An influential proposal is that knowledge involves safe belief. A belief is safe, in the relevant sense, just in case it is true in nearby metaphysically possible worlds. In this paper, I introduce a distinct but complementary notion of safety, understood in terms of epistemically possible worlds. The main aim, in doing so, is to add to the epistemologist’s tool-kit. To demonstrate the usefulness of the tool, I use it to advance and assess substantive proposals concerning knowledge and justification.

The notion of a proposition is central to philosophy. But it is subject to paradoxes. A natural response is a hierarchical account and, ever since Russell proposed his theory of types in 1908, this has been the strategy of choice. But in this paper I raise a problem for such accounts. While this does not seem to have been recognized before, it would seem to render existing such accounts inadequate. The main purpose of the paper, however, is to provide a (...) new hierarchical account that solves the problem. (shrink)

Here are two plausible ideas about belief. First: beliefs are our means of storing information. Second: if we believe something, then we are willing to use it in reasoning. But in this paper I introduce a puzzle that seems to show that these cannot both be right. The solution, I argue, is a new picture, on which there is a kind of belief for each idea. An account of these two kinds of belief is offered in terms of two components: (...) a relatively stable one, which represents our information; and a more variable one, which represents what we are taking seriously. I also consider the possibility of solving the puzzle by less radical means; and an alternative argument for the proposed account of belief in terms of considerations from desire. (shrink)

A normative reason for a person to? is a consideration which favours?ing. A motivating reason is a reason for which or on the basis of which a person?s. This paper explores a connection between normative and motivating reasons. More specifically, it explores the idea that there are second-order normative reasons to? for or on the basis of certain first-order normative reasons. In this paper, I challenge the view that there are second-order reasons so understood. I then show that prominent views (...) in contemporary epistemology are committed to the existence of second-order reasons, specifically, views about the epistemic norms governing practical reasoning and about the role of higher-order evidence. If there are no second-order reasons, those views are mistaken. (shrink)

The knowledge account of assertion holds that it is improper to assert that p unless the speaker knows that p. This paper argues against the knowledge account of assertion; there is no general norm that the speaker must know what she asserts. I argue that there are cases in which it can be entirely proper to assert something that you do not know. In addition, it is possible to explain the cases that motivate the knowledge account by postulating a general (...) norm that assertions would be true, combined with conversational norms that govern all speech acts. A theory on which proper assertions must be true explains the data better than a theory on which proper assertions must be known to be true. (shrink)

The bootstrapping problem poses a general challenge, afflicting even strongly internalist theories. Even if one must always know that one’s source is reliable to gain knowledge from it, bootstrapping is still possible. I survey some solutions internalists might offer and defend the one I find most plausible: that bootstrapping involves an abuse of inductive reasoning akin to generalizing from a small or biased sample. I also argue that this solution is equally available to the reliabilist. The moral is that the (...) issues raised by bootstrapping are orthogonal to questions about internalism and basic knowledge, having more to do with the nature of good inductive reasoning. (shrink)

Sometimes, we think of belief as a phenomenon that comes in degrees – that is, in the many different levels of confidence that a thinker might have in various different propositions. Sometimes, we think of belief as a simple two-place relation that holds between a thinker and a proposition – that is, as what I shall here call "outright belief".

Pragmatic encroachment theories have a problem with evidence. On the one hand, the arguments that knowledge is interest-relative look like they will generalise to show that evidence too is interest-relative. On the other hand, our best story of how interests affect knowledge presupposes an interest-invariant notion of evidence. -/- The aim of this paper is to sketch a theory of evidence that is interest-relative, but which allows that ‘best story’ to go through with minimal changes. The core idea is that (...) the evidence someone has is just what evidence a radical interpreter says they have. And a radical interpreter is playing a kind of game with the person they are interpreting. The cases that pose problems for pragmatic encroachment theorists generate fascinating games between the interpreter and the interpretee. They are games with multiple equilibria. To resolve them we need to detour into the theory of equilibrium selection. I’ll argue that the theory we need is the theory of risk-dominant equilibria. That theory will tell us how the interpreter will play the game, which in turn will tell us what evidence the person has. The evidence will be interest-relative, because what the equilibrium of the game is will be interest-relative. But it will not undermine the story we tell about how interests usually affect knowledge. (shrink)

I defend interest-relative invariantism from a number of recent attacks. One common thread to my response is that interest-relative invariantism is a muchweaker thesis than is often acknowledged, and a number of the attacks only challenge very specific, and I think implausible, versions of it. Another is that a number of the attacks fail to acknowledge how many things we have independent reason to believe knowledge is sensitive to. Whether there is a defeater for someone's knowledge can be sensitive to (...) all manner of features of their environment, as the host of examples from the post-Gettier literature shows. Adding in interest-sensitive defeaters is a much less radical move than most critics claim it is. (shrink)

I consider the problem of how to derive what an agent believes from their credence function and utility function. I argue the best solution of this problem is pragmatic, i.e. it is sensitive to the kinds of choices actually facing the agent. I further argue that this explains why our notion of justified belief appears to be pragmatic, as is argued e.g. by Fantl and McGrath. The notion of epistemic justification is not really a pragmatic notion, but it is being (...) applied to a pragmatically defined concept, i.e. belief. (shrink)

In this paper, we claim that, if you justifiably believe that you ought to perform some act, it follows that you ought to perform that act. In the first half, we argue for this claim by reflection on what makes for correct reasoning from beliefs about what you ought to do. In the second half, we consider a number of objections to this argument and its conclusion. In doing so, we arrive at another argument for the view that justified beliefs (...) about what you ought to do must be true, based in part on the idea that the epistemic and practical domains are uniform, in a sense we spell out. We conclude by sketching possible implications of our discussion for the debates over what is wrong with akrasia and pragmatic encroachment on justified belief and knowledge. (shrink)

David Lewis has long defended an analysis of counterfactuals in terms of comparative similarity of possible worlds. The purpose of this paper is to reevaluate Lewis’s response to one of the oldest and most familiar objections to this proposal, the future similarity objection.

The interest of epistemic comparative conditionals comes from the fact that they represent genuine ‘comparative epistemic relations’ between propositions, situations, evidences, abilities, interests, etc. This paper argues that various types of epistemic comparative conditionals uniformly represent comparative epistemic relations via the comparison of epistemic positions rather than the comparison of epistemic standards. This consequence is considered as a general constraint on a theory of knowledge attribution, and then further used to argue against the contextualist thesis that, in some cases, considering (...) a new counter- possibility can raise the epistemic standard of knowledge attribution. Instead, the paper shows that considering a new counter-possibility can only lower the epistemic position of a putative knower. Moreover, since the comparison, by the nature of conditionals, is free from any commitment to the truth-values of specific knowledge attributions, my conclusion is free from the debate between contextualism and invariantism on whether the truth-value of a knowledge attribution can actually vary with context. (shrink)

Intellectualists claim that knowing how to do something is a matter of knowing, for some w, that w is a way to do that thing. However, standard accounts fail to account for the way that knowing how sometimes seems to require ability. I argue that the way to make sense of this situation is via a ‘subject-specific’ intellectualism according to which knowing how to do something is a matter of knowing that w is a way for some relevant person to (...) do that thing, but who the relevant person is can change from context to context. If it is the utterer themselves, then knowing how will require ability, but otherwise it will not. (shrink)

Epistemic modals are standardly taken to be context-dependent quantifiers over possibilities. Thus sentences containing them get truth-values with respect to both a context and an index. But some insist that this relativization is not relative enough: `might'-claims, they say, only get truth-values with respect to contexts, indices, and—the new wrinkle—points of assessment (hence, CIA). Here we argue against such "relativist" semantics. We begin with a sketch of the motivation for such theories and a generic formulation of them. Then we catalogue (...) central problems that any such theory faces. We end by outlining an alternative story. (shrink)

This book symposium comprises a précis of Nuno Venturinha’s Description of Situations: An Essay in Contextualist Epistemology together with four critical commentaries on different aspects of the book by Marcelo Carvalho, João Vergílio Gallerani Cuter, Marcos Silva and Darlei Dall’Agnol, and the author’s replies.

The conclusive reasons view of knowledge entails the “abominable conjunction” that I know that I have hands but I do not know that I am not a brain in a vat. The argument from abomination takes this as a reason to reject the view. This paper aims to buttress the argument from abomination by adding a new sort to this list: the logical abominations. These include: “I know that argument is sound and that sound arguments have true conclusions but I (...) don’t know whether the conclusion of that argument is true”. Two standard replies to the argument from abomination are raised. It is argued that the logical abominations open new holes in both. (shrink)

In a Normal Case, a subject has a justified true belief that P and also knows that P. In a Gettier Case, a subject has a justified true belief that P but does not know that P. The received view (endorsed by Lycan and others) is that if one is in a Normal Case then one cannot know that he is not in a Gettier case. I argue that the received view is mistaken and I discuss the implications this has (...) on some other epistemological issues. (shrink)

This paper concerns the apparent fact — discussed by Sinan Dogramaci and Brian Weatherson — that inductive reasoning often interacts in disastrous ways with patterns of reasoning that seem perfectly fine in the deductive case. In contrast to Dogramaci's and Weatherson's own suggestions, I argue that these cases show that we cannot reason inductively about arbitrary objects. Moreover, as I argue, this prohibition is neatly explained by a certain hypothesis about the rational basis of inductive reasoning — namely, the hypothesis (...) that inductive reasoning is fundamentally reasoning about what normally happens. (shrink)

Elsewhere, I have challenged virtue epistemology and argued that it doesn’t square with mundane cases of extended cognition. Kelp (forthcoming, this journal) and Greco (forthcoming) have responded to my charges, the former by questioning the force of my argument, the latter by developing a new virtue epistemology. Here I consider both responses. I show first that Kelp mischaracterizes my challenge. Subsequently, I identify two new problems for Greco’s new virtue epistemology.

In his important book Knowledge and Practical Interests, Jason Stanley advances a proposal about knowledge and the semantics of knowledge ascriptions which he calls interest-relative invariantism. A theory of knowledge ascriptions of the form ‘A knows that S’ is invariantist.

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

Many philosophers favour the simple knowledge account of assertion, which says you may assert something only if you know it. The simple account is true but importantly incomplete. I defend a more informative thesis, namely, that you may assert something only if your assertion expresses knowledge. I call this 'the express knowledge account of assertion', which I argue better handles a wider range of cases while at the same time explaining the simple knowledge account's appeal. §1 introduces some new data (...) that a knowledge account of assertion well explains. §2 explains the simple knowledge account's advantage over two of its main competitors. §3 presents a problem for the simple account and offers a solution, which is to adopt the express knowledge account. §4 encapsulates the case for the express knowledge account, and offers a unifying vision for the epistemology of belief and assertion. §5 answers an objection. §6 briefly sums up. Even those who ultimately reject my conclusion can still benefit from the new data presented in §1, and learn an important lesson from the problem discussed in §3, which demonstrates a general constraint on an acceptable account of the norm of assertion. (shrink)

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

I accomplish two things in this paper. First I expose some important limitations of the contemporary literature on the norms of assertion and in the process illuminate a host of new directions and forms that an account of assertional norms might take. Second I leverage those insights to suggest a new account of the relationship between knowledge and assertion, which arguably outperforms the standard knowledge account.

Is knowledge justified true belief? Most philosophers believe that the answer is clearly ‘no’, as demonstrated by Gettier cases. But Gettier cases don’t obviously refute the traditional view that knowledge is justified true belief (JTB). There are ways of resisting Gettier cases, at least one of which is partly successful. Nevertheless, when properly understood, Gettier cases point to a flaw in JTB, though it takes some work to appreciate just what it is. The nature of the flaw helps us better (...) understand the nature of knowledge and epistemic justification. I propose a crucial improvement to the traditional view, relying on an intuitive and independently plausible metaphysical distinction pertaining to the manifestation of intellectual powers, which supplements the traditional components of justification, truth and belief. (shrink)

According to factive accounts of the norm of belief and decision-making, you should not believe or base decisions on a falsehood. Even when the evidence misleadingly suggests that a false proposition is true, you should not believe it or base decisions on it. Critics claim that factive accounts are counterintuitive and badly mischaracterize our ordinary practice of evaluating beliefs and decisions. This paper reports four experiments that rigorously test the critic’s accusations and the viability of factive accounts. The results undermine (...) the accusations and provide the best evidence yet of factive norms of belief and decision-making. The results also help discriminate between two leading candidates for a factive norm: truth and knowledge. Knowledge is the superior candidate. (shrink)

Epistemic contextualism is one of the most hotly debated topics in contemporary epistemology. Contextualists claim that ‘know’ is a context-sensitive verb associated with different evidential standards in different contexts. Contextualists motivate their view based on a set of behavioural claims. In this paper, I show that several of these behavioural claims are false. I also show that contextualist test cases suffer from a critical confound, which derives from people's tendency to defer to speakers’ statements about their own mental states. My (...) evidence consists in results from several behavioural experiments. I conclude that contextualism is an idle hypothesis and I propose some general methodological lessons. (shrink)

In this essay I show how to reconcile epistemic invariantism with the knowledge account of assertion. My basic proposal is that we can comfortably combine invariantism with the knowledge account of assertion by endorsing contextualism about speech acts. My demonstration takes place against the backdrop of recent contextualist attempts to usurp the knowledge account of assertion, most notably Keith DeRose's influential argument that the knowledge account of assertion spells doom for invariantism and enables contextualism's ascendancy.

Indicative judgments pertain to what is true. Epistemic modal judgments pertain to what must or might be true relative to a body of information. A standard view is that epistemic modals implicitly quantify over alternative possibilities, or ways things could turn out. On this view, a proposition must be true just in case it is true in all the possibilities consistent with the available information, and a proposition might be true just in case it is true in at least one (...) possibility consistent with the available information. I report three experiments testing this view of epistemic modals. The results show that although modal judgments are sensitive to information about alternative possibilities, the standard quantification theory mischaracterizes the ordinary meaning of modals. I then report two more experiments testing the hypothesis that epistemic modals express willingness to attribute knowledge based on the available information. The results support this hypothesis. The results also show that the difference between “inside” and “outside” probabilistic information, familiar from the judgment and decision-making literature, affects epistemic modal judgments. (shrink)

From antiquity through the twentieth century, philosophers have hypothesized that, intuitively, it is harder to know negations than to know affirmations. This paper provides direct evidence for that hypothesis. In a series of studies, I found that people naturally view negations as harder to know than affirmations. Participants read simple scenarios and made judgments about truth, probability, belief, and knowledge. Participants were more likely to attribute knowledge of an outcome when framed affirmatively than when framed negatively. Participants did this even (...) though the affirmative and negative framings were logically equivalent. The asymmetry was unique to knowledge attributions: it did not occur when participants rated truth, probability, or belief. These findings show new consequences of negation on people’s judgments and reasoning and can inform philosophical theorizing about the ordinary concept of knowledge. (shrink)

The Neo-Moorean Deduction (I have a hand, so I am not a brain-in-a-vat) and the Zebra Deduction (the creature is a zebra, so isn’t a cleverly disguised mule) are notorious. Crispin Wright, Martin Davies, Fred Dretske, and Brian McLaughlin, among others, argue that these deductions are instances of transmission failure. That is, they argue that these deductions cannot transmit justification to their conclusions. I contend, however, that the notoriety of these deductions is undeserved. My strategy is to clarify, attack, defend, (...) and apply. I clarify what transmission and transmission failure really are, thereby exposing two questionable but quotidian assumptions. I attack existing views of transmission failure, especially those of Crispin Wright. I defend a permissive view of transmission failure, one which holds that deductions of a certain kind fail to transmit only because of premise circularity. Finally, I apply this account to the Neo-Moorean and Zebra Deductions and show that, given my permissive view, these deductions transmit in an intuitively acceptable way—at least if either a certain type of circularity is benign or a certain view of perceptual justification is false. (shrink)

If it is ethically wrong to hold some beliefs, there may be a conflict between the demands of morality and the demands of rationality. A recent theory holds that no such conflict exists: any morally wrong belief is also irrational to hold, made irrational through a phenomenon of radical moral encroachment. In this paper, I argue that radical moral encroachment fails to coordinate ethical and epistemic norms, given plausible epistemological principles and various substantive accounts of which beliefs are morally wrong, (...) including those endorsed by radical moral encroachment theorists themselves. (shrink)

Standpoint epistemology, the view that social identity is relevant to knowledge-acquisition, has been consigned to the margins of mainstream philosophy. In part, this is because the principles of standpoint epistemology are taken to be in opposition to those which guide traditional epistemology. One goal of this paper is to tease out the characterization of traditional epistemology that is at odds with standpoint epistemology. The characterization of traditional epistemology that I put forth is one which endorses the thesis of intellectualism, the (...) view that knowledge does not depend on non-epistemic features. I then suggest that two further components – the atomistic view of knowers and aperspectivalism – can be usefully interpreted as supporting features of intellectualism. A further goal of this paper is to show that we ought to resist this characterization of traditional epistemology. I use pragmatic encroachment as a dialectical tool to motivate the denial of intellectualism, and consequently, the denial of both supporting components. I then attempt to show how it is possible to have a view, similar to pragmatic encroachment, that takes social identity, rather than stakes, to be the feature that makes a difference to what a person is in a position to know. (shrink)

At first pass, internalism about justification is the view that there is no justificatory difference without an internal difference. Externalism about mental content is the view that there are differences in mental content without an internal difference. Assuming mental contents are the primary bearers of justificatory features, the two views are in obvious tension. The goal of this paper is to determine how the tension is best resolved. The paper proceeds as follows. In §1 I explain the threat to justificatory (...) internalism from content externalism in more detail. In §2 I present Earl Conee and Richard Feldman’s “counterpart propositions” reply to the problem of content externalism. §3 criticizes the counterpart propositions reply. §4 presents a view in the metaphysics of belief that is widely adopted by content externalists: one that appeals to vehicles of content, modes of presentation of content, or ways of believing propositions. §5 exploits this metaphysics of belief in order to better accommodate justificatory internalist insights in light of content externalism. §6 shows how the new view can be used to address problems that face Conee and Feldman’s account. Finally, §7 provides a new argument from the Vehicle View for the language of thought hypothesis. (shrink)

The article proceeds upon the assumption that the beliefs and degrees of belief of rational agents satisfy a number of constraints, including: consistency and deductive closure for belief sets, conformity to the axioms of probability for degrees of belief, and the Lockean Thesis concerning the relationship between belief and degree of belief. Assuming that the beliefs and degrees of belief of both individuals and collectives satisfy the preceding three constraints, I discuss what further constraints may be imposed on the aggregation (...) of beliefs and degrees of belief. Some possibility and impossibility results are presented. The possibility results suggest that the three proposed rationality constraints are compatible with reasonable aggregation procedures for belief and degree of belief. (shrink)

The present article illustrates a conflict between the claim that rational belief sets are closed under deductive consequences, and a very inclusive claim about the factors that are sufficient to determine whether it is rational to believe respective propositions. Inasmuch as it is implausible to hold that the factors listed here are insufficient to determine whether it is rational to believe respective propositions, we have good reason to deny that rational belief sets are closed under deductive consequences.

The following method is popular in some areas of philosophy and linguistics when trying to describe the semantics of a given sentence Φ. Present ordinary speakers with scenarios that involve an utterance of Φ, ask them whether these utterances are felicitous or infelicitous and then construct a semantics that assigns the truth-value True to felicitous utterances of Φ and the truth-value False to infelicitous utterances of Φ. The author makes five observations about this intuition-based approach to semantics; their upshot is (...) that it should be revised in favour of a more nuanced method. The author suggests that this method should be based on corpus linguistics and makes some tentative remarks about what it might look like and which questions we need to address in order to develop it. (shrink)

There is a long-standing view in epistemology that perception is a way of knowing. There is a less long-standing but increasingly popular view that knowledge attributions have a relativist semantics. I discuss three things here. First, I show that it is a consequence of the logic of RKA that WOK and RKA are incompatible. Second, I argue that, even if WOK is incompatible with the main rivals to RKA, this is not a consequence of the logics of these views. RKA (...) comes with a hitherto unobserved philosophical consequence that its main rivals do not come with. Third, I consider some responses to the effect that it does not matter that RKA comes with this consequence, and argue that they are all unsatisfactory as they stand. I conclude that, at the very least, the onus is placed on relativists to engage with more epistemology than they currently do to show that we do not need to worry about the incompatibility of WOK and RKA. I conclude with some suggestions about the broader relevance and implications of this paper. (shrink)

It’s often thought that the phenomenon of risk aggregation poses a problem for multi-premise closure but not for single-premise closure. But recently, Lasonen-Aarnio and Schechter have challenged this thought. Lasonen-Aarnio argues that, insofar as risk aggregation poses a problem for multi-premise closure, it poses a similar problem for single-premise closure. For she thinks that, there being such a thing as deductive risk, risk may aggregate over a single premise and the deduction itself. Schechter argues that single-premise closure succumbs to risk (...) aggregation outright. For he thinks that there could be a long sequence of competent single-premise deductions such that, even though we are justified in believing the initial premise of the sequence, intutively, we are not justified in believing the final conclusion. This intuition, Schechter thinks, vitiates single-premise closure. In this paper, I defend single-premise closure against the arguments offered by Lasonen-Aarnio and Schechter. (shrink)

Stewart Cohen argues that basic knowledge is problematic, as it implies that subjects can acquire knowledge or justified beliefs about certain matters in ways that are supposedly too easy. Cohen raises two versions of the problem of easy knowledge, one involving the principle of closure and the other track-record style bootstrapping reasoning. In this paper I confront the problem of easy knowledge from the perspective of epistemological disjunctivism about perception. I argue that disjunctivism can do a better job than dogmatism (...) at responding to the version of the problem involving closure. I also argue that while disjunctivism would permit subjects to bootstrap their way to justified beliefs about the reliability of their perceptual powers, the disjunctivist can distinguish in a principled manner between this sort of bootstrapping and instances of it that we should agree are objectionable. (shrink)

Strict moderate invariantism is the ho-hum, ‘obvious’ view about knowledge attributions. It says knowledge attributions are often true and that only traditional epistemic factors like belief, truth, and justification make them true. As commonsensical as strict moderate invariantism is, it is equally natural to withdraw a knowledge attribution when error possibilities are made salient. If strict moderate invariantism is true, these knowledge-denials are often false because the subject does in fact know the proposition. I argue that strict moderate invariantism needs (...) an explanation of this phenomenon, but it does not have one. That is significant, for if strict moderate invariantism does not square with ordinary intuition, then it cannot rely on ordinary intuition for support. Section 1 introduces the concept of epistemic relevance blindness, which says ordinary subjects are generally insensitive to whether or not error possibilities are relevant to knowledge attributions. Section 2 focuses on Patrick Rysiew’s influential strict moderate invariantist pragmatic explanation of knowledge-denials and argues that such pragmatic explanations of knowledge-denials depend on attributors being epistemic relevance blind. Section 3 targets psychological explanations of epistemic relevance blindness offered separately by Jennifer Nagel and Mikkel Gerken. I argue that strict moderate invariantists lack a plausible explanation of epistemic relevance blindness. (shrink)

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)

Many philosophers think that part of what makes an event lucky concerns how probable that event is. In this paper, I argue that an epistemic probability account of luck successfully resists recent arguments that all theories of luck, including probability theories, are subject to counterexample (Hales 2016). I argue that an event is lucky if and only if it is significant and sufficiently improbable. An event is significant when, given some reflection, the subject would regard the event as significant, and (...) the event’s epistemic probability, determined by the subject’s evidence, is the only kind of probability that directly bears on whether or not the event is lucky. I conclude with some lessons that are applicable to probability theorists of luck generally, including those defending non-epistemic probability theories. (shrink)

Contextualists offer "high-low standards" practical cases to show that a variety of knowledge standards are in play in different ordinary contexts. These cases show nothing of the sort, I maintain. However Keith DeRose gives an ingenious argument that standards for knowledge do go up in high-stakes cases. According to the knowledge account of assertion (Kn), only knowledge warrants assertion. Kn combined with the context sensitivity of assertability yields contextualism about knowledge. But is Kn correct? I offer a rival account of (...) warranted assertion and argue that it beats Kn as a response to the "knowledge" version of Moore's Paradox. (shrink)