What are its sources? What is its structure, and what are its limits? As the study of justified belief, epistemology aims to answer questions such as: How we are to understand the concept of justification? What makes justified beliefs justified? Is justification internal or external to one's own mind? (...) Understood more broadly, epistemology is about issues having to do with the creation and dissemination of knowledge in particular areas of inquiry. This article will provide a systematic overview of the problems that the questions above raise and focus in some depth on issues relating to the structure and the limits of knowledge and justification. (shrink)

Anscombe famously said that there are some act types that can only be done intentionally. We defend this claim: some act types are essentially intentional. We argue that Ving intentionally is itself essentially intentional: it is not possible to be non-intentionally Ving intentionally. And we show how this explains why various other act types—such as trying, lying, and thanking—are essentially intentional. Finally, building on Piñeros Glassock (2020) and Beddor & Pavese (2022), we explain how this makes trouble for the thesis (...) that if I am Ving intentionally, I know that I am Ving. (shrink)

This paper begins by applying a version of Timothy Williamson’s anti-luminosity argument to normative properties. This argument suggests that there must be at least some unknowable normative facts in normative Sorites sequences, or otherwise we get a contradiction given certain plausible assumptions concerning safety requirements on knowledge and our doxastic dispositions. This paper then focuses on the question of how the defenders of different forms of metaethical anti-realism (namely, error theorists, subjectivists, relativists, contextualists, expressivists, response dependence theorists, and constructivists) could (...) respond to the explanatory challenge created by the previous argument. It argues that, with two exceptions, the metaethical anti-realists need not challenge the argument itself, but rather they can find ways to explain how the unknowable normative facts can obtain. These explanations are based on the idea that our own attitudes on which the normative facts are grounded need not be transparent to us either. Reaching this conclusion also illuminates how metaethical anti-realists can make sense of instances of normative vagueness more generally. (shrink)

This book takes purism about knowledge as the default position and defends it from the challenges of pragmatic encroachment. The book is divided into two parts, a negative and a positive one. The negative part critically examines existing purist strategies in response to pragmatic encroachment. The positive part provides a new theory of how practical factors can systematically influence our confidence and explores some implications of such influence.

Williamson’s anti-luminosity argument has been thought to be in tension with the doctrine that we enjoy privileged epistemic access to our own mental states. In this paper, I will argue that the tension is only apparent. Friends of privileged access who accept the conclusion of the argument need not give up the claim that our beliefs about our own mental states are mostly or invariably right, nor the view that mental states are epistemically available to us in a way that (...) renders everything within our mind ‘open to view’ – arguably, two main pillars of their doctrine. What they need to reject is the idea that the mental is a realm whose ’determinacy’ or ’fineness of grain’ never escapes our appreciation. This idea – I will suggest – is not essential to privileged access and defenders of the doctrine should not be afraid to give it up. (shrink)

Epistemological disjunctivists hold that perceiving subjects have “reflective access” to factive perceptual support for belief. However, little has been done to elaborate the intended notion of reflection, or introspective awareness more generally. Moreover, critics have pointed out that the disjunctivist conception of “reflective access” can seem vulnerable to varieties of Williamson’s anti-luminosity argument. In this paper I defend disjunctivism from this charge, arguing that it holds the resources for a potent defense of the claim that knowledge of perceptual states is (...) luminous. Indeed, I argue that appreciating the relation between disjunctivism and luminosity sheds critical light on how the disjunctivist conceives of perceptual support for belief. (shrink)

Early moderns such as Locke and Descartes thought we could guarantee the justification of our beliefs, even in worlds most hostile to their truth, if only we form those beliefs with sufficient care. That is, they thought it possible for us to be impeccable with respect to justification. This principle has traditionally been used to argue for internalism. By placing all of the normatively relevant conditions in our minds, we ensure reflective access to what those norms require of us and (...) so sustain the possibility of impeccability (unlike externalism). However, recent challenges to transparency leave this reasoning vulnerable. In response, I show how impeccability can be sustained without requiring transparency. The account only works if we define internal states as those directly accessible to our rational belief forming systems. I argue that this sort of causal internalism, while somewhat revisionary, preserves traditional motivations for internalism while avoiding problems faced by other varieties. The result is a renewed argument for internalism that simultaneously moves us away from access internalism and towards a species of mentalism. (shrink)

Arguably, the original conception of epistemic justification comes from Descartes and Locke, who thought of justification deontologically. Moreover, their deontological conception was especially strict: there are no excuses for unjustified beliefs. Call this the “classical deontologist” conception of justification. As the original conception, we ought to accept it unless proven untenable. Nowadays, however, most have abandoned classical deontologism as precisely that—untenable. It stands accused of requiring doxastic voluntarism and normative transparency. My goal is to rescue classical deontologism from these accusations. (...) I show how, given a specific form of internalism coupled with a plausible theory of epistemic blame, we can be blameworthy for all of our (non-exempt) unjustified beliefs without transparency or voluntarism. The result is that the classical deontological conception of justification should regain its privileged status. (shrink)

This idea that what is distinctive of intentional performances (or at least of those intentional performances that amount to skilled actions) is one’s practical knowledge in it —i.e., knowledge of what one is doing while doing it— famously traces back to Anscombe ([]1963] 2000). While many philosophers have theorized about Anscombe’s notion of practical knowledge (e.g., Setiya (2008), Thompson et al. (2011), Schwenkler (2019), O’Brien (2007)), there is a wide disagreement about how to understand it. This paper investigates how best (...) to understand practical knowledge for it to play the desired explanatory role in a reductive theory of intentional action, of intention-in-action, and of control-in-action. I argue that practical knowledge ought to be construed as a dynamic knowledge state and that structured practical senses (Pavese 2015) are needed to model it. (shrink)

In this paper, I present a two-pronged argument devoted to defending the type-identity theory of mind against the argument presented by Kripke in _Naming and Necessity_. In the first part, the interpersonal case, I show that since it is not possible to establish the metaphysical conditions for phenomenal identity, it is not possible to argue that there can be physical differences between two subjects despite their phenomenal identity. In the second part, the intrapersonal case, I consider the possibility of imagining (...) one and the same individual having the same phenomenal state while counterfactually being in very different physical states. I argue that this case should respect Kripke’s implicit theory of personal identity—but this proves to be a very difficult task to accomplish, thus preventing the argument from getting off the ground. Therefore, I maintain, that the type-identity theory is still the better option to solve the mind–body problem. (shrink)

This thesis investigates the relationship between consciousness and self-consciousness. I consider two broad claims about this relationship: a constitutive claim, according to which all conscious experiences constitutively involve self-consciousness; and a typicalist claim, according to which ordinary conscious experiences contingently involve self-consciousness. Both of these claims call for elucidation of the relevant notions of consciousness and self-consciousness. -/- In the first part of the thesis ('The Myth of Constitutive Self-Consciousness'), I critically examine the constitutive claim. I start by offering an (...) elucidatory account of consciousness, and outlining a number of foundational claims that plausibly follow from it. I subsequently distinguish between two concepts of self-consciousness: consciousness of one's experience, and consciousness of oneself (as oneself). Each of these concepts yields a distinct variant of the constitutive claim. In turn, each resulting variant of the constitutive claim can be interpreted in two ways: on a 'minimal' or deflationary reading, they fall within the scope of foundational claims about consciousness, while on a 'strong' or inflationary reading, they point to determinate aspects of phenomenology that are not acknowledged by the foundational claims as being aspects of all conscious mental states. I argue that the deflationary readings of either variant of the constitutive claim are plausible and illuminating, but would ideally be formulated without using a term as polysemous as 'self-consciousness'; by contrast, the inflationary readings of either variant are not adequately supported. -/- In the second part of the thesis ('Self-Consciousness in the Real World'), I focus on the second concept of self-consciousness, or consciousness of oneself as oneself. Drawing upon empirical evidence, I defend a pluralist account of self-consciousness so construed, according to which there are several ways in which one can be conscious of oneself as oneself – through conscious thoughts, bodily experiences and perceptual experiences – that make distinct determinate contributions to one's phenomenology. This pluralist account provides us with the resources to vindicate the typicalist claim according to which consciousness of oneself as oneself – a sense of self – is pervasive in ordinary conscious experiences, as a matter of contingent empirical fact. It also provides us with the resources to assess the possibility that a subject might be conscious without being conscious of herself as herself in any way. (shrink)

'Knowledge and its Limits' starts its exposition of the knowledge-first approach to epistemology with a structural analogy between knowledge and action as the two key relations between mind and world (Williamson 2000: 1, 6-8). This chapter aims to reconsider the relation between knowledge and action, and refine the analogy.

One of the most intriguing claims in Sven Rosenkranz’s Justification as Ignorance is that Timothy Williamson’s celebrated anti-luminosity argument can be resisted when it comes to the condition ~K~KP—the condition that one is in no position to know that one is in no position to know P. In this paper, I critically assess this claim.

What is the connection between having a phenomenal property and knowing that one has that property? A traditional view on the matter takes the connection to be quite intimate. Whenever one has a phenomenal property, one knows that one does. Recently most authors have denied this traditional view. The goal of this paper is to defend the traditional view. In fact, I will defend something much stronger: I will argue that what it is for a property to be phenomenal is (...) for it to be a property one must know oneself to have when on has it. As we will see, this theory has a number of surprising and welcome upshots, suggesting that the traditional view has been unjustly maligned. (shrink)

According to a rich tradition in philosophy of action, intentional action requires practical knowledge: someone who acts intentionally knows what they are doing while they are doing it. Piñeros Glasscock argues that an anti-luminosity argument, of the sort developed in Williamson, can be readily adapted to provide a reductio of an epistemic condition on intentional action. This paper undertakes a rescue mission on behalf of an epistemic condition on intentional action. We formulate and defend a version of an epistemic condition (...) that is free from any luminosity commitments. While this version of an epistemic condition escapes reductio, it comes with substantive commitments of its own. In particular, we will see that it forces us to deny the existence of any essentially intentional actions. We go on to argue that this consequence should be embraced. On the resulting picture, intentional action is not luminous. But it still entails practical knowledge. (shrink)

This paper explores the principle that knowledge is fragile, in that whenever S knows that S doesn’t know that S knows that p, S thereby fails to know p. Fragility is motivated by the infelicity of dubious assertions, utterances which assert p while acknowledging higher-order ignorance whether p. Fragility is interestingly weaker than KK, the principle that if S knows p, then S knows that S knows p. Existing theories of knowledge which deny KK by accepting a Margin for Error (...) principle can be conservatively extended with Fragility. (shrink)

The main aims in this article are to discuss and criticize the core thesis of a position that has become known as phenomenal conservatism. According to this thesis, its seeming to one that p provides enough justification for a belief in p to be prima facie justified. This thesis captures the special kind of epistemic import that seemings are claimed to have. To get clearer on this thesis, the article embeds it, first, in a probabilistic framework in which updating on (...) new evidence happens by Bayesian conditionalization, and second, a framework in which updating happens by Jeffrey conditionalization. The article spells out problems for both views, and then generalizes some of these to nonprobabilistic frameworks. The main theme of the discussion is that the epistemic import of a seeming should depend on its content in a plethora of ways that phenomenal conservatism is insensitive to. (shrink)

A mental state is luminous if, whenever an agent is in that state, they are in a position to know that they are. Following Timothy Williamson’s Knowledge and Its Limits, a wave of recent work has explored whether there are any non-trivial luminous mental states. A version of Williamson’s anti-luminosity appeals to a safety- theoretic principle connecting knowledge and confidence: if an agent knows p, then p is true in any nearby scenario where she has a similar level of confidence (...) in p. However, the relevant notion of confidence is relatively underexplored. This paper develops a precise theory of confidence: an agent’s degree of confidence in p is the objective chance they will rely on p in practical reasoning. This theory of confidence is then used to critically evaluate the anti-luminosity argument, leading to the surprising conclusion that although there are strong reasons for thinking that luminosity does not obtain, they are quite different from those the existing literature has considered. In particular, we show that once the notion of confidence is properly understood, the failure of luminosity follows from the assumption that knowledge requires high confidence, and does not require any kind of safety principle as a premise. (shrink)

The idea that there are some facts that call for explanation serves as an unexamined premise in influential arguments for the inexistence of moral or mathematical facts and for the existence of a god and of other universes. This book is the first to offer a comprehensive and critical treatment of this idea. It argues that calling for explanation is a sometimes-misleading figure of speech rather than a fundamental property of facts.

I argue that no successful version of Williamson's anti‐luminosity‐argument has yet been presented, even if Srinivasan's further elaboration and defence is taken into account. There is a version invoking a coarse‐grained safety condition and one invoking a fine‐grained safety condition. A crucial step in the former version implicitly relies on the false premise that sufficient similarity is transitive. I show that some natural attempts to resolve this issue fail. Similar problems arise for the fine‐grained version. Moreover, I argue that Srinivasan's (...) defence of the more contentious fine‐grained safety condition is also unsuccessful, again for similar reasons. (shrink)

Our main aims in this paper is to discuss and criticise the core thesis of a position that has become known as phenomenal conservatism. According to this thesis, its seeming to one that p provides enough justification for a belief in p to be prima facie justified (a thesis we label Standard Phenomenal Conservatism). This thesis captures the special kind of epistemic import that seemings are claimed to have. To get clearer on this thesis, we embed it, first, in a (...) probabilistic framework in which updating on new evidence happens by Bayesian conditionalization, and second, a framework in which updating happens by Jeffrey conditionalization. We spell out problems for both views, and then generalize some of these to non-probabilistic frameworks. The main theme of our discussion is that the epistemic import of a seeming (or experience) should depend on its content in a plethora of ways that phenomenal conservatism is insensitive to. (shrink)

The first part of this thesis articulates and defends the Subjectivist View of the Mental. According to this view, my mental states are essentially different from the mental states of everyone else, but the fact that they are is a subjective fact, rather than an objective one. Chapter 1 explains what it takes for a fact to be subjective, what kind of difference holds between my mental states and everyone else's mental states and what kind of intuitions lead me to (...) believe that there is such a difference. Chapter 2 defends the Subjectivist View of the Mental from objections and discusses some of its most significant implications. In the second part of the thesis, I explore the advantages that the Subjectivist View of the Mental offers when it comes to accounting for three basic features of our knowledge of the mental. Chapter 3 deals with the asymmetry between self-knowledge and knowledge of other minds. It is argued that, if the Subjectivist View of the Mental is true, we can explain why this asymmetry holds without assuming that self-knowledge and knowledge of other minds are involved with substantially different ways of knowing. Chapter 4 focuses on the immunity to error through misidentification of mental self-ascriptions. I show that, while there has been a temptation to explain this phenomenon by following Lichtenberg and Wittgenstein in taking the content of mental self-ascriptions to be general rather than particular, this proposal cannot be made to work unless something like the Subjectivist View of the Mental is true. Chapter 5 is concerned with experiential knowledge. I argue that, if experiential truths are taken to be objective truths, it is not easy to see why experiential knowledge should have the peculiar 'first-hand' character it has. The problem disappears if experiential truths are regarded as subjective rather than objective. (shrink)

The epistemology of self-locating belief concerns itself with how rational agents ought to respond to certain kinds of indexical information. I argue that those who endorse the thesis of Time-Slice Rationality ought to endorse a particular view about the epistemology of self-locating belief, according to which ‘essentially indexical’ information is never evidentially relevant to non-indexical matters. I close by offering some independent motivations for endorsing Time-Slice Rationality in the context of the epistemology of self-locating belief.

Many philosophers hold that if an agent acts intentionally, she must know what she is doing. Although the scholarly consensus for many years was to reject the thesis in light of presumed counterexamples by Donald Davidson, several scholars have recently argued that attention to aspectual distinctions and the practical nature of this knowledge shows that these counterexamples fail. In this paper I defend a new objection against the thesis, one modelled after Timothy Williamson’s anti-luminosity argument. Since this argument relies on (...) general principles about the nature of knowledge rather than on intuitions about fringe cases, the recent responses that have been given to defuse the force of Davidson’s objection are silent against it. Moreover, the argument suggests that even weaker theses connecting practical entities with knowledge are also false. Recent defenders of the thesis that there is a necessary connection between knowledge and intentional action are motivated by the insight that this connection is non-accidental. I close with a positive proposal to account for the non-accidentality of this link without appeal to necessary connections by drawing an extended analogy between practical and perceptual knowledge. (shrink)

It is well known that de se (or ‘self-locating’) propositions complicate the standard picture of how we should respond to evidence. This has given rise to a substantial literature centered around puzzles like Sleeping Beauty, Dr. Evil, and Doomsday—and it has also sparked controversy over a style of argument that has recently been adopted by theoretical cosmologists. These discussions often dwell on intuitions about a single kind of case, but it’s worth seeking a rule that can unify our treatment of (...) all evidence, whether de dicto or de se. -/- This paper is about three candidates for such a rule, presented as replacements for the standard updating rule. Each rule stems from the idea that we should treat ourselves as a random sample, a heuristic that underlies many of the intuitions that have been pumped in treatments of the standard puzzles. But each rule also yields some strange results when applied across the board. This leaves us with some difficult options. We can seek another way to refine the random-sample heuristic, e.g. by restricting one of our rules. We can try to live with the strange results, perhaps granting that useful principles can fail at the margins. Or we can reject the random-sample heuristic as fatally flawed—which means rethinking its influence in even the simplest cases. (shrink)

It is widely thought that moral obligations are necessarily guidance giving. This supposed fact has been put to service in defence of the ‘ought-implies-can’ principle according to which one cannot be morally obligated to do the impossible, since impossible-to-satisfy obligations would not give guidance. It is argued here that the supposed fact is no such thing; moral obligations are not necessarily guiding giving, and so the ‘guidance argument’ for ought-implies-can fails. This is the result of no non-trivial condition being ‘luminous’.

I argue against ‘right reason’ style accounts of how we should manage our beliefs in the face of higher-order evidence. I start from the observation that such views seem to have bad practical consequences when we imagine someone acting on them. I then catalogs ways that Williamson, Weatherson, and Lasonen-Aarnio have tried to block objections based on these consequences; I argue all fail. I then move on to offer my own theoretical picture of a rational ‘should believe,’ and show that, (...) if such a picture is right, it can neatly explain why right reason isn't. I close by arguing that the extent to which anti-luminosity arguments motivate right reason has been overstated; the positive picture developed here, despite rejecting right reason, is nonetheless consistent with luminosity failures. (shrink)

Recently, several epistemologists have defended an attractive principle of epistemic rationality, which we shall call Ur-Prior Conditionalization. In this essay, I ask whether we can justify this principle by appealing to the epistemic goal of accuracy. I argue that any such accuracy-based argument will be in tension with Evidence Externalism, i.e., the view that agent's evidence may entail non-trivial propositions about the external world. This is because any such argument will crucially require the assumption that, independently of all empirical evidence, (...) it is rational for an agent to be certain that her evidence will always include truths, and that she will always have perfect introspective access to her own evidence. This assumption is in tension with Evidence Externalism. I go on to suggest that even if we don't accept Evidence Externalism, the prospects for any accuracy-based justification for Ur-Prior Conditionalization are bleak. (shrink)

Some people commonly know a proposition just in case they all know it, they all know that they all know it, they all know that they all know that they all know it, and so on. They commonly believe a proposition just in case they all believe it, they all believe that they all believe it, they all believe that they all believe that they all believe it, and so on. A long tradition in economic theory, theoretical computer science, linguistics (...) and philosophy has held that people have some approximation of common knowledge or common belief in a range of circumstances, for example, when they are looking at an object together, or when they have just discussed something explicitly in conversation. In this paper, I argue that people do not have any approximation of common knowledge or common belief in these circumstances. The argument suggests that people never have any approximation of common knowledge or common belief. (shrink)

‘How, then, she had asked herself, did one know one thing or another thing about people, sealed as they were?’ So asks Lily Briscoe in To the Lighthouse. It is this question, rather than any concern about pretence or deception, which forms the basis for the philosophical problem of other minds. Responses to this problem have tended to cluster around two solutions: either we know others’ minds through perception; or we know others’ minds through a form of inference. In the (...) first part of this paper I argue that this debate is best understood as concerning the question of whether our knowledge of others’ minds is based on perception or based on evidence. In the second part of the paper I suggest that our ordinary ways of thinking take our knowledge of others’ minds to be both non- evidential and non-perceptual. A satisfactory resolution to the philosophical problem of other minds thus requires us to take seriously the idea that we have a way of knowing about others’ minds which is both non-evidential and non-perceptual. I suggest that our knowledge of others’ minds which is based on their expressions – our expressive knowledge - may fit this bill. (shrink)

This article aims to show that Williamson's anti-luminosity argument does not succeed if we presuppose a constitutive connection between the phenomenal and the doxastic. In contrast to other luminists, however, my strategy is not to critically focus on the refined safety condition in terms of degrees of confidence that anti-luminists typically use in this context. Instead, I will argue that, given a certain conception of what Chalmers calls ‘direct phenomenal concepts,’ luminosity is guaranteed even if the refined safety condition in (...) terms of degrees of confidence is taken for granted. (shrink)

Many people believe that the mind is an epistemic refuge of sorts. The idea is that when it comes to certain core mental states, one’s being in such a state automatically puts one in a position to know that one is in that state. This idea has come under attack in recent years. One particularly influential attack comes from Timothy Williamson (2000), who argues that there is no central core of states or conditions—mental or otherwise—to which we are guaranteed epistemic (...) access. In Williamson’s words, we are cognitively homeless. In this paper I will argue that Williamson’s argument for the conclusion that we are cognitively homeless fails. Then I will show that there is a class of phenomenal states that constitutes a substantial cognitive refuge. When all is said and done, I will have both defended and shed light on our cognitive home. (shrink)

In Knowledge and Its Limits Timothy Williamson argues against the luminosity of phenomenal states in general by way of arguing against the luminosity of feeling cold, that is, against the view that if one feels cold, one is at least in a position to know that one does. In this paper I consider four strategies that emerge from his discussion, and argue that none succeeds.

Our decision-theoretic states are not luminous. We are imperfectly reliable at identifying our own credences, utilities and available acts, and thus can never be more than imperfectly reliable at identifying the prescriptions of decision theory. The lack of luminosity affords decision theory a remarkable opportunity — to issue guidance on the basis of epistemically inaccessible facts. We show how a decision theory can guarantee action in accordance with contingent truths about which an agent is arbitrarily uncertain. It may seem that (...) such advantages would require dubiously adverting to externalist facts that go beyond the internalism of traditional decision theory, but this is not so. Using only the standard repertoire of decision-theoretic tools, we show how to modify existing decision theories to take advantage of this opportunity. These improved decision theories require agents to maximize conditional expected utility — expected utility conditional upon an agent’s actual decision situation. We call such modified decision theories ‘self-confident’. These self-confident decision theories have a distinct advantage over standard decision theories: their prescriptions are better. (shrink)

A mental state is luminous if, whenever an agent is in that state, they are in a position to know that they are. Following Timothy Williamson's Knowledge and Its Limits, a wave of recent work has explored whether there are any non‐trivial luminous mental states. A version of Williamson's anti‐luminosity appeals to a safety‐theoretic principle connecting knowledge and confidence: if an agent knows p, then p is true in any nearby scenario where she has a similar level of confidence in (...) p. However, the relevant notion of confidence is relatively underexplored. This paper develops a precise theory of confidence: an agent's degree of confidence in p is the objective chance they will rely on p in practical reasoning. This theory of confidence is then used to critically evaluate the anti‐luminosity argument, leading to the surprising conclusion that although there are strong reasons for thinking that luminosity does not obtain, they are quite different from those the existing literature has considered. In particular, we show that once the notion of confidence is properly understood, the failure of luminosity follows from the assumption that knowledge requires high confidence, and does not require any kind of safety principle as a premise. (shrink)

Williamson's influential anti-luminosity argument aims to show that our own mental states are not “luminous,” and that we are thus “cognitively homeless.” Among other things, this argument represents a significant challenge to the idea that we enjoy basic self-knowledge of our own occurrent mental states. In this paper, I summarize Williamson's anti-luminosity argument, and discuss the role that the notion of “epistemic basis” plays in it. I argue that the anti-luminosity argument relies upon a particular version of the basis-relative safety (...) condition on knowledge. This commitment is significant because basic self-knowledge seemingly lacks any kind of distinct epistemic basis, such as inference, observation, testimony, etc., despite representing a genuine kind of knowledge of contingent matters of fact. I consider a disjunctivist account, according to which true basic self-beliefs indeed lack an epistemic basis in any kind of epistemic method, yet are still epistemically grounded in the mental states they concern. I argue that this account of self-knowledge is compatible with standard understandings of the basis relative safety condition on knowledge, but rejects the particular version required by the anti-luminosity argument. (shrink)

Many of the arguments for and against robust moral realism parallel arguments for and against theism. In this article, I consider one of the shared challenges: the explanatory challenge. The article begins with a presentation of Harman's formulation of the explanatory challenge as applied to moral realism and theism. I then examine two responses offered by robust moral realists to the explanatory challenge, one by Russ Shafer-Landau and another by David Enoch. Shafer-Landau argues that the moral realist can plausibly respond (...) to the challenge in a way unavailable to theists. I argue that Shafer-Landau's response is implausible as it stands and that once revised, it will apply to theism just as well. I then argue that Enoch's response, to the extent that it is plausible, can be used to defend theism as well. (shrink)