The recursive aspect of process reliabilism has rarely been examined. The regress puzzle, which illustrates infinite regress arising from the combination of the recursive structure and the no-defeater condition incorporated into it, is a valuable exception. However, this puzzle can be dealt with in the framework of process reliabilism by reconsidering the relationship between the recursion and the no-defeater condition based on the distinction between prima facie and ultima facie justification. Thus, the regress puzzle is not a basis for abandoning (...) process reliabilism. A genuinely intractable problem for recursive reliabilism lies in the gap between the reliability of the entire path to a belief and that of its parts. Confronted with this puzzle, reliabilists can orient themselves toward ‘reliable-as-a-whole reliabilism’ instead of ‘reliable-in-every-part reliabilism’, including recursive reliabilism, which is found to be not well-motivated. (shrink)

Many epistemologists endorse a view I call “evidence essentialism:” if e is evidence of h, for some agent at some time, then necessarily, e is evidence of h, for any agent at any time. I argue that such a view is only plausible if we ignore cognitive diversity among epistemic agents, i.e., the fact that different agents have different—sometimes radically different—cognitive skills, abilities, and proclivities. Instead, cognitive diversity shows that evidential relations are contingent and relative to cognizers. This is especially (...) obvious in extreme cases and in connection with epistemic defeat, but it is also very plausibly true of ordinary agents, and regarding prima facie justification. (shrink)

What justifies our beliefs about what other people say? According to epistemic inferentialism​, the justification of comprehension-based beliefs depends on the justification of other beliefs, e.g., beliefs about what words the speaker uttered or even what sounds they produced. According to epistemic non-inferentialism, the justification of comprehension-based beliefs ​does not depend on the justification of other beliefs. This paper offers a new defense of epistemic non-inferentialism. First, I discuss three counterexamples to epistemic non-inferentialism provided recently by Brendan Balcerak Jackson. I (...) argue that only one of Balcerak Jackson’s counterexamples is effective, and that it is effective against only one version of epistemic non-inferentialism, viz. language comprehension dogmatism. Second, I propose an alternative version of epistemic non-inferentialism, viz. comprehension-process reliabilism, which is immune to these counterexamples. I conclude that we should follow Balcerak Jackson in his rejection of language comprehension dogmatism but not all the way to the endorsement of epistemic inferentialism. Comprehension-process reliabilism is superior to both these alternatives. (shrink)

Nearly everyone agrees that perception gives us justification and knowledge, and a great number of epistemologists endorse a particular two-part view about how this happens. The view is that perceptual beliefs get their justification from perceptual experiences, and that they do so by being based on them. Despite the ubiquity of these two views, I think that neither has very much going for it; on the contrary, there’s good reason not to believe either one of them.

Influential cases have been provided that seem to suggest that one can fail to have knowledge because of the social environment. If not a distinct kind of social defeater, is there a uniquely social phenomenon that defeats knowledge? My aim in this paper is to explore these questions. I shall argue that despite initial appearances to the contrary, we have no reason to accept a special class of social defeater, nor any essentially social defeat phenomenon. We can explain putative cases (...) of social defeat with our existing epistemological apparatus. (shrink)

The child objection is a major challenge for reductionism, which requires hearers to have positive reasons for testimonial justification. However, it has been pointed out that anti-reductionism, which requires only the absence of negative reasons, or defeaters, suffers from the same kind of problem. The child objection presupposes the empirical thesis that “children do not have the capacity to consider reasons,” but the plausibility of this assumption may be revealed by developmental psychology research on selective trust. This paper uses recent (...) epistemological studies as a guide to narrow down the types of defeaters that children are required to consider, and then clarifies what kind of reasons various experiments can be said to test the ability to consider, and in what sense children who pass the test can be said to be “considering” reasons. In doing so, we clarify the scope and limits of the implications that selective trust studies can have for reductionism and anti-reductionism. We then suggest what future psychological research is desired from an epistemological interest to go beyond the current limitations. (shrink)

This thesis is an investigation into the nature of epistemic justification. It brings together themes from traditional, individual-centred epistemology, and collective, group-centred epistemology. The first half of the thesis is concerned with the question of whether rationality is epistemically permissive; that is, whether one body of evidence can rationalise more than one doxastic attitude. In chapter 1, I argue that permissive cases are best understood as epistemic standard conflicts. Doing so provides us with a novel understanding of the arbitrariness objection (...) against permissivism and enables us to reduce questions about epistemic permissibility to questions about the nature of incommensurability. In chapter 2, I show that the defended understanding of permissive cases generalises by defending it against an objection from self-fulfilling beliefs. In chapter 3, I demonstrate that we can use this view of epistemic rationality to generate so-called divergence arguments which show that the epistemic status of group-level attitudes and member-level attitudes can rationally diverge. In the second half of the thesis, I develop a novel evidentialist theory of epistemic justification, called Continuous Evidentialism. Continuous Evidentialism is inspired by some general methodological reflections (chapter 4), which suggest that we should opt for a theory of epistemic justification that analyses the epistemic status of group-level attitudes and member-level attitudes continuously. According to Continuous Evidentialism, to have a justified belief is to possess sufficient evidence and utilise that evidence in an epistemically responsible way when forming the belief. While I argue that we can reduce epistemic responsibility to higher-order evidentialist requirements. In chapter 5, I develop a theory of evidence, evidence possession and epistemic basing. Chapters 6 - 8, discuss various complications of the proposed theory, having to do with the alleged defeasibility of justification (chapter 6), epistemic responsibility (chapter 7), and the proposed reduction of epistemic responsibility (chapter 8). In chapter 9, I compare Continuous Evidentialism to various extant accounts. (shrink)

Virtue epistemology is the view that beliefs are attempts at truth (or perhaps knowledge) and, as a result, can be assessed as successful, competent, and apt. Moreover, virtue epistemology identifies central epistemic properties with normative properties of beliefs as attempts. In particular, knowledge is apt belief and justified belief is competent belief. This paper develops a systematic virtue epistemological account of defeat (of justification/competence). I provide reason to think that defeat occurs not only for beliefs but for attempts more general. (...) The key constructive idea is that defeaters are evidence that attempting (in a certain way) isn't successful and that defeaters defeat the competence of an attempt when one stands in a certain normative relation to the defeater. I argue that while this account handles paradigm cases of defeat both within epistemology and beyond nicely, cases of external (sometimes also ‘normative’ or ‘propositional’) defeat continue to cause trouble. To handle these cases, I develop a distinctively functionalist version of virtue epistemology. This functionalist version of virtue epistemology allows me to countenance proficiencies, that is, roughly, abilities that have the function to produce successes under certain conditions. It is the normative import of proficiencies that delivers the normative relation that serves to explain defeat in cases of external defeat. In this way, the functionalist version of virtue epistemology ushers the way towards a satisfactory account even of external defeat. (shrink)