Justification logics are constructive analogues of modal logics. They are often used as epistemic logics, particularly as models of evidentialist justification. However, in this role, justification (and modal) logics are defective insofar as they represent justification with a necessity-like operator, whereas actual evidentialist justification is usually probabilistic. This paper first examines and rejects extant candidates for solving this problem: Milnikel’s Logic of Uncertain Justifications, Ghari’s Hájek–Pavelka-Style Justification Logics and a version of probabilistic justification logic developed by Kokkinis et al. It (...) then proposes a new solution to the problem in the form of a justification logic that incorporates the essential features of both a fuzzy logic and a probabilistic logic. (shrink)

How is it that a speaker _S_ can at once make it obvious to an audience _A_ that she intends to communicate some proposition _p_, and yet at the same time retain plausible deniability with respect to this intention? The answer is that _S_ can bring it about that _A_ has a high justified credence that ‘_S_ intended _p_’ without putting _A_ in a position to know that ‘_S_ intended _p_’. In order to achieve this _S_ has to exploit a (...) sense in which communication can be lottery-like. After defending this view of deniability I argue that it compares favorably to a rival account recently developed by Dinges and Zakkou (Mind, https://doi.org/10.1093/mind/fzac056, 2023 ). (shrink)

Crispin Wright tried to refute classical 'Cartesian' skepticism contending that its core argument is extendible to a reductio ad absurdum (_Mind<D>, 100, 87-116, 1991). We show both that Wright is mistaken and that his mistakes are philosophically illuminating. Wright's 'best version' of skepticism turns on a concept of warranted belief. By his definition, many of our well-founded beliefs about the external world and mathematics would not be warranted. Wright's position worsens if we take 'warranted belief' to be implicitly defined by (...) the general principles governing it. Those principles are inconsistent, as shown by a variant of Godel's argument. Thus the inconsistency Wright found has nothing to do with the special premises of Cartesian skepticism, but is embedded in his own conceptual apparatus. Lastly, we show how a Cartesian skeptic could avoid Wright's critique by reconstructing a skeptical argument that does not use the claims Wright ultimately finds objectionable. (shrink)

This paper considers some puzzling knowledge ascriptions and argues that they present prima facie counterexamples to credence, belief, and justification conditions on knowledge, as well as to many of the standard meta-semantic assumptions about the context-sensitivity of ‘know’. It argues that these ascriptions provide new evidence in favor of contextualist theories of knowledge—in particular those that take the interpretation of ‘know’ to be sensitive to the mechanisms of constraint.

The principle of epistemic closure is the claim that what is known to follow from knowledge is known to be true. This intuitively plausible idea is endorsed by a vast majority of knowledge theorists. There are significant problems, however, that have to be addressed if epistemic closure – closed knowledge – is endorsed. The present essay locates the problem for closed knowledge in the separation it imposes between knowledge and evidence. Although it might appear that all that stands between knowing (...) the truth of the premises of a valid inference and knowledge of its conclusion is inferring it from the premises, the evidence for each of the premises may jointly count against the conclusion. The intuitive view regarding inferred knowledge says one thing, the evidence says another. One epistemological framework that seems to have the resources to resolve this tension endorses the view that knowledge always requires conclusive evidence. A second framework resolves the tension by limiting the scope of the closure principle. Only inferences drawn directly from propositions contained in the scope of a single knowledge operator are considered closed. The aim of the present essay is to revive the unpopular third option, the idea that knowledge is open. The essay proceeds by arguing that in different ways the two former frameworks only succeed in relocating the problem, not in resolving it. The first framework, the infallibilist view, relocates the problem to a sharp separation between knowledge of the occurrences of events from knowledge of their chance of occurring, a separation leading to several significant additional problems. The fallibilist view, the second framework, in endorsing closure neglects to take into full account the ways in which evidence fails to be transitive. For instance, evidence can count in favor of a conjunction while counting against each of its conjuncts. This fact, which is argued for in the essay on probabilistic as well as non-probabilistic grounds, is used as the foundation of an argument against closed knowledge that can be used as a way to understand several of the most fundamental challenges of epistemology. Not only can an open knowledge view that is based on open evidence resolve all these problems in a simple and natural way, it can also respond to formidable challenges that significantly hinder other open knowledge views. There are good reasons, then, to view both knowledge and evidence as open. (shrink)

Epistemological contrastivism can model how infallible knowledge functions by employing the explanatory resource of structural differences between contrastive propositions, e.g., “P rather than Q”, and orthodox propositions, e.g., “P”. In doing so we notice that how this difference factors into our conception of infallible knowledge depends on two aspects: one, whether belief acts as a necessary condition for knowledge, and two, whether epistemic justification is construed as consciously internalist or non-consciously externalist. We further leverage the notion of phenomenal resolution, conceived (...) as an outcome of one’s discriminative capacities in accessing their evidence, to clarify in what sense it becomes reasonable to say that the truth of P mutually excludes the truth of Q when the latter is contrasted to the former. Importantly then, there is a way of infallibly knowing that P that is indistinguishable from infallibly knowing that P rather than Q, and a way that is not. (shrink)

This Open Access book addresses the age-old problem of infinite regresses in epistemology. How can we ever come to know something if knowing requires having good reasons, and reasons can only be good if they are backed by good reasons in turn? The problem has puzzled philosophers ever since antiquity, giving rise to what is often called Agrippa's Trilemma. The current volume approaches the old problem in a provocative and thoroughly contemporary way. Taking seriously the idea that good reasons are (...) typically probabilistic in character, it develops and defends a new solution that challenges venerable philosophical intuitions and explains why they were mistakenly held. Key to the new solution is the phenomenon of fading foundations, according to which distant reasons are less important than those that are nearby. The phenomenon takes the sting out of Agrippa's Trilemma; moreover, since the theory that describes it is general and abstract, it is readily applicable outside epistemology, notably to debates on infinite regresses in metaphysics. (shrink)

The ambiguity theory of ‘knows’ is the view that ‘knows’ and its cognates have more than one sense, and that which sense of ‘knows’ is used in a knowledge ascription or denial determines, in part, the meaning (and as a result the truth conditions) of that knowledge ascription or denial. In this paper, I argue that the ambiguity theory of ‘knows’ ought to be taken seriously by those drawn to epistemic contextualism. In doing so I first argue that the ambiguity (...) theory of ‘knows’ is a distinct view from epistemic contextualism. Second, I provide independent philosophical and linguistic considerations to motivate the ambiguity theory. Third, I argue that the ambiguity theory has the same central, generally agreed upon virtues ascribed to epistemic contextualism (namely, the ability to solve certain persistent epistemological problems relating to skeptical arguments and the ability to preserve the truth of most of our everyday, ordinary usages of ‘knows’ and its cognates). Finally, I provide an ambiguity-theory-friendly account of why contextualism may be initially appealing, and why this shouldn’t dissuade us from taking the ambiguity theory seriously nonetheless. (shrink)

Radical skepticism is the view that we know nothing or at least next to nothing. Nearly no one actually believes that skepticism is true. Yet it has remained a serious topic of discussion for millennia and it looms large in popular culture. What explains its persistent and widespread appeal? How does the skeptic get us to doubt what we ordinarily take ourselves to know? I present evidence from two experiments that classic skeptical arguments gain potency from an interaction between two (...) factors. First, people evaluate inferential belief more harshly than perceptual belief. Second, people evaluate inferential belief more harshly when its content is negative (i.e., that something is not the case) than when it is positive (i.e., that something is the case). It just so happens that potent skeptical arguments tend to focus our attention on negative inferential beliefs, and we are especially prone to doubt that such beliefs count as knowledge. That is, our cognitive evaluations are biased against this specific combination of source and content. The skeptic sows seeds of doubt by exploiting this feature of our psychology. (shrink)

Contemporary philosophers nearly unanimously endorse knowledge reliabilism, the view that knowledge must be reliably produced. Leading reliabilists have suggested that reliabilism draws support from patterns in ordinary judgments and intuitions about knowledge, luck, reliability, and counterfactuals. That is, they have suggested a proto-reliabilist hypothesis about “commonsense” or “folk” epistemology. This paper reports nine experimental studies (N = 1262) that test the proto-reliabilist hypothesis by testing four of its principal implications. The main findings are that (a) commonsense fully embraces the possibility (...) of unreliable knowledge, (b) knowledge judgments are surprisingly insensitive to information about reliability, (c) “anti-luck” intuitions about knowledge have nothing to do with reliability specifically, and (d) reliabilists have mischaracterized the intuitive counterfactual properties of knowledge and their relation to reliability. When combined with the weakness of existing arguments for reliabilism and the recent emergence of well supported alternative views that predict the widespread existence of unreliable knowledge, the present findings are the final exhibit in a conclusive case for abandoning reliabilism in epistemology. I introduce an alternative theory of knowledge, abilism, which out-performs reliabilism and well explains all the available evidence. (shrink)

Many philosophers claim that interesting forms of epistemic evaluation are insensitive to truth in a very specific way. Suppose that two possible agents believe the same proposition based on the same evidence. Either both are justified or neither is; either both have good evidence for holding the belief or neither does. This does not change if, on this particular occasion, it turns out that only one of the two agents has a true belief. Epitomizing this line of thought are thought (...) experiments about radically deceived “brains in vats.” It is widely and uncritically assumed that such a brain is equally justified as its normally embodied human “twin.” This “parity” intuition is the heart of truth-insensitive theories of core epistemological properties such as justification and rationality. Rejecting the parity intuition is considered radical and revisionist. In this paper, I show that exactly the opposite is true. The parity intuition is idiosyncratic and widely rejected. A brain in a vat is not justified and has worse evidence than its normally embodied counterpart. On nearly every ordinary way of evaluating beliefs, a false belief is significantly inferior to a true belief. Of all the evaluations studied here, only blamelessness is truth-insensitive. (shrink)

A critical review of “Gettier” cases and theoretical attempts to solve “the” "Gettier" "problem".

I review recent empirical findings on knowledge attributions in lottery cases and report a new experiment that advances our understanding of the topic. The main novel finding is that people deny knowledge in lottery cases because of an underlying qualitative difference in how they process probabilistic information. “Outside” information is generic and pertains to a base rate within a population. “Inside” information is specific and pertains to a particular item’s propensity. When an agent receives information that 99% of all lottery (...) tickets lose (outside information), people judge that she does not know that her ticket will lose. By contrast, when an agent receives information that her specific ticket is 99% likely to lose (inside information), people judge that she knows that her ticket will lose. Despite this difference in knowledge judgments, people rate the likelihood of her ticket losing the exact same in both cases (i.e. 99%). The results shed light on other factors affecting knowledge judgments in lottery cases, including formulaic expression and participants’ own estimation of whether it is true that the ticket will lose. The results also undermine previous hypotheses offered for knowledge denial in lottery cases, including the hypotheses that people deny knowledge because they either deny justification or acknowledge a chance for error. (shrink)

The epistemic closure principle says that knowledge is closed under known entailment. The closure principle is deeply implicated in numerous core debates in contemporary epistemology. Closure’s opponents claim that there are good theoretical reasons to abandon it. Closure’s proponents claim that it is a defining feature of ordinary thought and talk and, thus, abandoning it is radically revisionary. But evidence for these claims about ordinary practice has thus far been anecdotal. In this paper, I report five studies on the status (...) of epistemic closure in ordinary practice. Despite decades of widespread assumptions to the contrary in philosophy, ordinary practice is ambivalent about closure. Ordinary practice does not endorse an unqualified version of the epistemic closure principle, although it might endorse a source-relative version of the principle. In particular, whereas inferential knowledge is not viewed as closed under known entailment, perceptual knowledge might be. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to analyze methodological problems of cross-cultural research in experimental philosophy. By studying five research projects, representing two distinct approaches to the examination of cross-cultural differences in philosophical intuitions, I point out the difficulties related to the content validity that appear in the choice of some cultural affiliation indicators. I criticize various indicators of cultural affiliation that are used in experimental philosophy (selfidentification, language) and suggest which indicators, and how, should be chosen in that kind (...) of research. I also argue that some problems related to bilingualism, translation, and the possible influence of language on the owned or reported philosophical intuitions may be impossible to transcend in cross-cultural research in experimental philosophy. It may be impossible to assess the differences between cultural philosophical intuitions. (shrink)

Libertarianism about free will conjoins the thesis that free will requires indeterminism with the thesis that we have free will. Here the claim that we have experiential evidence for the libertarian position is assessed. It is argued that, on a straightforward reading, the claim is false, for our experiences as agents don't support the claim that free will requires indeterminism. However, our experiences as agents may still have a role to play in an overall case for libertarianism, insofar as they (...) give us some (defeasible) reason to think that we have free will. This latter claim is defended against a pair of objections that have been leveled against it. (shrink)

The Cartesian arguments for external world skepticism are usually considered to be significant for at least two reasons: they seem to present genuine paradoxes and that providing an adequate response to these arguments would reveal something epistemically important about knowledge, justification, and/or our epistemic position to the world. Using only premises and reasoning the skeptic accepts, I will show that the most common Cartesian argument for external world skepticism leads to a previously unrecognized self-undermining dilemma: it either leads to a (...) reductio ad absurdum, or to avoid this reductio the skeptic must accept that this argument is epistemically idle—it does not provide any support for external world skepticism. Either way, this Cartesian argument cannot legitimately threaten or even call into question our beliefs about the external world. And thus, either way, this Cartesian argument for external world skepticism is not epistemically significant—it is not a genuine paradox and adequately responding to it need not reveal anything epistemically important. (shrink)

We face reality presented with the data of conscious experience and nothing else. The project of early modern philosophy was to build a complete theory of the world from this starting point, with no cheating. Crucial to this starting point is the data of conscious sensory experience – sense data. Attempts to avoid this project often argue that the very idea of sense data is confused. But the sense-data way of talking, the sense-data language, can be freed from every blemish (...) using ideas from contemporary metaontology. We can adopt a sense-data framework that vindicates the traditional claims of sense-data theories and leads to plausible theories of perception and color. We can, we should, and in a sense, we must. Yet when we do, we face the traditional problem of external world skepticism, head-on. The real challenge of skepticism is forced upon us; it cannot honestly be avoided using externalist tricks, burden of proof shifting, or other razzle dazzle. But the challenge can be met: we are rational to posit the external world as the best explanation of the many synchronic and diachronic patterns over our sense-data. This paper argues for all of these points and ends with a plea for analytic empiricism – a traditional sense-data version of empiricism that uses all of the tools of analytic philosophy while avoiding the more questionable doctrines of the Vienna Circle (phenomenalism, verificationism). Analytic empiricism is our last best hope for completing the great philosophical project of early modern philosophy. (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)

It is received wisdom that the skeptic has a devastating line of argument in the following. You probably think, he says, that you know that you have hands. But if you knew that you had hands, then you would also know that you were not a brain in a vat, a brain suspended in fluid with electrodes feeding you perfectly coordinated impressions that are generated by a supercomputer, of a world that looks and moves just like this one. You would (...) know you weren’t in this state if you knew you had hands, since having hands implies you are no brain in a vat. You obviously don’t know you’re not a brain in a vat, though—you have no evidence that would distinguish that state from the normal one you think you’re in. Therefore, by modus tollens, you don’t know you have hands. At least, the skeptic has a devastating argument, it is thought, if we grant him closure of knowledge under known implication, which many of us are inclined to do: roughly, if you know p, and you know that p implies q, then you know q. (shrink)

This paper addresses a problem about epistemic warrant. The problem is posed by philosophical arguments for externalism about the contents of thoughts, and similarly by philosophical arguments for architecturalism about thinking, when these arguments are put together with a thesis of first person authority. In each case, first personal knowledge about our thoughts plus the kind of knowledge that is provided by a philosophical argument seem, together, to open an unacceptably ‘non-empirical’ route to knowledge of empirical facts. Furthermore, this unwelcome (...) prospect of transferring a ‘non-empirical’ warrant from premises about our own mental states and about philosophical theory to a conclusion about external environment or internal architecture seems to depend upon little more than the possibility of knowledge by inference. (The use of the scare-quoted term ‘non-empirical’ is explained a couple of paragraphs further on.). (shrink)

In this paper I argue first, that a contrastive account of self-knowledge and the propositional attitudes entails an anti-individualist account of propositional attitude concepts, second, that the final account provides a solution to the McKinsey paradox, and third, that the account has the resources to explain why certain anti-skeptical arguments fail.

Contrastivism is the view that knowledge is a ternary relation between an agent, a content proposition, and a contrast, and it explains that a binary knowledge ascription sentence appears to be context-sensitive because different contexts can implicitly fill the contrast with different values. This view is purportedly supported by certain linguistic evidence. An objective of this paper is to argue that contrastivism is not empirically adequate, as there are examples that favor its contextualist cousin. Thereafter, I shall develop a contextualist (...) account for the relevant linguistic data. The account consists of a contextualist semantics and some rules of pragmatics. The two parts combined show that contrastivism is neither sufficient nor necessary as a satisfactory theory of knowledge ascriptions. (shrink)

Half a century later, a Dretskean stance on epistemic closure remains a minority view. Why? Mainly because critics have successfully poked holes in the epistemologies on which closure fails. However, none of the familiar pro-closure moves works against the counterexamples on display here. It is argued that these counterexamples pose the following dilemma: either accept that epistemic closure principles are false, and steal the thunder from those who attack classical logic on the basis of similarly problematic cases—specifically, relevance logicians and (...) like-minded philosophers—or stick with closure and surrender to relevantist claims of failure in truth-preservation aimed at classical rules of inference. Classicist closure advocates find the promise of a way out of the dilemma in the works of Roy Sorensen and John Hawthorne. The paper argues against their pro-closure move and renews Robert Audi’s call for a theory of closure-failure. (shrink)

It is argued, on the basis of new counterexamples, that neither knowledge nor epistemic justification (or “epistemic rationality”) can reasonably be thought to be closed under logical implication. The argument includes an attempt to reconcile the fundamental intuitions of the opposing parties in the debate.

In attempting to debunk moral realism through an appeal to evolutionary facts, debunkers face a series of problems, which we label the problems of scope, corrosiveness, and post‐hoc justification. To overcome these problems, debunkers must assume certain metaphysical or epistemological positions, or otherwise pre‐establish them. In doing so, they must assume or pre‐establish the very conclusion they seek in advancing the argument. This means that such debunking arguments either beg the question against the moral realist or are undermined as standalone (...) metaethical arguments. (shrink)

Infallibilism is commonly rejected because it is apparently subject to easy counter-examples. I describe a strategy that infallibilists can use to resist this objection. Because the sentences used in the counter-examples to express evidence and belief are context-sensitive, the infallibilist can insist that such counter-examples trade on a vacillation between different readings of these sentences. I describe what difficulties await those who try to produce counter-examples against which the proposed strategy is ineffective.

David Lewis, Stewart Cohen, and Keith DeRose have proposed that sentences of the form S knows P are indexical, and therefore differ in truth value from one context to another.1 On their indexical contextualism, the truth value of S knows P is determined by whether S meets the epistemic standards of the speakers context. I will not be concerned with relational forms of contextualism, according to which the truth value of S knows P is determined by the standards of the (...) subject Ss context, regardless of the standards applying to the speaker making the knowledge claim. Relational contextualism is a form of normative relativism. Indexical contextualism is a semantic theory. When the subject is the speaker, as when S is the first person pronoun I, the two forms of contextualism coincide. But otherwise, they diverge. I critically examine the principal arguments for indexicalism, detail linguistic evidence against it, and suggest a pragmatic alternative. (shrink)

Critical comments on Guido Melchior’s book, Knowing and Checking: An Epistemological Investigation (2019). In the second part of his book, Melchior aims to employ his sensitivity account of the epistemic concept of checking to explain well-known puzzle cases about knowing. My comments focus on Melchior’s explanation of knowledge-closure puzzles, as exemplified by Dretske’s zebra case. I raise three critical points about the explanation Melchior proposes for puzzles of this type.

In this paper I look at Fred Dretske’s account of information and knowledge as developed in Knowledge and The Flow of Information. In particular, I translate Dretske’s probabilistic definition of information to a modal logical framework and subsequently use this to explicate the conception of information and its flow which is central to his account, including the notions of channel conditions and relevant alternatives. Some key products of this task are an analysis of the issue of information closure and an (...) investigation into some of the logical properties of Dretske’s account of information flow. (shrink)

Dretske's conclusive reasons account of knowledge is designed to explain how epistemic closure can fail when the evidence for a belief does not transmit to some of that belief's logical consequences. Critics of Dretske dispute the argument against closure while joining Dretske in writing off transmission. This paper shows that, in the most widely accepted system for counterfactual logic , conclusive reasons are governed by an informative, non-trivial, logical transmission principle. If r is a conclusive reason for believing p in (...) Dretske's sense, and if p logically implies q, and if p and q satisfy one additional condition, it follows that r is a conclusive reason for believing q. After introducing this additional condition, I explain its intuitive import and use the condition to shed new light on Dretske's response to scepticism, as well as on his distinction between the so-called ‘lightweight’ and ‘heavyweight’ implications of a piece of perceptual knowledge. (shrink)

What relation must hold between a fact p and the corresponding belief that p for the belief to amount to knowledge? Many authors have recently proposed that the relation can be captured by subjunctive conditionals. In this paper I critically evaluate the main proposals along those lines.

In the contemporary expanding literature on transmission failure and its connections with issues such as the Closure principle, the nature of perceptual warrant, Moore’s proof of an external world and the effectiveness of Humean scepticism, it has often been assumed that there is just one kind of it: the one made familiar by the writings of Crispin Wright and Martin Davies. Although it might be thought that one kind of failure is more than enough, Davies has recently challenged this view: (...) apparently, there are more ways in heaven and earth that warrant can fail to transmit across valid inference from one (set of) belief(s) to another, than have been dreamt of in philosophy so far. More specifically, Davies thinks that a second kind of transmission failure has to be countenanced. He connects each kind of failure of transmission of warrant with two different kinds of epistemic project, respectively, and with the exploration of whether the current dispute between conservatives such as Wright, and liberals such as Jim Pryor, on the nature of perceptual warrant, would have a bearing on them. I point out why Davies’s second kind of transmission failure is indeed no such thing. I then move on to canvass another kind of transmission failure, different from the one studied by both Wright and Davies, and dependent on an alternative conception of the structure of empirical warrants, which I dub “moderatism”. I then consider how this alternative notion of transmission failure fares with respect to Moore’s proof, its relationship with Wright’s kind of transmission failure and with the Closure principle. In closing, I defend it from criticisms that can be elicited from Pryor’s recent work. (shrink)

Despite its intrinsic plausibility, the sensitivity principle has remained deeply unpopular on the grounds that it violates an even more plausible closure principle. Here we show that sensitivity does not, in general, violate closure. Sensitivity only violates closure when combined with further auxiliary premises—regarding which of an agent’s commitments constitute that agent’s beliefs—which are optional for the sensitivity theorist.

The paper discusses some themes in Duncan Pritchard’s last book, Epistemic Angst. Radical Skepticism and the Groundlessness of Our Believing. It considers it in relation to other forms of Wittgenstein-inspired hinge-epistemology. It focuses, in particular, on the proposed treatment of Closure in relation to entailments containing hinges, the treatment of Underdetermination-based skeptical paradox and the avail to disjunctivism to respond to the latter. It argues that, although bold and thought-provoking, the mix of hinge epistemology and disjunctivism Pritchard proposes is not (...) motivated. (shrink)

_ Source: _Volume 7, Issue 4, pp 217 - 234 The paper presents the key themes of my _Extended Rationality: A Hinge Epistemology_. It focuses, in particular, on the moderate account of perceptual justification, the constitutive response put forward against Humean skepticism, epistemic relativism, the closure principle, the transmission of warrant principle, as well as on the applications of the extended rationality view to the case of the principle of the uniformity of nature, testimony, and the justification of basic laws (...) of inference. (shrink)

Recently, a number of writers have presented an argument to the effect that leading causal theories make available accounts of affect’s motivational role, but at the cost of failing to understand affect’s rationalizing role. Moreover, these writers have gone on to argue that these considerations support the adoption of an alternative (“evaluationist”) conception of pleasure and pain that, in their view, successfully explains both the motivational and rationalizing roles of affective experience. We believe that this argument from rationalization is ineffective (...) in choosing between evaluationist and causal theories of affective experience, and that the impression to the contrary rests on a serious misunderstanding of the dialectic between the two views. We’ll describe general forms of causal and evaluationist theories, set out the argument that has been deployed by evaluationists against causal theorists, and then show how that argument rests on crucial and highly controversial presuppositions. (shrink)

This essay aims to reorient current theorizing about luck as an aid to our discerning this concept's true philosophical significance. After introducing the literature's leading theories of luck, it presents and defends counterexamples to each of them. It then argues that recent luck theorists’ main target of analysis—the concept of an event's being lucky for a subject—is parasitic on the more fundamental notion of an event's being a stroke of luck for a subject, which thesis serves as at least a (...) partial diagnosis of the leading theories’ failure. Next, it develops an analysis of strokes of luck that utilizes insights from the recent luck literature. Finally, having set out a comprehensive new analysis of luck—the Enriched Strokes Account of lucky events—the essay revisits the initial counterexamples to the literature's leading theories and argues that the Enriched Strokes Account properly handles all of them. (shrink)

In this paper, I consider some issues involving a certain closure principle for Structural Justification, a relation between a cognitive subject and a proposition that’s expressed by locutions like ‘S has a source of justification for p’ and ‘p is justifiable for S’. I begin by summarizing recent work by Peter Klein that advances the thesis that the indicated closure principle is plausible but lacks Skeptical utility. I then assess objections to Klein’s thesis based on work by Robert Audi and (...) Anthony Brueckner. One finding is that the typical statement of the relevant closure principle can express a number of different closure principles, and that recognizing this helps to resolve certain disputes. (shrink)

Many philosophers hold that luck excludes control-more precisely, that an event is lucky for you only if that event lies beyond your control. Call this the Lack of Control Requirement (LCR) on luck. Jennifer Lackey [2008] has recently argued that there is no such requirement on luck. Should such an argument succeed, it would (among other things) disable a main objection to the "libertarian" position in the free will debate. After clarifying the LCR, I defend it against both Lackey's argument (...) and a novel argument different in kind from Lackey's. I undermine each of these arguments by sketching a plausible error theory for its key intuition. For each argument, there's a natural reply available to its proponents. I show that these natural replies depend on certain mistaken general principles about luck. Neither Lackey's argument nor the novel argument I consider casts serious doubt on the LCR. [Word count: 147]. (shrink)

The preface paradox does not show that it can be rational to have inconsistent beliefs, because preface writers do not have inconsistent beliefs. I argue, first, that a fully satisfactory solution to the preface paradox would have it that the preface writer's beliefs are consistent. The case here is on basic intuitive grounds, not the consequence of a theory of rationality or of belief. Second, I point out that there is an independently motivated theory of belief – sensitivism – which (...) allows such a solution. I sketch a sensitivist account of the preface writer's doxastic state. (shrink)

This paper deals with the semantic issues of epistemological contextualism - the doctrine according to which the truth-conditions of knowledge ascribing sentences vary depending on the context in which they are uttered. According to the contextualist, a sentence of the form "S knows that p" does not express a complete proposition. Different utterances of this same sentence, in different contexts of utterance, can express different propositions: "know" is context-dependent. Little attention has been paid to a precise formulation of the semantic (...) contextualist thesis grounding epistemological contextualism. My goal is then to assess differences and similarities between "know" and context-sensitive terms in a natural language – in particular pure indexicals and demonstratives: my remarks are a strong argument against the postulation of an indexical element in ascriptions of propositional knowledge. (shrink)

It is argued, on the basis of new counterexamples, that neither knowledge nor epistemic justification (or epistemic rationality ) can reasonably be thought to be closed under logical implication. The argument includes an attempt to reconcile the fundamental intuitions of the opposing parties in the debate.