A widespread assumption in debates about trust and trustworthiness is that the evaluative norms of principal interest on the trustor’s side of a cooperative exchange regulate trusting attitudes and performances whereas those on the trustee’s side regulate dispositions to respond to trust. The aim here will be to highlight some unnoticed problems with this asymmetrical picture – and in particular, how it elides certain key evaluative norms on both the trustor’s and trustee’s side the satisfaction of which are critical to (...) successful cooperative exchanges – and to show that a symmetrical, ‘achievement-first’ approach to theorising about trust and trustworthiness (and their relation to each other) has important advantages by comparison. The view I develop is guided by a structural analogy with practical reasoning. Just as practical reasoning is working as it should only when there is realisation (knowledge and action) of states (belief and intention) with reverse directions of fits (mind-to-world and world-to-mind), likewise, cooperation between trustor and trustee is functioning as it should only when there is an analogous kind of realisation on both sides of the cooperative exchange – viz., when the trustor ‘matches’ her achievement in trusting (an achievement in fitting reliance to reciprocity) with the trustee’s achievement in responding to trust (an achievement in fitting reciprocity to reliance). An upshot of viewing cooperation between trustor and trustee as exhibiting achievement-theoretic structure is that we will be better positioned to subsume trustworthiness (and its cognates on the trustee’s side), like trust, under a wider suite of evaluative norms that regulate attempts, dispositions, and achievements symmetrically on both sides of a cooperative exchange, with ‘matching achievements’ as the gold standard. (shrink)

Cuneo and Shafer-Landau (2014) argued that there are moral conceptual truths that are substantive in content, what they called ‘moral fixed points’. I argue that insofar as we have some reason to postulate moral fixed points, we have equal reason to postulate epistemic fixed points (e.g. the factivity condition). To this effect, I show that the two basic reasons Cuneo and Shafer-Landau (2014) offer in support of moral fixed points naturally carry over to epistemic fixed points. In particular, epistemic fixed (...) points exhibit the four ‘marks’ of conceptual truths that they identify and can be utilized to address important challenges to epistemic realism. I conclude that insofar as we have some reason to postulate moral fixed points, we have equal reason to postulate epistemic fixed points. -/- . (shrink)

A common objection to Sosa’s epistemology is that it countenances, in an objectionable way, unsafe knowledge. This objection, under closer inspection, turns out to be in far worse shape than Sosa’s critics have realised. Sosa and his defenders have offered two central response types to the idea that allowing unsafe knowledge is problematic: one response type adverts to the animal/reflective knowledge distinction that is characteristic of bi-level virtue epistemology. The other less-discussed response type appeals to the threat of dream scepticism, (...) and in particular, to the idea that many of our everyday perceptual beliefs are unsafe through the nearness of the dream possibility. The latter dreaming response to the safety objection to Sosa’s virtue epistemology has largely flown under the radar in contemporary discussions of safety and knowledge. We think that, suitably articulated in view of research in the philosophy and science of dreaming, it has much more going for it than has been appreciated. This paper further develops, beyond what Sosa does himself, the dreaming argument in response to those who think safety (as traditionally understood) is a condition on knowledge and who object to Sosa’s account on the grounds that it fails this condition. The payoffs of further developing this argument will be not only a better understanding of the importance of insights about dreaming against safety as a condition on knowledge, but also some reason to think a weaker safety condition, one that is relativised to SSS (i.e., skill/shape/situation) conditions for competence exercise, gets better results all things considered as an anti-luck codicil on knowledge. (shrink)

What degree of justification should be required of epistemological cognition, the kind of cognition by which epistemological problems are to be solved? I consider the question by examining Husserl’s view of the matter. Challenging the current consensus, I argue that he is committed to the infallibility of epistemological cognition. I first present what he takes to be the leading problem of epistemology, which he designates as the ‘problem of transcendence’ or the problem of how ‘transcendent cognition’ is possible. I then (...) give an account of what I call his Non-Transcendence Constraint, on which the problem cannot be solved by means of cognitions of the kind whose possibility it concerns, and so cannot be solved by means of transcendent cognition. Pointing out that he provides four specifications of the problem, I go on to argue that on the most fundamental of these it concerns the general possibility of fallible cognition. By the Non-Transcendence Constraint, however, this entails that the problem of transcendence cannot be solved by means of fallible cognition. I conclude that central aspects of Husserl’s metaepistemology commit him to the infallibility of epistemological cognition, at least as far as solving the supposedly leading problem of epistemology is concerned. (shrink)

Here I pose a challenge to realism about knowledge, the view that facts about knowledge are non-trivially mind-independent, adapting an evolutionary debunking argument from metaethics. In brief: Our beliefs about knowledge are the products of innate knowledge-representing capacities with a deep and well documented evolutionary history, and, crucially, this history indicates that such capacities are indifferent to whether there are any mind-independent facts about knowledge. Instead, knowledge-representing capacities are likely just a byproduct of processing limitations on primate cognition. This presents (...) an explanatory challenge for the knowledge realist—How is it, then, that we nonetheless happen to have many true beliefs about knowledge? I’ll argue that, without abandoning the non-naturalism that characterizes much of contemporary epistemology, realism struggles to provide a compelling answer. In contrast, evolutionary anti-realism, the view advocated for here, meets the explanatory challenge head-on. Facts about knowledge are grounded in facts about what our innate knowledge-representing capacities classify as knowledge, so it’s no surprise that we have many true beliefs about knowledge. While none of this shows that realism about knowledge is false, these considerations give us ceteris paribus reason to prefer an anti-realist approach. (shrink)

Changing concepts, understood as social constructs and facets of linguistic expressions, and likewise the mechanisms of change and the dynamicity of their contents, cannot be adequately analysed without a holistic perspective of a language system on the one hand, and a multi-layered perspective of conversational interaction on the other. I take on board a case study of the concept humanism, in particular in its relation to speciesism, to argue for such a broad perspective when discussing concept revision, including its deliberate (...) and automatic aspects. Section 1 sets out the scene and the objectives, emphasising the importance of metapragmatic concerns. In Sect. 2, I briefly introduce some relevant terms and debates surrounding concepts, lexemes, and their dynamicity. Section 3 moves to the question of the foundations of meaning and points out the importance of addressing it in the context of these debates. Section 4 contains the case study of the concept humanism and the insights it offers for carving out the boundaries of inquiry into the life of a concept, focusing on the importance of broadly understood propositional content and the non-propositional overlay as they are dynamically constructed in discourse—and, as such, on the importance of metapragmatic concerns. Section 5 concludes and reiterates my plea against carving out fields of inquiry based on narrowly understood pursuits. (shrink)