While it is well known that the early Heidegger distinguishes between different ‘kinds of being’ and identifies various ‘structures’ that compose them, there has been little discussion about what these kinds and structures of being are. This paper defends the ‘Property Thesis’, the position that kinds of being (and their structures) are properties of the entities that have them. I give two arguments for this thesis. The first is grounded in the fact that Heidegger refers to kinds and structures of (...) being as ‘characteristics’ and ‘determinations’, which are just two different words for ‘properties’, in the broadest senses of these terms. The second argument is based on the fact that kinds and structures of being play three roles that properties are supposed to play: they are what account for similarities between things, they are what predicates express, and they are what abstract nouns refer to. (shrink)

In chapter four of Truth and Truthfulness Bernard Williams presents an account of assertion that relies heavily on the ‘psychological’ notions of belief and intention. In chapter five his definition of lying similarly relies on such notions. For Williams, insofar as there are norms governing assertion as such or norms broken by lying as such, these norms relate to saying what you think to be true, as distinct from saying what is true. I argue that this ‘psychologized’ account of assertion (...) (and lying) is for various reasons mistaken. A consequence of Williams’s approach is that ‘Shall I tell the truth here?’ is presented as a much more open question for an agent than it possibly can be. Only by adverting to the language-game presupposed by that question’s having any sense at all can we arrive at a fair picture of when and how the answer ‘No’ might be reasonable. (shrink)

We argue for a new mode of interpretation for attributed attitudes, what we call de translato interpretation. De translato interpretation assigns a meaning to an expression based on the interpretation given to that expression by the attitude subject rather than that standardly given by the attributor. We argue that this new mode of interpretation is distinct from but compatible with de dicto, de re and de qualitate interpretation. Formally, de translato interpretation is analyzed as introducing a modification in the language (...) used for interpretation, where the modification alters the attributor’s language in such a way as to more closely approximate the presumed language of a perspective holder. Attitude predicates are taken to introduce the perspective of their subject as a parameter of interpretation for the clause they embed. (shrink)

Epistemologists have known for two-and-a-half centuries that there are serious difficulties surroundingnon-demonstrativeinference. The best-known problem,theproblem of induction, was first diagnosed by Hume in theTreatise. In our own century, several more problems were added, e.g., by Hempel —the paradox of the ravens—and by Goodman —the “new,” or exacerbated, problem of induction. But an even greater blow lay ahead: within the decade after Goodman's problem appeared, Gettier was to publish his famous challenge to the traditional analysis of knowledge which, again, underscored how (...) problematic inductive inferences are. (shrink)

In recent years, there has been increasing discussion of whether philosophy actually makes progress. This discussion has been prompted, in no small part, by the depth and persistence of disagreement among philosophers on virtually every major theoretical issue in the field. In this paper, I examine the role that the Method of Cases – the widespread philosophical method of testing and revising theories by comparing their verdicts against our intuitions in particular cases – plays in creating and sustaining theoretical disagreements (...) in philosophy. Drawing on work from cognitive psychology, I argue that there is a fundamental incompatibility between the structure of the theories that philosophers seek to construct using the MoC and the structure of the concepts on which our case-specific intuitions are based. This incompatibility renders MoC-based philosophical theorizing unable ever to succeed by the very standards of adequacy that it sets for itself. And this, in turn, helps to explain the depth and persistence of theoretical disagreements – and, in certain ways, the lack of progress – in the many areas of philosophy where the MoC plays an important role. (shrink)

Sider (2011, 2013) proposes a reductive analysis of metaphysical modality—‘(modal) Humeanism’—and goes on to argue that it has interesting epistemological and methodological implications. In particular, Humeanism is supposed to undermine a class of ‘arguments from possibility’, which includes Sider's (1993) own argument against mereological nihilism and Chalmers's (1996) argument against physicalism. I argue that Sider's arguments do not go through, and moreover that we should instead expect Humeanism to be compatible with the practice of arguing from possibility in philosophy.

This article argues that justified true beliefs in Gettier cases often are not true due to luck. I offer two ‘unlucky’ Gettier cases, and it's easy enough to generate more. Hence even attaching a broad ‘anti‐luck’ codicil to the tripartite account of knowledge leaves the Gettier problem intact. Also, two related questions are addressed. First, if epistemic luck isn't distinctive of Gettier cases, what is? Second, what do Gettier cases reveal about knowledge?

Positions in the debate about the correct semantics of “S knows that p” are sometimes motivated in part by an appeal to interpretive charity. In particular, non-skeptical views hold that many utterances of the sentence “S knows that p” are true and some of them think the fact that their views are able to respect this is a reason why their views are more charitable than skeptical invariantism. However, little attention has been paid to why charity should be understood in (...) this way and little effort has been spent justifying the notion that a charitable semantics is likely to be true. I distinguish two kinds of interpretive charity. One principle of charity is often appealed to in the literature. I introduce a second. I argue that while some positions better respect one principle of charity, the reverse is true of the other principle of charity. I conclude with some remarks about how to break this apparent tie. (shrink)

Perception is typically distinguished from cognition. For example, seeing is importantly different from believing. And while what one sees clearly influences what one thinks, it is debatable whether what one believes and otherwise thinks can influence, in some direct and non-trivial way, what one sees. The latter possible relation is the cognitive penetration of perception. Cognitive penetration, if it occurs, has implications for philosophy of science, epistemology, philosophy of mind, and cognitive science. This paper offers an analysis of the phenomenon, (...) its theoretical consequences, and a variety of experimental results and possible interpretations of them. The paper concludes by proposing some constraints for analyses and definitions of cognitive penetrability. (shrink)

In this paper we propose to argue for two claims. The first is that a sizeable group of epistemological projects – a group which includes much of what has been done in epistemology in the analytic tradition – would be seriously undermined if one or more of a cluster of empirical hypotheses about epistemic intuitions turns out to be true. The basis for this claim will be set out in Section 2. The second claim is that, while the jury is (...) still out, there is now a substantial body of evidence suggesting that some of those empirical hypotheses are true. Much of this evidence derives from an ongoing series of experimental studies of epistemic intuitions that we have been conducting. A preliminary report on these studies will be presented in Section 3. In light of these studies, we think it is incumbent on those who pursue the epistemological projects in question to either explain why the truth of the hypotheses does not undermine their projects, or to say why, in light of the evidence we will present, they nonetheless assume that the hypotheses are false. In Section 4, which is devoted to Objections and Replies, we’ll consider some of the ways in which defenders of the projects we are criticizing might reply to our challenge. Our goal, in all of this, is not to offer a conclusive argument demonstrating that the epistemological projects we will be criticizing are untenable. Rather, our aim is to shift the burden of argument. (shrink)

Many philosophers have argued that an event is lucky for an agent only if it was suitably improbable, but there is considerable disagreement about how to understand this improbability condition. This paper argues for a hitherto overlooked construal of the improbability condition in terms of the lucky agent’s epistemic situation. According to the proposed account, an event is lucky for an agent only if the agent was not in a position to know that the event would occur. It is also (...) explored whether this new account threatens the anti- luck program in epistemology. It is argued that although not detrimental to the anti- luck program, the epistemic account of luck sets certain important limits to its scope and feasibility. (shrink)

It has recently been argued that indeterminacy and indeterminism make most ordinary counterfactuals false. I argue that a plausible way to avoid such counterfactual skepticism is to postulate the existence of primitive modal facts that serve as truth-makers for counterfactual claims. Moreover, I defend a new theory of ‘might’ counterfactuals, and develop assertability and knowledge criteria to suit such unobservable ‘counterfacts’.

How do people decide which claims should be considered mere beliefs and which count as knowledge? Although little is known about how people attribute knowledge to others, philosophical debate about the nature of knowledge may provide a starting point. Traditionally, a belief that is both true and justified was thought to constitute knowledge. However, philosophers now agree that this account is inadequate, due largely to a class of counterexamples (termed ‘‘Gettier cases’’) in which a person’s justified belief is true, but (...) only due to luck. We report four experiments examining the effect of truth, justification, and ‘‘Gettiering’’ on people’s knowledge attributions. These experiments show that: (1) people attribute knowledge to others only when their beliefs are both true and justified; (2) in contrast to contemporary philosophers, people also attribute knowledge to others in Gettier situations; and (3) knowledge is not attributed in one class of Gettier cases, but only because the agent’s belief is based on ‘‘apparent’’ evidence. These findings suggest that the lay concept of knowledge is roughly consistent with the traditional account of knowledge as justified true belief, and also point to a major difference between the epistemic intuitions of laypeople and those of philosophers. (shrink)

Academics across widely ranging disciplines all pursue knowledge, but they do so using vastly different methods. Do these academics therefore also have different ideas about when someone possesses knowledge? Recent experimental findings suggest that intuitions about when individuals have knowledge may vary across groups; in particular, the concept of knowledge espoused by the discipline of philosophy may not align with the concept held by laypeople. Across two studies, we investigate the concept of knowledge held by academics across seven disciplines (N (...) = 1,581) and compare these judgments to those of philosophers (N = 204) and laypeople (N = 336). We find that academics and laypeople share a similar concept of knowledge, while philosophers have a substantially different concept. These experiments show that (a) in contrast to philosophers, other academics and laypeople attribute knowledge to others in some “Gettier” situations; (b) academics and laypeople are much less likely to attribute knowledge when reminded of the possibility of error, but philosophers are not affected by this reminder; and (c) non‐philosophy academics are overall more skeptical about knowledge than laypeople or philosophers. These findings suggest that academics across a wide range of disciplines share a similar concept of knowledge, and that this concept aligns closely with the intuitions held by laypeople, and differs considerably from the concept of knowledge described in the philosophical literature, as well as the epistemic intuitions of philosophers themselves. (shrink)

Among the results of recent investigation of epistemic intuitions by experimental philosophers is the finding that epistemic intuitions show cultural variability between subjects of Western, East Asian and Indian Sub-continent origins. In this paper I ask whether the finding of this variation is evidence of cross-cultural variation in the folk-epistemological competences that give rise to these intuitions—in particular whether there is evidence of variation in subjects’ explicit or implicit theories of knowledge. I argue that positing cross-cultural variation in subjects’ implicit (...) theories of knowledge is not the only possible explanation of the intuitions, and I suggest other explanations, including the hypothesis that each subject’s implicit theory of knowledge might contain a heterogeneous set of heuristics for ascribing knowledge. Variation in intuitions, then, might be the result of within-subject heterogeneity rather than across-subject heterogeneity. (shrink)

We investigate the interactions between scalar implicatures and presuppositions in sentences containing both a scalar item and presupposition trigger. We first critically discuss Gajewski and Sharvit’s previous approach. We then closely examine two ways of integrating an exhaustivity-based theory of scalar implicatures with a trivalent approach to presuppositions. The empirical side of our discussion focuses on two novel observations: the interactions between prosody and monotonicity, and what we call presupposed ignorance. In order to account for these observations, our final proposal (...) relies on two mechanisms of scalar strengthening, the Presupposed Ignorance Principle and an exhaustivity operator which lets the presuppositions of negated alternatives project. (shrink)

This paper explores some consequences of Lewis’s (Australas J Philos 74(4):549–567, 1996) understanding of how knowledge is compartmentalized. It argues, first, that he underestimates how badly it impacts his view. When knowledge is compartmentalized, it lacks at least one of two essential features of Lewis’s account: (a) Elusiveness—familiar skeptical possibilities, when relevant, are incompatible with everyday knowledge. (b) Knowledge is a modality—when a thinker knows that p, there is no relevant possibility where p is false. Lewis proposes compartmentalized knowledge to (...) keep treating knowledge as a modality while mitigating one of its unrealistic epistemological implications: In normal modal epistemic logic (and standard possible world semantics), a thinker always counts as knowing the strongest proposition that follows from the set of all the individual propositions that this thinker knows. Lewis’s compartmentalization proposal is that thinkers merely know the conjunctions of propositions that are known in each of, but not across, their compartments. The irony is that in avoiding overblown knowledge the view now allows for thinkers to attend to skeptical error possibilities and yet knowledge is present. The account avoids inflation of knowledge in one sense only to acquire another type of knowledge the view denies subjects can have. This problem motivates an inspection of knowledge accounts whose intra-compartment closure principles are weaker than those that are valid in normal modal-logic. The conclusion is that some formulations of closure can avoid the challenge Lewis’s view faces. Nevertheless, even these closure principles pose a barrier—perhaps an implausible barrier—for knowledge of ignorance. Even when the reasoning supporting the lack of knowledge is sound, a subject cannot always know she doesn’t know. Interestingly, this obstacle is one that knowledge of knowledge doesn’t seem to face. (shrink)

Our paper addresses the following question: Is there a general characterization, for all predicates P that take both declarative and interrogative complements , of the meaning of the P-interrogative clause construction in terms of the meaning of the P-declarative clause construction? On our account, if P is a responsive predicate and Q a question embedded under P, then the meaning of ‘P + Q’ is, informally, “to be in the relation expressed by P to some potential complete answer to Q”. (...) We show that this rule allows us to derive veridical and non-veridical readings of embedded questions, depending on whether the embedding verb is veridical or not, and provide novel empirical evidence supporting the generalization. We then enrich our basic proposal to account for the presuppositions induced by the embedding verbs, as well as for the generation of intermediate exhaustive readings of embedded questions. (shrink)

Many take the claim that you cannot ‘get’ an ‘ought’ from an ‘is’ to imply that non- moral beliefs are by themselves incapable of justifying moral beliefs. I argue that this is a mistake and that the position that moral beliefs are justified exclusively by non-moral beliefs—a view that I call moral inferentialism—presents an attractive non-sceptical moral epistemology.

What do you get when you cross a fallacy with a good argument? A fugu, that is, a valid argument that tempts you to reach its conclusion invalidly. You have yielded to the temptation more than you realize. If you are a teacher, you may have served many fugus. They arise systematically through several mechanisms. Fugus are interesting intermediate cases that shed light on the following issues: bare evidentialism, false pleasure, philosophy of education, and the ethics of argument. Normally, a (...) fugu will not yield knowledge from known premises. But if the reasoning is only slightly fallacious, they do yield knowledge. These mild fugus show that we can gain knowledge by invalid reasoning. This is a conservative resource for historians. They want to credit discoveries to Euclid rather than those who made minor corrections to his proofs, such as David Hilbert. We also benefit from this practice of grandfathering in old standards of knowledge attribution. For we can compete spiritedly for priority. We do not need to worry that credit will instead go to future scholars who will make the minor amendments needed to raise present proofs to a future standard of demonstration. (shrink)

Contemporary experimental philosophers sometimes use versions of an argument from the history of philosophy to defend the claim that what they do is philosophy. Although experimental philosophers conduct surveys and carry out what appear to be experiments in psychology, making them methodologically different from most analytic philosophers working today, techniques like theirs were not out of the ordinary in the philosophy of the past, early modern philosophy in particular. Or so some of them argue. This paper disputes the argument, citing (...) important differences between early modern philosopher-scientists – Descartes, Hobbes and Boyle – and their supposed modern counterparts. Although there is some continuity between early modern philosopher-scientists and the contemporary experimentalists, it is mostly a continuity of interest in empirically informed philosophy, not a distinctively experimental philosophy. (shrink)

I extract, and then analyse critically, the epistemological ideas that are implicit in Robin DiAngelo's best-selling book White Fragility and her other writings. On what grounds, according to DiAngelo, can people know what they claim to know? And on what grounds does DiAngelo know what she claims to know?

This paper proposes a game-theoretic solution of the surprise examination problem. It is argued that the game of “matching pennies” provides a useful model for the interaction of a teacher who wants her exam to be surprising and students who want to avoid being surprised. A distinction is drawn between prudential and evidential versions of the problem. In both, the teacher should not assign a probability of zero to giving the exam on the last day. This representation of the problem (...) provides a diagnosis of where the backwards induction argument, which “proves” that no surprise exam is possible, is mistaken. (shrink)

This article treats religion as a central concern in Whitehead. His view of rational religion relies primarily on rational inference, not direct intuition. Taking seriously in religion the nonreflective elements in human cognition would not jeopardize, but would strengthen, his treatment of the reflective ones. While religion can certainly include vestiges of human savagery, it also promotes the ascent of humanity beyond social decay and enhances the art of life.

In this paper, I critically discuss one of the more influential arguments for mereological universalism, what I will call ‘the Vagueness Argument’. I argue that a premise of the Vagueness Argument is not well supported and that there are at least two good reasons for thinking that the premise in question is false.

We propose a new topological semantics for evidence, evidence-based justifications, belief, and knowledge. Resting on the assumption that an agent’s rational belief is based on the available evidence, we try to unveil the concrete relationship between an agent’s evidence, belief, and knowledge via a rich formal framework afforded by topologically interpreted modal logics. We prove soundness, completeness, decidability, and the finite model property for the associated logics, and apply this setting to analyze key epistemological issues such as “no false lemma” (...) Gettier examples, misleading defeaters, undefeated justification versus undefeated belief, as well as the defeasibility theories of knowledge. (shrink)

The cross-cultural differences in epistemic intuitions reported by Weinberg, Nichols and Stich (2001; hereafter: WNS) laid the ground for the negative program of experimental philosophy. However, most of WNS’s findings were not corroborated in further studies. The exception here is the study concerning purported differences between Westerners and Indians in knowledge ascriptions concerning the Zebra Case, which was never properly replicated. Our study replicates the above-mentioned experiment on a considerably larger sample of Westerners (n = 211) and Indians (n = (...) 204). The analysis found a significant difference between the ethnic groups in question in the predicted direction: Indians were more likely to attribute knowledge in the Zebra Case than Westerners. In this paper, we offer an explanation of our result that takes into account the fact that replications of WNS’s other experiments did not find any cross-cultural differences. We argue that the Zebra Case is unique among the vignettes tested by WNS since it should not be regarded as a Gettier case but rather as a scenario exhibiting skeptical pressure concerning the reliability of sense-perception. We argue that skepticism towards perception as a means of gaining knowledge is a trope that is deeply rooted in Western epistemology but is very much absent from Classical Indian philosophical inquiry. This line of reasoning is based on a thorough examination of the skeptical scenarios discussed by philosophers of the Indian Nyaya tradition and their adversaries. (shrink)

In the paper I introduce and discuss the interpretative procedure; a stage of thought experiments’ investigation in which it is determined which states of affairs are genuine realizations of the described story. I show how incorporating the interpretative procedure to the reconstruction a certain kind of thought experiments, i.e. the method of cases, provides a solution to the so-called problem of deviant realizations. According to this problem it is hard to formulate the logical structure of the method of cases that (...) excludes far-fetched interpretations of a particular thought experiment’s description that are inconsistent with the expected conclusion of the experiment. As I show, if we agree that the interpretative procedure precedes the act of establishing whether the thing which is at issue (e.g., knowledge) appears within a certain state of affairs, deviant realizations could be ruled out, since within interpretative procedure we establish the set of states of affairs that are compatible with the intentions of the author of the thought experiment. In the paper I provide a general explanation of how this task could be fulfilled by semantic intuitions and discuss their contextual dependence. (shrink)

The aim of the paper is to determine the role of intuitions in Gettier cases. Critics of the Method of Cases argue that arguments developed within this method contains a premise that is justified by its intuitiveness; they also argue that intuitions are unreliable source of evidence. By contrast, Max Deutsch argues that this critique is unsound since intuitions do not serve as evidence for premises. In Gettier cases, an intuitive premise is justified by other arguments called G-Grounds. I propose (...) a different view on the role of intuition in Gettier cases. I introduce a distinction between concept-revision arguments and concept-application arguments. On the basis of this distinction and Craig’s and Spicer’s distinction between intuitions of intension and intuitions of extension, I show that (1) intuitions of extension do not serve as evidence for any G-Grounds; (2) intuitions of intension do play an evidential role for all G-Grounds, but (3) in the case of G-Grounds which are used as concept-application arguments, they are a poor source of evidence, while (4) in the case of G-Grounds used as concept-revision arguments, they could be a reliable source of evidence if they are intuitions of intension of a speaker immersed in philosophical discourse. (shrink)

In this paper, I develop a serious new dilemma involving necessary truths for safety-based theories of knowledge, a dilemma that I argue safety theorists cannot resolve or avoid by relativizing safety to either the subject’s basis or method of belief formation in close worlds or to a set of related or sufficiently similar propositions. I develop this dilemma primarily in conversation with Duncan Pritchard’s well-known, oft-modeled safety-based theories of knowledge. I show that Pritchard’s well-regarded anti-luck virtue theory of knowledge and (...) his recently proposed (allegedly superior) anti-risk virtue theory of knowledge clearly succumb to the dilemma, and so they are inadequate as they stand. If Pritchard’s safety-based theories of knowledge are shown to be inadequate by the dilemma that is developed in this paper, then a number of other safety-based theories of knowledge (e.g., Beddor and Pavese’s, Luper’s, Dutant’s, early Pritchard’s, and others) look to be in jeopardy in this connection as well. (shrink)

This paper has two aims. The first is critical: I identify a set of normative desiderata for accounts of justified belief and I argue that prominent knowledge first views have difficulties meeting them. Second, I argue that my preferred account, knowledge first functionalism, is preferable to its extant competitors on normative grounds. This account takes epistemically justified belief to be belief generated by properly functioning cognitive processes that have generating knowledge as their epistemic function.

In this paper, I’ll survey a number of closure principles of epistemic justification and find them all wanting. However, it’ll be my contention that there’s a novel closure principle of epistemic justification that has the virtues of its close cousin closure principles, without their vices. This closure principle of epistemic justification can be happily thought of as a multi-premise closure principle and it cannot be used in Cartesian skeptical arguments that employ a closure principle of epistemic justification. In this way, (...) then, it represents marked improvement over other contemporary closure principles of epistemic justification that require both sacrificing multi-premise closure and forcing anti-Cartesian skeptics who reject the closure principle employed in certain Cartesian skeptical arguments to cast aside justification closure. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThis paper discusses the permissibility of exclusively relying on a procedural objectivity model for news reporting, from the perspective of the normativity of informative speech acts. It is argued that, with the exception of urgency situations, the paradigmatic application of procedural objectivity is in breach of the relevant norms.

I set out the standard view about alleged examples of failure of transmission of warrant, respond to two cases for the view, and argue that the view is false. The first argument for the view neglects the distinction between believing a proposition on the basis of a justification and merely having a justification to believe a proposition. The second argument for the view neglects the position that one's justification for believing a conclusion can be one's premise for the conclusion, rather (...) than simply one's justification for the premise. Finally, the view is false since it is inconsistent with the closure of knowledge as closure is properly understood. (shrink)

[Significantly updated in Chapter 7 of Awareness and the Substructure of Knowledge] Many have found it plausible that knowledge is a constitutively normative state, i.e. a state that is grounded in the possession of reasons. Many have also found it plausible that certain cases of proprioceptive knowledge, memorial knowledge, and self-evident knowledge are cases of knowledge that are not grounded in the possession of reasons. I refer to these as cases of basic knowledge. The existence of basic knowledge forms a (...) primary objection to the idea that knowledge is a constitutively normative state. In what follows I offer a way through the apparent dilemma of having to choose between either basic knowledge or the normativity of knowledge. The solution involves homing in on a state of awareness (≈non-accidental true representation) that is distinct from knowledge and which in turn grounds the normativity of knowledge in a way that is fully consistent with the existence of basic knowledge. An upshot of this is that externalist theories of knowledge turn out to be fully compatible with the thesis that knowledgeable beliefs are always beliefs that are justified by the reasons one possesses. (shrink)

Virtue epistemology is one of the most popular approaches to epistemological research in Anglophone philosophy. However, it is little known in Ukraine. The article aims to familiarize its readers with the making of virtue epistemology, presenting parallels with virtue ethics. The au- thor makes an attempt to determine the place that virtue epistemology holds in modern philo- sophical discourse. The article provides a brief overview of the main research topics, the biggest controversies within the field, and the systematisation of classification (...) types within the field. The author considers responsibilist and reliabilist approaches to the definition of intellectual virtue. Furthermore, she demonstrates the importance of the Gettier problem for the formation and development of virtue epistemology theories. The article serves as a preliminary sketch of the current state of the Anglophone epistemo- logical discussion presenting research in the field of virtue epistemology from its appearance to the present day. The overview nature of the article is used to test proposed translations of modern epistemological terminology in Ukrainian. The primary goal of the article is to introduce virtue epistemology to the Ukrainian philosophical discourse. (shrink)

While logical theories of information attitudes, such as knowledge, certainty and belief, have flourished in the past two decades, formalization of other facets of rational behavior have lagged behind significantly. One intriguing line of research concerns the concept of intention. I will discuss one approach to tackling the notion within a logical framework, based on a database perspective.

This paper critically explores Timothy Williamson’s view of evidence, and it does so in light of the problem of epistemic luck. Williamson’s view of evidence is, of course, a crucially important aspect of his novel and influential “knowledge-first” epistemological project. Notoriously, one crucial thesis of this project is that one’s evidence is equivalent to what one knows. This has come to be known as the E = K thesis. This paper specifically addresses Williamson’s knowledge-first epistemology and the E = K (...) thesis in the context of anti-luck epistemology and the idea that knowledge is factive. Williamson’s views on these matters are worth investigating in some detail because he subscribes to a well-worked out anti-luck view of knowledge that incorporates what is perhaps the most common anti-luck condition. But this paper is also of more general importance because the critique of Williamson’s views on these matters reveals some important things about the nature of evidence and evidence is one of the most fundamental concepts in epistemology. (shrink)

Philosophical progress is one of the most controversial topics in metaphilosophy. It has been widely debated whether philosophy makes any progress in history. This paper revisits the concept of philosophical progress. It first identifies two criteria of an ideal concept of philosophical progress. It then argues that our accounts of philosophical progress fail to provide such an ideal concept. Finally, it argues that not only do we not have a good concept of philosophical progress, we also do not need a (...) concept of philosophical progress in order to arrive at a good understanding of the history of philosophy. (shrink)

Sosa (2007) claims that a necessary condition on knowledge is manifesting an epistemic competence. To manifest an epistemic competence, a belief must satisfy two conditions: (1) it must derive from the exercise of a reliable belief-forming disposition in appropriate conditions for its exercise and (2) that exercise of the disposition in those conditions would not issue a false belief in a close possible world. Drawing on recent psychological research, I show that memories that are issued by episodic memory retrieval fail (...) to satisfy either of these conditions. This presents Sosa, and other proponents of similar conditions (e.g. some safety theorists and process reliabilists), with a dilemma: (1) deny that episodic memories count as knowledge or (2) give up the conditions as necessary conditions on knowledge. I explore the implications of this dilemma for our understanding of knowledge, memory and the relationship between them. (shrink)

In saying that it was up to someone whether or not she acted as she did, we are attributing a distinctive sort of power to her. Understanding such power attributions is of broad importance for contemporary discussions of free will. Yet the ‘is up to…whether’ locution and its cognates have largely escaped close examination. This article aims to elucidate one of its unnoticed features, namely that such power attributions introduce intensional contexts, something that is easily overlooked because the sentences that (...) express these attributions admit of both intensional and extensional readings. I argue that this kind of power attribution should inform discussions of Frankfurt’s counterexample strategy, in that an alternative possibility should not be considered robust unless it’s up to the agent whether or not it’s realized. I argue, as well, that understanding robust alternatives in this way sheds light on the relationship between the Frankfurt literature and the Luck Objection to libertarianism. (shrink)

This is an editorial introduction to a special issue of Acta Analytica on epistemic luck.