An account of the norms of assertion is proposed which is supported by the same considerations that motivate the familiar knowledge account of those norms, but does not have a problematic consequence of the latter. This alternative account is defended against others to be found in the literature, and some larger epistemological issues it raises are considered briefly.

Arguments from "easy knowledge" are meant to refute a class of epistemological views, including foundationalism about perceptual knowledge. I present arguments from easy knowledge in their strongest form, and explain why other formulations in the literature are inferior. I criticize two features of Stewart Cohen's presentation, namely his focus on knowing that one's faculties are reliable, and his use of a Williamson-style closure principle. Rather, the issue around easy knowledge must be understood using a notion of epistemic priority. Roger White's (...) presentation is contaminated by the so-called lottery puzzle, which is best kept separate. Distinguishing basic from non-basic visual contents limits the force of the examples discussed by Cohen, White, and Crispin Wright. Finally, I present a new strategy for resisting even the best-formulated arguments from easy knowledge. (shrink)

This paper addresses the question whether future contingents are knowable, that is, whether one can know that things will go a certain way even though it is possible that things will not go that way. First I will consider a long-established view that implies a negative answer, and draw attention to some endemic problems that affect its credibility. Then I will sketch an alternative line of thought that prompts a positive answer: future contingents are knowable, although our epistemic access of (...) them is limited in some important respects. (shrink)

This paper articulates in formal terms a crucial distinction concerning future contingents, the distinction between what is true about the future and what is reasonable to believe about the future. Its key idea is that the branching structures that have been used so far to model truth can be employed to define an epistemic property, credibility, which we take to be closely related to knowledge and assertibility, and which is ultimately reducible to probability. As a result, two kinds of claims (...) about future contingents—one concerning truth, the other concerning credibility—can be smoothly handled within a single semantic framework. (shrink)

Experimental restrictionists have challenged philosophers’ reliance on intuitions about thought experiment cases based on experimental findings. According to the expertise defense, only the intuitions of philosophical experts count—yet the bulk of experimental philosophy consists in studies with lay people. In this paper, we argue that direct strategies for assessing the expertise defense are preferable to indirect strategies. A direct argument in support of the expertise defense would have to show: first, that there is a significant difference between expert and lay (...) intuitions; second, that expert intuitions are superior to lay intuitions; and third, that expert intuitions accord with the relevant philosophical consensus. At present, there is only little experimental evidence that bears on these issues. To advance the debate, we conducted two new experiments on intuitions about knowledge with experts and lay people. Our results suggest that the intuitions of epistemological experts are superior in some respects, but they also pose an unexpected challenge to the expertise defense. Most strikingly, we found that even epistemological experts tend to ascribe knowledge in fake-barn-style cases. This suggests that philosophy, as a discipline, might fail to adequately map the intuitions of its expert practitioners onto a disciplinary consensus. (shrink)

In mathematics, any form of probabilistic proof obtained through the application of a probabilistic method is not considered as a legitimate way of gaining mathematical knowledge. In a series of papers, Don Fallis has defended the thesis that there are no epistemic reasons justifying mathematicians’ rejection of probabilistic proofs. This paper identifies such an epistemic reason. More specifically, it is argued here that if one adopts a conception of mathematical knowledge in which an epistemic subject can know a mathematical proposition (...) based solely on a probabilistic proof, one is then forced to admit that such an epistemic subject can know several lottery propositions based solely on probabilistic evidence. Insofar as knowledge of lottery propositions on the basis of probabilistic evidence alone is denied by the vast majority of epistemologists, it is concluded that this constitutes an epistemic reason for rejecting probabilistic proofs as a means of acquiring mathematical knowledge. (shrink)

According to the normative approach, speech acts are governed by certain norms. Interestingly, the same is true for classes of speech acts. This paper considers the normative treatment of constatives, consisting of such classes as assertives, predictives, suggestives, and more. The classical approach is to treat these classes of illocutions as species of constatives. Recently, however, Simion (Shifty Speech and Independent Thought: Epistemic Normativity in Context, Oxford University Press, 2021) has proposed that all constatives (i) are species of assertion, and (...) (ii) are governed by the knowledge norm. I defend the classical treatment of constatives and show that Simion’s conclusion is untenable. No taxonomy of speech acts can accommodate such a view. More importantly, we can test whether a particular speech act is an assertion or not. I propose five tests of assertion, the passing of which is a necessary condition for being an assertion. Some constative speech acts fail these tests. Thus, contrary to Simion, not all constatives can be regarded as species of assertion. (shrink)

Suppose that I hold a ticket in a fair lottery and that I believe that my ticket will lose [L] on the basis of its extremely high probability of losing. What is the appropriate epistemic appraisal of me and my belief that L? Am I justified in believing that L? Do I know that L? While there is disagreement among epistemologists over whether or not I am justified in believing that L, there is widespread agreement that I do not know (...) that L. I defend the two-pronged view that I am justified in believing that my ticket will lose and that I know that it will lose. Along the way, I discuss four different but related versions of the lottery paradox—The Paradox for Rationality, The Paradox for Knowledge, The Paradox for Fallibilism, and The Paradox for Epistemic Closure—and offer a unified resolution of each of them. (shrink)

The paper takes as its starting point the observation that people can be led to retract knowledge claims when presented with previously ignored error possibilities, but offers a noncontextualist explanation of the data. Fallibilist epistemologies are committed to the existence of two kinds of Kp -falsifying contingencies: (i) Non-Ignorable contingencies [NI-contingencies] and (ii) Properly-Ignorable contingencies [PI-contingencies]. For S to know that p, S must be in an epistemic position to rule out all NI-contingencies, but she need not be able to (...) rule out the PI-contingencies. What is required vis-à-vis PI-contingencies is that they all be false . In mentioning PI-contingencies, an interlocutor can lead S mistakenly to think that these contingencies are NI-contingencies, when in fact they are not. Since S cannot rule out these newly mentioned contingencies and since she mistakenly takes them to be NI-contingencies , it is quite natural that she retract her earlier knowledge claim. In short, mentioning NI-contingencies creates a distortion effect. It makes S think that the standards for knowledge are higher than they actually are, which in turn explains why she mistakenly thinks she lacks knowledge. Conclusion: The primary linguistic data offered in support of contextualism can be explained without resorting to contextualism. (shrink)

According to so-called epistemic theories of conditionals, the assertability/acceptability/acceptance of a conditional requires the existence of an epistemically significant relation between the conditional’s antecedent and its consequent. This paper points to some linguistic data that our current best theories of the foregoing type appear unable to explain. Further, it presents a new theory of the same type that does not have that shortcoming. The theory is then defended against some seemingly obvious objections.

As part of an exceptionally lucid analysis of the Lottery Paradox, Dana Nelkin castigates the solutions to that paradox put forward by Laurence Bonjour and Sharon Ryan. According to her, these are “so finely tailored to lottery-like cases that they are limited in their ability to explain [what seem the intuitively right responses to such cases]”. She then offers a solution to the Lottery Paradox that allegedly has the virtue of being independently motivated by our intuitions regarding certain non-lottery-like cases. (...) This note argues that Nelkin fails to show that her solution applies to other than lottery-like cases or in any event that it is more general than Bonjour’s and Ryan’s solutions. (shrink)

As part of an exceptionally lucid analysis of the Lottery Paradox, Dana Nelkin castigates the solutions to that paradox put forward by Laurence Bonjour and Sharon Ryan. According to her, these are “so finely tailored to lottery-like cases that they are limited in their ability to explain [what seem the intuitively right responses to such cases]”. She then offers a solution to the Lottery Paradox that allegedly has the virtue of being independently motivated by our intuitions regarding certain non-lottery-like cases. (...) This note argues that Nelkin fails to show that her solution applies to other than lottery-like cases or in any event that it is more general than Bonjour’s and Ryan’s solutions. (shrink)

The idea that knowledge is conceptually related to practical reasoning is becoming increasingly popular. In defending this idea, philosophers have been relying on a conception of practical reasoning that drastically deviates from one which has been more traditionally advocated in analytic philosophy and which assigns no special role to knowledge. This paper argues that these philosophers have failed to give good reasons for thinking that the conception of practical reasoning they have been assuming is the right one, and that hence (...) they have been rash to conclude that there is a conceptual relation between knowledge and practical reasoning. (shrink)

The idea that knowledge is conceptually related to practical reasoning is becoming increasingly popular. In defending this idea, philosophers have been relying on a conception of practical reasoning that drastically deviates from one which has been more traditionally advocated in analytic philosophy and which assigns no special role to knowledge. This paper argues that these philosophers have failed to give good reasons for thinking that the conception of practical reasoning they have been assuming is the right one, and that hence (...) they have been rash to conclude that there is a conceptual relation between knowledge and practical reasoning. (shrink)

It is widely believed that the so-called knowledge account of assertion best explains why sentences such as “It’s raining in Paris but I don’t believe it” and “It’s raining in Paris but I don’t know it” appear odd to us. I argue that the rival rational credibility account of assertion explains that fact just as well. I do so by providing a broadly Bayesian analysis of the said type of sentences which shows that such sentences cannot express rationally held beliefs. (...) As an interesting aside, it will be seen that these sentences also harbor a lesson for Bayesian epistemology itself. (shrink)

I argue that believing that p implies having a credence of 1 in p. This is true because the belief that p involves representing p as being the case, representing p as being the case involves not allowing for the possibility of not-p, while having a credence that’s greater than 0 in not-p involves regarding not-p as a possibility.

Concessive knowledge attributions (CKAs) are knowledge attributions of the form ‘S knows p, but it’s possible that q’, where q obviously entails not-p (Rysiew, Nous (Detroit, Mich.) 35:477–514, 2001). The significance of CKAs has been widely discussed recently. It’s agreed by all that CKAs are infelicitous, at least typically. But the agreement ends there. Different writers have invoked them in their defenses of all sorts of philosophical theses; to name just a few: contextualism, invariantism, fallibilism, infallibilism, and that the knowledge (...) rules for assertion and practical reasoning are false. In fact, there is a lot of confusion about CKAs and their significance. I try to clear some of this confusion up, as well as show what their significance is with respect to the debate between fallibilists and infallibilists about knowledge in particular. (shrink)

In this paper I argue for a doctrine I call ?infallibilism?, which I stipulate to mean that If S knows that p, then the epistemic probability of p for S is 1. Some fallibilists will claim that this doctrine should be rejected because it leads to scepticism. Though it's not obvious that infallibilism does lead to scepticism, I argue that we should be willing to accept it even if it does. Infallibilism should be preferred because it has greater explanatory power (...) than fallibilism. In particular, I argue that an infallibilist can easily explain why assertions of ?p, but possibly not-p? (where the ?possibly? is read as referring to epistemic possibility) is infelicitous in terms of the knowledge rule of assertion. But a fallibilist cannot. Furthermore, an infallibilist can explain the infelicity of utterances of ?p, but I don't know that p? and ?p might be true, but I'm not willing to say that for all I know, p is true?, and why when a speaker thinks p is epistemically possible for her, she will agree (if asked) that for all she knows, p is true. The simplest explanation of these facts entails infallibilism. Fallibilists have tried and failed to explain the infelicity of ?p, but I don't know that p?, but have not even attempted to explain the last two facts. I close by considering two facts that seem to pose a problem for infallibilism, and argue that they don't. (shrink)

According to the principle of epistemic closure, knowledge is closed under known implication. The principle is intuitive but it is problematic in some cases. Suppose you know you have hands and you know that ‘I have hands’ implies ‘I am not a brain-in-a-vat’. Does it follow that you know you are not a brain-in-a-vat? It seems not; it should not be so easy to refute skepticism. In this and similar cases, we are confronted with a puzzle: epistemic closure is an (...) intuitive principle, but at times, it does not seem that we know by implication. In response to this puzzle, the literature has been mostly polarized between those who are willing to do away with epistemic closure and those who think we cannot live without it. But there is a third way. Here I formulate a restricted version of the principle of epistemic closure. In the standard version, the principle can range over any proposition; in the restricted version, it can only range over those propositions that are within the limits of a given epistemic inquiry and that do not constitute the underlying assumptions of the inquiry. If we adopt the restricted version, I argue, we can preserve the advantages associated with closure, while at the same time avoiding the puzzle I’ve described. My discussion also yields an insight into the nature of knowledge. I argue that knowledge is best understood as a topic-restricted notion, and that such a conception is a natural one given our limited cognitive resources. (shrink)

This book explores a question central to philosophy--namely, what does it take for a belief to be justified or rational? According to a widespread view, whether one has justification for believing a proposition is determined by how probable that proposition is, given one's evidence. In this book this view is rejected and replaced with another: in order for one to have justification for believing a proposition, one's evidence must normically support it--roughly, one's evidence must make the falsity of that proposition (...) abnormal in the sense of calling for special, independent explanation. This conception of justification bears upon a range of topics in epistemology and beyond. Ultimately, this way of looking at justification guides us to a new, unfamiliar picture of how we should respond to our evidence and manage our own fallibility. This picture is developed here. (shrink)

Our beliefs utilize various sources: perception, memory, induction, etc. We trust these sources to provide reliable information about the world around us. My dissertation investigates how this trust could be justified. Chapter one introduces background material. I argue that justification rather than knowledge is of primary epistemological importance, discuss the internalism/externalism debate, and introduce an evidentialist thesis that provides a starting point/framework for epistemological theorizing. Chapter two introduces a puzzle concerning justification. Can a belief source provide justification absent prior justification (...) for believing it's reliable? Any answer appears to either make justifying the reliability of a source intellectually unsatisfying or all together impossible. Chapter three considers and rejects a plethora of proposed solutions to our puzzle. Investigating these solutions illustrates the need to further investigate evidence, evidence possession, and evidential support. Chapter four discusses the metaphysics of evidence. I argue that evidence always consists of a set of facts and that fact-proposition pairs stand in confirmation relations isomorphic to those holding between pairs of propositions. Chapter five argues that justification requires what I call actually connected possession of supporting evidence: a subject must be aware of supporting evidence and of the support relation itself. Chapter six argues that the relation constitutive of a set of facts being justificatory evidence is a sui generis and irreducible relation that is knowable a priori. Chapter seven begins by showing how Richard Fumerton's acquaintance theory meets the constraints on a theory of justification laid down in previous chapters. I modify the theory so as to: make room for fallible foundational justification, and allow inferential justification absent higher-order beliefs about evidential connections. Chapter eight applies the developed theory of justification to our initial puzzle. I show how my modified acquaintance theory is in a unique position to vindicate the idea that necessarily a source provides a person with justification only if she is aware of evidence for the reliability of that source. However, this awareness of evidence for a source's reliability falls short of a justified belief and thereby avoids impalement from our dilemma's skeptical horn. (shrink)

I believe that the sort of disagreements we encounter in philosophy—disagreements that often take the form that I have elsewhere called system- atic peer disagreements—make it unreasonable to think that there is any knowledge, or even justified belief, when the disagreements themselves are systematic. I readily acknowledge that this skeptical view is quite controversial; I suspect many are unconvinced. However, I will not be defending it here. Rather, I will be exploring a worry, or set of worries, that arise on (...) the assumption that this view is correct. For if it is unreasonable to think that there is justified belief in contexts of systematic philosophical disagreements, by what right do we continue to advance philosophical claims in such contexts? Indeed, by what right do we believe the philosophical claims we advance? And if we don’t believe them, why do we advance them in the first place? An inability to respond to these worries would leave us with the dis- tinct impression that the practice or activity of philosophy is quite suspect: what sort of practice or activity would have us believe unreasonably, assert unwarrantedly, and perhaps exhibit insincerity to boot? (shrink)

This dissertation examines some of ways of evaluating beliefs, relevant to epistemology and to metaphysics. Some problems in normative epistemology are solved by properly relating justified belief, rational belief, and knowledge. Chapter 1 uses this strategy to defend externalism about justified belief. Chapters 3 and 4 defend the view that knowledge is the epistemic standard we aim for our beliefs to meet. Chapter 2 investigates which beliefs are improper because formed in an objectionably circular way. The findings support the Moorean (...) response to Brain-In-a-Vat skepticism, by rebutting the objection from ‘easy knowledge’. The theory of justified belief developed in chapter 1 underwrites the Moorean reply. Chapters 5 and 6 make a non-epistemic way of evaluating beliefs central to metaphysics. To understand relativity or vagueness in a subject-matter, we must hold that being true or false is not the metaphysically serious evaluation of how a belief answers to reality. Either verdict on a borderline case is ‘acceptable’ in the metaphysically serious sense. For a matter to be relative is for the ‘acceptability’ of affirming the proposition to vary between judges. Chapters 5 and 6 sketch an approach to metaphysics built from the notion of ‘metaphysically acceptable judgment’, with chapter 6 concentrating on vagueness, and chapter 5 focusing on relativism about knowledge. Chapter 5 argues that the lottery and preface puzzles manifest central features of our concept of knowledge. The proposed version of relativism about knowledge is the only theory to respect those features. The view of knowledge presented in chapter 5 is not an isolated metaphysical extravagance, as the same framework is needed for the right metaphysics of everything that’s vague. It is worth noting that my solution to the lottery puzzle is metaphysical relativism about knowledge, but my rebuttal of Brain-In-a-Vat skepticism concerns epistemic circularity and belongs to normative epistemology. Much recent work incorrectly assumes that the two puzzles receive the same treatment. (shrink)

I review several theoretical and empirical developments relevant to assessing contemporary virtue epistemology’s theory of knowledge. What emerges is a leaner theory of knowledge that is more empirically adequate, better captures the ordinary conception of knowledge, and is ripe for cross-fertilization with cognitive science. I call this view abilism. Along the way I identify several topics for future research.