Timothy Williamson (1992, 224–5) and Ernest Sosa (1996) have ar- gued that knowledge requires one to be safe from error. Something is said to be safe from happening iff it does not happen at “close” worlds. I expand here on a puzzle noted by John Hawthorne (2004, 56n) that suggests the need for two notions of closeness. Counterfac- tual closeness is a matter of what could in fact have happened, given the specific circumstances at hand. The notion is involved in (...) the semantics for counterfactuals and is the one epistemologists have typically assumed. Normalized closeness is rather a matter of what could typically have happened, that is, what would go on in a class of normal alternatives to actuality, irrespectively of whether or not they could have happened in the circumstances at hand. (shrink)

In this paper we argue that knowledge is characteristically safe true belief. We argue that an adequate approach to epistemic luck must not be indexed to methods of belief formation, but rather to explanations for belief. This shift is problematic for several prominent approaches to the theory of knowledge, including virtue reliabilism and proper functionalism (as normally conceived). The view that knowledge is characteristically safe true belief is better able to accommodate the shift in question.

Intellectual autonomy has long been identified as an epistemic virtue, one that has been championed influentially by Kant, Hume and Emerson. Manifesting intellectual autonomy, at least, in a virtuous way, does not require that we form our beliefs in cognitive isolation. Rather, as Roberts and Wood note, intellectually virtuous autonomy involves reliance and outsourcing to an appropriate extent, while at the same time maintaining intellectual self-direction. In this essay, I want to investigate the ramifications for intellectual autonomy of a particular (...) kind of epistemic dependence: cognitive enhancement. Cognitive enhancements involve the use of technology and medicine to improve cognitive capacities in healthy individuals, through mechanisms ranging from smart drugs to brain-computer interfaces. With reference to case studies in bioethics, as well as the philosophy of mind and cognitive science, it is shown that epistemic dependence, in this extreme form, poses a prima facie threat to the retention of intellectual autonomy, specifically, by threatening to undermine our intellectual self-direction. My aim will be to show why certain kinds of cognitive enhancements are subject to this objection from self-direction, while others are not. Once this is established, we’ll see that even some extreme kinds of cognitive enhancement might be not merely compatible with, but constitutive of, virtuous intellectual autonomy. (shrink)

A common presupposition in epistemology is that the processes contributing to the generation of knowledge do not extend beyond the knower's skin. This paper challenges this presupposition. I adduce a novel kind case that causes trouble for a number of even the most promising accounts of knowledge in current literature (virtue epistemological and modal accounts), at least so long as the presupposition is in place. I then look at a couple of recent accounts of knowledge that drop the presupposition and (...) expressly allow the relevant processes to extended beyond the knower's skin. While these accounts can handle the problem case, they encounter difficulties elsewhere: extension occurs too easily and so the accounts predict knowledge where they ought not. Finally, I offer a novel way of extending epistemology and argue that it can steer clear of the problems on both sides. (shrink)

Recently, it has become popular to account for knowledge and other epistemic states in terms of epistemic virtues. The present paper focuses on an epistemic virtue relevant when deferring to others in testimonial contexts. It is argued that, while many virtue epistemologists will accept that epistemic virtue can be exhibited in cases involving epistemically motivated hearers, carefully vetting their testimonial sources for signs of untrustworthiness prior to deferring, anyone who accepts that also has to accept that an agent may exhibit (...) epistemic virtue in certain cases of blind deference, involving someone soaking up everything he or she is told without any hesitation. Moreover, in order to account for the kind of virtue involved in the relevant cases of blind deference, virtue epistemologists need to abandon a widespread commitment to personalism, i.e., the idea that virtue is possessed primarily on account of features internal to the psychology of the person, and accept that some virtues are social virtues, possessed in whole or in large part on account of the person being embedded in a reliable social environment. (shrink)

The recent literature on ad hominem argument contends that the speaker’s character is sometimes relevant to evaluating what she says. This effort to redeem ad hominems requires an analysis of character that explains why and how character is relevant. I argue that virtue epistemology supplies this analysis. Three sorts of ad hominems that attack the speaker’s intellectual character are legitimate. They attack a speaker’s: (1) possession of reliabilist vices; or (2) possession of responsibilist vices; or (3) failure to perform intellectually (...) virtuous acts. Legitimate ad hominems conclude that we should not believe what a speaker says solely on her say-so. (shrink)

Human beings are promiscuously social creatures, and contemporary epistemologists are increasingly becoming aware that this shapes the ways in which humans process information. This awareness has tended to restrict itself, however, to testimony amongst isolated dyads. As scientific practice ably illustrates, information-processing can be spread over a vast social network. In this essay, a credit theory of knowledge is adapted to account for the normative features of strongly distributed cognition. A typical credit theory analyzes knowledge as an instance of obtaining (...) success because of or through the ability of the individual knower. The extended credit theory developed here broadens this framework so as to accommodate team-like epistemic achievements. The extended credit theory is then contrasted with some similar proposals given from within a process reliabilist framework. Once one isolates pairs of cases of distributed cognition in which there is a difference between sheer reliability and reliability grounded in ability, one can see that the extended credit theory maps the normative terrain better than the alternatives. (shrink)

The value problem of knowledge is one of the prominent problems that philosophical accounts of knowledge are expected to solve. According to the credit solution, a well-known solution to this problem, knowledge is more valuable than mere true belief because the former is creditable to a subject’s cognitive competence. But what is “credit value”? How does it connect to the already existing distinctions between values? The purpose of the present paper is to answer these questions. Its most important conclusion is (...) that credit value is not—contrary to what the upholders of the credit solution have frequently claimed—final value. (shrink)

Two key intuitions regarding knowledge are explored: that knowledge is a kind of cognitive achievement and that knowledge excludes luck. It is claimed that a proper understanding of how these intuitions should inform our conception of knowledge leads to some surprising results, not just as regards the theory of knowledge more generally but also as regards the epistemology of testimonial knowledge. In particular, it is argued that this conception of knowledge motivates a new kind of proposal B quasi-reductionism B that (...) can accommodate the motivations behind both reductionist and anti-reductionist accounts of the epistemology of testimonial knowledge. (shrink)

Gettiered beliefs are those whose agents are subject to the kind of epistemologically significant luck illustrated by Gettier Cases. Provided that knowledge requires ungettiered belief, we can learn something about knowledge by figuring out how luck blocks it in Gettier Cases. After criticizing the most promising of the going approaches to gettiered belief—the Risk of False Belief Approach—, I explain and defend a new approach: the Risk of Misleading Dispositions Approach.Roughly, this view says that a belief is gettiered just in (...) case its unfortunate subject has at best just luckily avoided being disposed by his belief’s actual grounds to believe a wide class of falsehoods about his environment. I then show how this approach undercuts an influential recent argument that knowledge has no more value than certain subsets of its components. (shrink)

This essay defends virtue reliabilism against a line of argument put forward by Duncan Pritchard. In the process, it discusses (1) the motivations for virtue reliabilism, (2) some analogies between epistemic virtue and moral virtue, and (3) the relation between virtue (epistemic and otherwise) and luck (epistemic and otherwise). It argues that considerations about virtue and luck suggest a solution to Gettier problems from the perspective of a virtue theory.

Sanford Goldberg has called our attention to an interesting problem: How is it that young children can learn from the testimony of their caregivers (their parents, teachers, and nannies, for example) even when the children themselves are undiscriminating consumers of testimony? Part One describes the importance and scope of the problem, showing that it generalizes beyond tots and their caregivers. Part Two considers and rejects several strategies for solving the problem, including Goldberg's own. Part Three defends a solution, positing a (...) previously unnoticed social dimension to knowledge. (shrink)

The traditional argument for skepticism relies on a comparison between a normal subject and a subject in a skeptical scenario: because there is no relevant difference between them, neither has knowledge. Externalists respond by arguing that there is in fact a relevant difference—the normal subject is properly situated in her environment. I argue, however, that there is another sort of comparison available—one between a normal subject and a subject with a belief that is accidentally true—that makes possible a new argument (...) for skepticism. Unlike the traditional form of skeptical argument, this new argument applies equally well to both internalist and externalist theories of knowledge. (shrink)

In updating our beliefs on the basis of our background attitudes and evidence we frequently employ objects in our environment to represent pertinent information. For example, we may write our premises and lemmas on a whiteboard to aid in a proof or move the beads of an abacus to assist in a calculation. In both cases, we generate extramental (that is, occurring outside of the mind) representational states, and, at least in the case of the abacus, we operate over these (...) states in light of their contents (e.g., the integers represented by the beads) to generate new representations. In this paper, I argue that our belief updating processes and the grounds of their rational evaluation are partly constituted by extramental representations and operations. In other words, we don’t merely update our attitudes through an internal process of reasoning on the basis of available evidence. If we are to accurately understand and rationally evaluate our belief updating processes and resultant attitudes, we need to examine how we representationally appropriate our extramental environment in the updating process. (shrink)

Does utterance understanding require reliable (i.e. non-lucky) recovery of the speaker’s intended proposition? There are good reasons to answer in the affirmative: the role of understanding in supporting testimonial knowledge seemingly requires such reliability. Moreover, there seem to be communicative analogues of Gettier cases in which luck precludes the audience’s understanding an utterance despite recovering the intended proposition. Yet, there are some major problems with the view that understanding requires such reliability. Firstly, there are a number of cases in which (...) understanding seems to occur in a lucky way. In light of these cases I argue that we need to narrow down the precise sense in which understanding precludes luck – the anti-luck condition attached to linguistic understanding is importantly different to anti-luck conditions typically applied to knowledge. Secondly, Megan Hyska has recently argued that, assuming understanding precludes luck, we get a communicative analogue of the value problem for knowledge. i.e. why is it better to meet the other conditions for understanding in a reliable way than in a lucky way? It is natural to assume that we can simply port over our favoured responses to the epistemic value problem in response to Hyska’s challenge. I argue that, due to the difference between epistemic and communicative luck (discussed in response to the first problem), this cannot be done. The epistemic and communicative value problems will require different solutions. I close by sketching the beginnings of an alternative answer to the value problem for communication. (shrink)

Strong epistemic anti-individualism—i.e., the claim that knowledge can be irreducibly social—is increasingly debated within mainstream and social epistemology. Most existing approaches attempt to argue for the view on the basis of aggregative analyses, which focus on the way certain groups aggregate the epistemic attitudes of their members. Such approaches are well motivated, given that many groups to which we often ascribe group knowledge—such as juries and committees—operate in this way. Yet another way that group knowledge can be generated is on (...) the basis of epistemic collaborations, such as scientific research teams and Transactive Memory Systems. To produce knowledge, epistemic collaborations rely heavily on the mutual interactions of their group members. This is a distinctive feature of epistemic collaborations that renders them resistant to aggregative analyses. To accommodate this kind of group knowledge, the paper combines virtue reliabilism with the hypothesis of distributed cognition in order to introduce the hybrid approach of distributed virtue reliabilism. On this view, beliefs produced by epistemic collaborations entertain positive epistemic standing in virtue of the mutual interactions of their group members; this positive epistemic standing is a collective property; epistemic collaborations qualify as epistemic group agents; collaborative knowledge is a special kind of group knowledge, motivating strong epistemic anti-individualism in a distinctive way. (shrink)

Pritchard defends virtue epistemology from epistemic situationism by appealing to the notion of epistemic dependence: if knowledge acquisition is sometimes allowed to depend on factors outside the cognitive agency of the subject, then this modest form of virtue epistemology escapes the threat of the situationist challenge. This lowering of the threshold of cognitive agency required for knowledge raises the question of how to demarcate between acquisitions of true belief influenced by situational factors that count as knowledge, and those that do (...) not. I fill this gap by proposing that the dependence of knowledge acquisition on external factors comes in degrees, which allows us to look for a right degree of epistemic dependence such that it both agrees with the situationist research and preserves the normative appeal of virtue epistemology. (shrink)

To avoid the problem of regress, externalists have put forward defeaters-based accounts of justification. The paper argues that existing proposals face two serious concerns: (i) They fail to accommodate related counterexamples such as Norman the clairvoyant, and, more worryingly, (ii) they fail to explain how one can be epistemically responsible in holding basic beliefs—i.e., they fail to explain how basic beliefs can avoid being arbitrary from the agent’s point of view. To solve both of these problems, a new, externalist, defeaters-based (...) account of justification is offered—viz., System Reliabilism. The core message of the view—and the way it deals with both (i) and (ii)—is the claim that the justificatory status of justified basic beliefs originates from being the undefeated outputs of a reliable, cognitively integrated system that is capable of defeating them. Simply put, to be candidates for being justified, basic beliefs must be epistemically responsible and to be so they must be undefeated while being defeasible. The paper also offers a detailed, naturalistic analysis of the notion of cognitive integration. This long-due, mechanistic account of cognitive integration is then used to argue that an additional advantage of System Reliabilism is its unique position to account for the as yet unexplained intuition that responsible beliefs are also likely to be true. (shrink)

Many have thought that exercises of skill are intentional. The argument of the paper is that this thesis fails to account for important types of mistakes and errors. In what psychologists and linguists call “verbal slips with semantic bias”, a speaker mistakenly switches, reverses, or blends certain conceptual contents. Nevertheless, the speaker has successfully exercised an intellectual skill, insofar as her slip uses concepts in conformity to semantic and logical rules. To flesh out how one might successfully exercise skills without (...) doing so intentionally, the paper appeals to the idea of habit. Verbal slips thus show how human skillfulness has a considerably wider scope than is often supposed. (shrink)

Strong epistemic anti-individualism—i.e., the claim that knowledge can be irreducibly social—is increasingly debated within mainstream and social epistemology. Most existing approaches attempt to argue for the view on the basis of aggregative analyses, which focus on the way certain groups aggregate the epistemic attitudes of their members. Such approaches are well motivated, given that many groups to which we often ascribe group knowledge—such as juries and committees—operate in this way. Yet another way that group knowledge can be generated is on (...) the basis of epistemic collaborations, such as scientific research teams and Transactive Memory Systems. To produce knowledge, epistemic collaborations rely heavily on the mutual interactions of their group members. This is a distinctive feature of epistemic collaborations that renders them resistant to aggregative analyses. To accommodate this kind of group knowledge, the paper combines virtue reliabilism with the hypothesis of distributed cognition in order to introduce the hybrid approach of distributed virtue reliabilism. On this view, beliefs produced by epistemic collaborations entertain positive epistemic standing in virtue of the mutual interactions of their group members; this positive epistemic standing is a collective property; epistemic collaborations qualify as epistemic group agents; collaborative knowledge is a special kind of group knowledge, motivating strong epistemic anti-individualism in a distinctive way. (shrink)

Neste ensaio, argumenta-se que as diferenças entre a epistemologia da era Gettier e a epistemologia pós-Gettier podem ser amplamente reduzidas a diferenças em metodologia. Faremos uma “reconstrução racional” do modo como fazíamos as coisas então, do modo como fazemos agora e de quais considerações nos levaram a fazer as coisas de modo diferente. Em resumo, durante a era Gettier a metodologia da epistemologia era basicamente o que Chisholm chamou de “particularismo” e Rawls chamou de “o método do equilíbrio reflexivo”. Diversos (...) desenvolvimentos forçaram o abandono dessa metodologia da era Gettier, em favor de diversas novas exigências a uma teoria adequada do conhecimento. Perguntas sobre a natureza da normatividade epistêmica, as relações entre conhecimento e ação, o valor do conhecimento e as dimensões sociais do conhecimento, todas essas se tornaram importantes para julgar entre teorias do conhecimento em competição. Com efeito, isso se mostrou apropriado, uma vez que a metodologia antiga era de fato inadequada. A nova metodologia contempla a maior riqueza e profundidade que vemos na epistemologia hodierna. (shrink)

Duncan Pritchard has recently argued against robust virtue epistemology on the grounds that it gets caught up in a fatal double bind: There is a type of case suggesting that the central robust virtue theoretic condition on knowledge is too strong to be necessary for knowledge as well as a type of case suggesting that it is too weak to be sufficient for knowledge. He does concede to the robust virtue epistemologist that his argument will be fully convincing only if (...) it really is a double bind the view gets caught up in, i.e. if robust virtue epistemology faces both types of case. This paper shows that Pritchard’s argument fails to fulfil its promise. I consider the two major ways of interpreting the virtue theoretic condition and argue that while it is plausible that for each interpretation of this condition one problematic type of case arises, for neither interpretation both problematic types of case arise. In consequence, by his own lights, Pritchard’s argument turns out unconvincing. (shrink)

In Weaving the Web, Berners-Lee defines Social Machines as biotechnologically hybrid Web-processes on the basis of which, “high-level activities, which have occurred just within one human’s brain, will occur among even larger more interconnected groups of people acting as if the shared a larger intuitive brain”. The analysis and design of Social Machines has already started attracting considerable attention both within the industry and academia. Web science, however, is still missing a clear definition of what a Social Machine is, which (...) has in turn resulted in several calls for a “philosophical engineering” ; Halpin et al. 2010). This paper is a first attempt to respond to this call, by combining contemporary philosophy of mind and cognitive science with epistemology. The idea of philosophical engineering implies that a sufficiently good conception of Social Machines should be of both theoretical and practical advantage. To demonstrate how the present approach can satisfy both objectives it will be used in order to address one of Wikipedia’s most worrying concerns—i.e., the current and ongoing decline in the number of its active contributors. (shrink)

In this paper I defend the theory that knowledge is credit-worthy true belief against a family of objections, one of which was leveled against it in a recent paper by Jennifer Lackey. In that paper, Lackey argues that testimonial knowledge is problematic for the credit-worthiness theory because when person A comes to know that p by way of the testimony of person B, it would appear that any credit due to A for coming to believe truly that p belongs to (...) the testifier, B, rather than the hearer, A. If so, then knowledge would appear not to be a matter of credit for true belief. I think that the problem this raises actually has little to do with the fact that the knowledge comes by way of testimony, and that similar objections can be formulated in terms of perceptual and memorial knowledge. I will attempt to neutralize these objections by drawing a distinction between credit as praiseworthiness and credit as attributability. (shrink)

There are many ordinary propositions we think we know. Almost every ordinary proposition entails some "lottery proposition" which we think we do not know but to which we assign a high probability of being true (for instance: “I will never be a multi-millionaire” entails “I will not win this lottery”). How is this possible - given that some closure principle is true? This problem, also known as “the Lottery puzzle”, has recently provoked a lot of discussion. In this paper I (...) discuss one of the most promising answers to the problem: Stewart Cohen’s contextualist solution which is based on ideas about the salience of chances of error. After presenting some objections to it I sketch an alternative solution which is still contextualist in spirit. (shrink)

Mainstream epistemologists have recently made a few isolated attempts to demonstrate the particular ways, in which specific types of knowledge are partly social. Two promising cases in point are Lackey’s dualism in the epistemology of testimony and Goldberg’s process reliabilist treatment of testimonial and coverage-support justification. What seems to be missing from the literature, however, is a general approach to knowledge that could reveal the partly social nature of the latter anytime this may be the case. Indicatively, even though Lackey (...) :345–361, 2007) has recently launched an attack against the Credit Account of Knowledge on the basis of testimony, she has not classified her view of testimonial knowledge into any of the alternative, general approaches to knowledge. Similarly, even if Goldberg’s attempt to provide a process reliabilist explanation of the social nature of testimonial knowledge is deemed satisfactory, his attempt to do the same in the case of coverage-support justification does not deliver the requisite result. This paper demonstrates that CAK can in fact provide, pace Lackey’s renunciation of the view, a promising account of the social nature of both testimonial and coverage-supported knowledge. Additionally, however, it can display further explanatory power by also revealing the social nature of knowledge produced on the basis of epistemic artifacts. Despite their disparities, all these types of knowledge count as partly social in nature, because in all these cases, according to CAK, the epistemic credit for the individual agent’s true belief must spread between the individual agent and certain parts of her epistemic community. Accordingly, CAK is a promising candidate for providing a unified approach to several and, perhaps all possible, instances of what we may call ‘weak epistemic anti-individualism’ within mainstream epistemology: i.e., the claim that the nature of knowledge can occasionally be both social and individual at the same time. (shrink)

Combining active externalism in the form of the extended and distributed cognition hypotheses with virtue reliabilism can provide the long sought after link between mainstream epistemology and philosophy of science. Specifically, by reading virtue reliabilism along the lines suggested by the hypothesis of extended cognition, we can account for scientific knowledge produced on the basis of both hardware and software scientific artifacts. Additionally, by bringing the distributed cognition hypothesis within the picture, we can introduce the notion of epistemic group agents, (...) in order to further account for collective knowledge produced on the basis of scientific research teams. (shrink)

This chapter examines an evidentialist ethics of belief, and W. K. Clifford’s proposal in particular. It argues that regardless of how one understands the notion of evidence, it is implausible that we could have a moral obligation to refrain from believing something whenever we lack sufficient evidence. Alternatively, this chapter argues that there are wide-scope conditional requirements on beliefs but that these requirements can be met without having sufficient evidence for the belief in question. It then argues that we are (...) epistemically, though not morally, required to form epistemically valuable beliefs. However, these beliefs, too, need not be beliefs for which we have sufficient evidence—epistemically good beliefs need not be based on sufficient evidence. (shrink)

ABSTRACT: Meno’s Thesis—the idea that knowing something is better than merely having a true belief about it—is incompatible with the joint claims that believing the truth is the sole source of the value of knowledge and true belief and knowledge are equally successful in believing the truth. Recent answers to that so-called “swamping” problem reject either or. This paper rejects Meno’s Thesis instead, as relying on a confusion between expected value and value proper. The proposed solution relies on an externalist (...) view of rationality, which is presented. View HTML Send article to KindleTo send this article to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about sending to your Kindle. Find out more about sending to your Kindle. Note you can select to send to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be sent to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply. Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.The Value and Expected Value of KnowledgeVolume 51, Issue 1Julien Dutant DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S0012217312000285Your Kindle email address Please provide your Kindle [email protected]@kindle.com Available formats PDF Please select a format to send. By using this service, you agree that you will only keep articles for personal use, and will not openly distribute them via Dropbox, Google Drive or other file sharing services. Please confirm that you accept the terms of use. Cancel Send ×Send article to Dropbox To send this article to your Dropbox account, please select one or more formats and confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about sending content to Dropbox. The Value and Expected Value of KnowledgeVolume 51, Issue 1Julien Dutant DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S0012217312000285Available formats PDF Please select a format to send. By using this service, you agree that you will only keep articles for personal use, and will not openly distribute them via Dropbox, Google Drive or other file sharing services. Please confirm that you accept the terms of use. Cancel Send ×Send article to Google Drive To send this article to your Google Drive account, please select one or more formats and confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about sending content to Google Drive. The Value and Expected Value of KnowledgeVolume 51, Issue 1Julien Dutant DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S0012217312000285Available formats PDF Please select a format to send. By using this service, you agree that you will only keep articles for personal use, and will not openly distribute them via Dropbox, Google Drive or other file sharing services. Please confirm that you accept the terms of use. Cancel Send ×Export citation Request permission. (shrink)

What is the relationship between saying ‘I know that Q’ and guaranteeing that Q? John Austin, Roderick Chisholm and Wilfrid Sellars all agreed that there is some important connection, but disagreed over what exactly it was. In this paper I discuss each of their accounts and present a new one of my own. Drawing on speech-act theory and recent research on the epistemic norms of speech acts, I suggest that the relationship is this: by saying ‘I know that Q’, you (...) represent yourself as having the authority to guarantee that Q. (shrink)

The Credit Theory of Knowledge (CTK)—as expressed by such figures as John Greco, Wayne Riggs, and Ernest Sosa—holds that knowing that p implies deserving epistemic credit for truly believing that p . Opponents have presented three sorts of counterexamples to CTK: S might know that p without deserving credit in cases of (1) innate knowledge (Lackey, Kvanvig); (2) testimonial knowledge (Lackey); or (3) perceptual knowledge (Pritchard). The arguments of Lackey, Kvanvig and Pritchard, however, are effective only in so far as (...) one is willing to accept a set of controversial background assumptions (for instance, that innate knowledge exists or that doxastic voluntarism is wrong). In this paper I mount a fourth argument against CTK, that doesn’t rest on any such controversial premise, and therefore should convince a much wider audience. In particular, I show that in cases of extended cognition (very broadly conceived), the most salient feature explaining S ’s believing the truth regarding p may well be external to S , that is, it might be a feature of S ’s (non-human, artifactual) environment. If so, the cognitive achievement of knowing that p is not (or only marginally) creditable to S , and hence, CTK is false. (shrink)

This paper explores the ramifications of the extended cognition thesis in the philosophy of mind for contemporary epistemology. In particular, it argues that all theories of knowledge need to accommodate the ability intuition that knowledge involves cognitive ability, but that once this requirement is understood correctly there is no reason why one could not have a conception of cognitive ability that was consistent with the extended cognition thesis. There is thus, surprisingly, a straightforward way of developing our current thinking about (...) knowledge such that it incorporates the extended cognition thesis. (shrink)

A belief is valuable when it “gets it right”. This “getting it right” is often understood solely as a matter of truth. But there is a second sense of “getting it right” worth exploring. According to this second sense, a belief “gets it right” when its concepts accurately match the way the world is objectively organized – that is, when its concepts are joint-carving, or have fidelity. In this paper, I explore the relationship between fidelity and epistemic value. While many (...) philosophers (especially metaphysicians) acknowledge fidelity's value, they overlook just how much it might disrupt our understanding of epistemic value. To tease out this disruption, I draw on the Jamesian balance between seeking the truth and avoiding the false. A similar balance must be struck both within the pursuit of fidelity itself (“seeking the joints” and “avoiding the gruesome”) as well as between the pursuit of fidelity and the pursuit of truth. I then give an argument against the claim that truth is the higher epistemic good. (shrink)

I argue that desire sometimes amounts to knowledge, in the same sense that belief sometimes amounts to knowledge. The argument rests on two assumptions: that goodness is the correctness condition for desire and that knowledge is apt mental representation. Desire that amounts to knowledge—or ‘conative knowledge’—is illustrated by cases in which someone knows the goodness of something despite not believing that it is good.

This article discusses Keith DeRose’s treatment of the lottery problem in Chapter 5 of his recent The Appearance of Ignorance. I agree with a lot of it but also raise some critical points and questions and make some friendly proposals. I discuss different ways to set up the problem, go into the difference between knowing and ending inquiry, propose to distinguish between two different kinds of lotteries, add to the defense of the idea that one can know lottery propositions, give (...) a critical discussion of DeRose’s contextualist solution to the problem, and support his defense against an absurdity objection with additional arguments. (shrink)

According to attributor virtue epistemology (the view defended by Ernest Sosa, John Greco, and others), S knows that p only if her true belief that p is attributable to some intellectual virtue, competence, or ability that she possesses. Attributor virtue epistemology captures a wide range of our intuitions about the nature and value of knowledge, and it has many able defenders. Unfortunately, it has an unrecognized consequence that many epistemologists will think is sufficient for rejecting it: namely, it makes knowledge (...) depend on factors that aren't truth-relevant, even in the broadest sense of this term, and it also makes knowledge depend in counterintuitive ways on factors that are truth-relevant in the more common narrow sense of this term. As I show in this paper, the primary objection to interest-relative views in the pragmatic encroachment debate can be raised even more effectively against attributor virtue epistemology. (shrink)

Debates em epistemologia recente têm se pautado, em grande medida, pelo problema de caracterizar a natureza da justificação. De modo geral, a tarefa tem sido explorar o status epistêmico que faz com que uma crença verdadeira seja uma instância de conhecimento. Este debate traz consigo uma discussão mais ampla acerca do conteúdo da definição de conhecimento, ou seja, uma discussão cujo propósito é identificar o que compõe de forma necessária e suficiente esta noção epistêmica central. No entanto, paralelamente a este (...) trabalho tem surgido um tipo de preocupação que, em alguma medida, parece ser anterior à tarefa de discutir a natureza ou os conteúdos do conceito em questão. Esta preocupação diz respeito ao problema da atribuição de conhecimento. Casos do tipo-Gettier não só colocam em xeque a definição tradicional, expondo uma insuficiência nos conteúdos comumente associados a esta noção, mas o fazem mostrando que atribuições triviais de conhecimento estão sob risco, quando pautadas pelos conteúdos da noção tradicional. Como veremos, a intuição contida na revisão feita por Edmund Gettier se torna ainda mais relevante ao notarmos que o problema persiste mesmo em versões reformuladas da noção tradicional do conhecimento, como presente na proposta confiabilista, com a qual lidaremos neste trabalho.Oproblema, em linhas gerais, é o seguinte: como devemos entender a atribuição de conhecimento para sujeitos que, supostamente, preenchem todas as demandas para tal, mas que não parecem ter conhecimento em sentido estrito? Os casos de Gettier são paradigmáticos neste sentido. Veremos mais adiante que casos como estes nos apresentam sujeitos que estão cumprindo todas as demandas da análise tradicional do conhecimento, mas que de fato não chegam a possuí-lo. Alternativamente, o problema pode ainda ser invertido: como devemos entender a atribuição de conhecimento para sujeitos que não cumprem todas estas demandas, mas para os quais, intuitivamente, atribuímos conhecimento? Este problema, veremos, é central para a proposta confiabilista, posto que coloca em dúvida uma das formulações recentes da teoria, defendida por John Greco, e pretende mostrar que tal formulação não salva a teoria do problema da atribuição. Neste trabalho, discutirei o alcance deste problema para a epistemologia e em que sentido sua versão invertida afeta o confiabilismo do agente1 de John Greco. Na primeira parte do trabalho meu foco estará no problema geral e na possível contribuição que a noção de saliência causal, proposta no confiabilismo do agente, tem a oferecer como solução.Emseguida, apresentarei dois contraexemplos à centralidade da saliência causal advogada por Greco. Então, na terceira e última parte do trabalho discutirei uma reformulação que Greco faz de sua própria proposta para dar conta das demandas apresentadas por estes contraexemplos. Ao final, defenderei, seguindo Greco, que sua reformulação da noção de saliência causal para casos de conhecimento, em termos qualitativos e não quantitativos, pode nos servir mais adequadamente para entender esta relação de atribuição. (shrink)

This paper explores the implications of a technological revolution that many in the industry think is likely soon to come to pass: neuromedia. In particular, the paper is interested in how this will constitute an especially persuasive kind of extended cognition, and thereby will facilitate extended epistemic states. This will in turn have ramifications for how we understand the epistemic goals of education. The paper argues that the challenges posed by neuromedia remind us that the overarching epistemic goal of education (...) is not orientated towards facilitating a body of knowledge (or the development of mere cognitive skills) but rather is concerned with the development of intellectual character, where this in turn essentially involves the cultivation of intellectual virtues, character traits that are not amenable to extended cognition. (shrink)

Pritchard and Vaesen have recently argued that robust virtue epistemology does not square with the extended cognition thesis that has enjoyed an increasing degree of popularity in recent philosophy of mind. This paper shows that their arguments fail. The relevant cases of extended cognition pose no new problem for robust virtue epistemology. It is shown that Pritchard’s and Vaesen’s cases can be dealt with in familiar ways by a number of virtue theories of knowledge.

In this paper, it is argued that both the informer and the hearer in a testimonial situation deserve epistemic merit insofar as they contribute to the collaborative achievement of sharing knowledge. The paper introduces a distinction between the ideals of self-sufficiency and epistemic autonomy. The autonomous exercise of our epistemic agency is very often carried out under strong conditions of epistemic dependence. Testimony exhibits a kind of social dependence that does not threaten the autonomy of the subjects that need to (...) consider their own epistemic capacities. When involved in a testimonial situation, both speaker and hearer declare, at least implicitly, the standings they occupy in an epistemic space and are obliged to recognise certain epistemic requirements. (shrink)

A central intuition many epistemologists seem to have is that knowledge is distinctively valuable. In his paper 'Radical Scepticism, Epistemic Luck and Epistemic Value', Duncan Pritchard rejects the virtue-theoretic explanation of this intuition. This explanation says that knowledge is distinctively valuable because it is a cognitive achievement. It is maintained, in the first place, that the arguments Pritchard musters against the thesis that knowledge is a cognitive achievement are unconvincing. It is argued, in the second place, that even if the (...) arguments against the thesis that knowledge is a cognitive achievement were convincing, there is another explanation of the intuition that knowledge has final value available: the question-relative treatment of knowledge. (shrink)

John Greco has proposed a new sort of contextualism which exhibits a principled grounding in an agent reliabilist virtue epistemology. In this paper I will discuss Greco's two main reasons in favor of virtue contextualism. The first reason is that his account of knowledge can be derived from a more general theory of virtue and credit. The second reason consists in the thesis that a virtue contextualist solution to the lottery problem is superior to standards contextualism. With regard to the (...) first claim, I raise some questions concerning the status and the content of the crucial conditions for Greco's theory of intellectual credit. With regard to the second claim, I try to show that his arguments do not succeed in establishing the superiority of virtue contextualism to standards contextualism. I close with some remarks on the relation among Greco's virtue contextualism, the traditional approach to the theory of knowledge and the proper domain of contextualism. (shrink)