In the recent literature on the nature of knowledge, a rivalry has emerged between modalism and explanationism. According to modalism, knowledge requires that our beliefs track the truth across some appropriate set of possible worlds. Modalists tend to focus on two modal conditions: sensitivity and safety. According to explanationism, knowledge requires only that beliefs bear the right sort of explanatory relation to the truth. In slogan form: knowledge is believing something because it’s true. In this paper, we aim to vindicate (...) explanationism from some recent objections offered by Gualtiero Piccinini, Dario Mortini, and Kenneth Boyce and Andrew Moon. Together, these authors present five purported counterexamples to the sufficiency of the explanationist analysis for knowledge. In addition, Mortini devises a clever argument that explanationism entails the violation of a plausible closure principle on knowledge. We will argue that explanationism is innocent of all these charges against it, and we hope that the strength of the defense we offer of explanationism is evidence in its favor, and a reason to investigate explanationism further as the long-elusive truth about the nature of knowledge. (shrink)

According to Greco’s early explanatory salience contextualism, _S_ knows that _p_ if and only if _S_’s cognitive abilities are the salient factor in a causal explanation of why _S_ holds a true belief rather than a false belief or no belief at all. Greco abandoned this view because it cannot handle fake barn cases and because it proves impossible to analyze knowledge in terms of a quantitative characterization of explanatory salience. The paper argues that the core idea of explanatory salience (...) contextualism could have been saved if only the causal notion of explanation had been replaced by an abductive notion. (shrink)

Some propositions are true, and it is true that some propositions are true. Each of these facts looks like an impeccable ground of the other. But they cannot both ground each other, since grounding is asymmetric. This paper explores two new diagnoses of this much discussed puzzle. The tools of higher-order logic are used to show how both diagnoses can be fleshed out into strong and consistent theories of grounding. These theories of grounding in turn demand new theories of the (...) granularity of propositions, properties, and relations. Even those who are uninterested in grounding should take seriously these pictures of reality’s logical structure, which are in many ways reminiscent of Russell’s and Wittgenstein’s logical atomism. (shrink)

Recent epistemology has witnessed a substantial opposition between two competing approaches to capturing the notion of non-accidentality in the analysis of knowledge: the explanationist and the modalist. According to the latest advocates of the former, S knows that p if and only if S believes that p because p is true. According to champions of the latter, S knows that p if and only if S's belief that p is true in a relevant set of possible worlds. Because Bogardus and (...) Perrin's explanationism promises to deliver a plausible analysis of knowledge without any need for modal notions, it is an elegant proposal with prima facie appeal. However, such version of explanationism ultimately does not live up to its promises: in this paper, I raise some objections to their explanationist analysis of knowledge while showing that modalism is in much better shape than they think. In particular, I argue that their explanationist condition generates the wrong results in Gettier cases and fake-barn cases. I also offer and defend a novel version of modalism: I introduce a refined safety condition which is shown to successfully handle the same Gettier cases that beset Bogardus and Perrin's version of explanationism. The paper concludes with a reassessment of the explanationist's initial ambition to provide an analysis of knowledge without modal notions. The upshot will be that even if the prospects for such analysis remain dim, our money should be on the modalist, not the explanationist. (shrink)

Modalists think that knowledge requires forming your belief in a “modally stable” way: using a method that wouldn't easily go wrong, or using a method that wouldn't have given you this belief had it been false. Recent Modalist projects from Justin Clarke-Doane and Dan Baras defend a principle they call “Modal Security,” roughly: if evidence undermines your belief, then it must give you a reason to doubt the safety or sensitivity of your belief. Another recent Modalist project from Carlotta Pavese (...) and Bob Beddor defends “Modal Virtue Epistemology”: knowledge is a belief that is maximally modally robust across “normal” worlds. We'll offer new objections to these recent Modalist projects. We will then argue for a rival view, Explanationism: knowing something is believing it because it's true. We will show how Explanationism offers a better account of undermining defeaters than Modalism, and a better account of knowledge. (shrink)

Jim buys a ticket in a million-ticket lottery. He knows it is a fair lottery, but, given the odds, he believes he will lose. When the winning ticket is chosen, it is not his. Did he know his ticket would lose? It seems that he did not. After all, if he knew his ticket would lose, why would he have bought it? Further, if he knew his ticket would lose, then, given that his ticket is no different in its chances (...) of winning from any other ticket, it seems that by parity of reasoning he should also know that every other ticket would lose. But of course he doesn’t know that; in fact, he knows that not every ticket will lose. (shrink)

Craig casts doubt upon the project of trying to give the traditional sort of necessary and sufficient conditions for A knows that p. He interprets the inadequacy of existing analyses of knowledge as evidence that our concept of knowledge is complex and diffuse, and concludes that we should aim to understand it by thinking about the rôle the concept plays in our lives, rather than by trying to find necessary and sufficient conditions for the truth of knowledge ascriptions.There is surely (...) something right about Craig's view: we are unlikely to succeed in any attempt to analyse away the intricacies in our concept of knowledge. We cannot realistically hope to uncover a set of necessary and sufficient conditions for A knows that p which are in all cases either clearly satisfied or clearly not satisfied. Nor, I suspect, is it possible to offer necessary and sufficient conditions for knowledge which are widely accepted as being more securely understood than knowledge itself. (shrink)

Recent epistemology has witnessed a substantial opposition between two competing approaches to capturing the notion of non-accidentality in the analysis of knowledge: the explanationist and the modalist. According to the latest advocates of the former (e.g., Bogardus and Perrin 2020), S knows that p if and only if S believes that p because p is true. According to champions of the latter (e.g., safety and sensitivity theorists), S knows that p if and only if S's belief that p is true (...) in a relevant set of possible worlds. Because Bogardus and Perrin's explanationism promises to deliver a plausible analysis of knowledge without any need for modal notions, it is an elegant proposal with prima facie appeal. However, such version of explanationism ultimately does not live up to its promises: in this paper, I raise some objections to their explanationist analysis of knowledge while showing that modalism is in much better shape than they think. In particular, I argue that their explanationist condition generates the wrong results in Gettier cases and fake-barn cases. I also offer and defend a novel version of modalism: I introduce a refined safety condition which is shown to successfully handle the same Gettier cases that beset Bogardus and Perrin's version of explanationism. The paper concludes with a reassessment of the explanationist's initial ambition to provide an analysis of knowledge without modal notions. The upshot will be that even if the prospects for such analysis remain dim, our money should be on the modalist, not the explanationist. (shrink)

I present and defend a reliabilist explanation of a priori knowledge which fulfils seven plausibility requirements.