This paper looks at an argument strategy for assessing the epistemic closure principle. This is the principle that says knowledge is closed under known entailment; or (roughly) if S knows p and S knows that p entails q, then S knows that q. The strategy in question looks to the individual conditions on knowledge to see if they are closed. According to one conjecture, if all the individual conditions are closed, then so too is knowledge. I give a deductive argument (...) for this conjecture. According to a second conjecture, if one (or more) condition is not closed, then neither is knowledge. I give an inductive argument for this conjecture. In sum, I defend the strategy by defending the claim that knowledge is closed if, and only if, all the conditions on knowledge are closed. After making my case, I look at what this means for the debate over whether knowledge is closed. (shrink)

We often talk about knowledge being transmitted via testimony. This suggests a picture of testimony with striking similarities to memory. For instance, it is often assumed that neither is a generative source of knowledge: while the former transmits knowledge from one speaker to another, the latter preserves beliefs from one time to another. These considerations give rise to a stronger and a weaker thesis regarding the transmission of testimonial knowledge. The stronger thesis is that each speaker in a chain of (...) testimonial transmission must know that p in order to pass this knowledge to a hearer. The weaker thesis is that at least the first speaker must know that p in order for any hearer in the chain to come to know that p via testimony. I argue that both theses are false, and hence testimony, unlike memory, can be a generative source of knowledge. (shrink)

One of the central problems afflicting reductionism in the epistemology of testimony is the apparent fact that infants and small children are not cognitively capable of having the inductively based positive reasons required by this view. Since non-reductionism does not impose a requirement of this sort, it is thought to avoid this problem and is therefore taken to have a significant advantage over reductionism. In this paper, however, I argue that if this objection undermines reductionism, then a variant of it (...) similarly undermines non-reductionism. Thus, considerations about the cognitive capacities of infants and small children do not effectively discriminate between these two competing theories of testimonial justification. (shrink)

Experimental restrictionists have challenged philosophers’ reliance on intuitions about thought experiment cases based on experimental findings. According to the expertise defense, only the intuitions of philosophical experts count—yet the bulk of experimental philosophy consists in studies with lay people. In this paper, we argue that direct strategies for assessing the expertise defense are preferable to indirect strategies. A direct argument in support of the expertise defense would have to show: first, that there is a significant difference between expert and lay (...) intuitions; second, that expert intuitions are superior to lay intuitions; and third, that expert intuitions accord with the relevant philosophical consensus. At present, there is only little experimental evidence that bears on these issues. To advance the debate, we conducted two new experiments on intuitions about knowledge with experts and lay people. Our results suggest that the intuitions of epistemological experts are superior in some respects, but they also pose an unexpected challenge to the expertise defense. Most strikingly, we found that even epistemological experts tend to ascribe knowledge in fake-barn-style cases. This suggests that philosophy, as a discipline, might fail to adequately map the intuitions of its expert practitioners onto a disciplinary consensus. (shrink)

In this paper I discuss the relation between various properties that have been regarded as important for determining whether or not a belief constitutes a piece of knowledge: its stability, strength and sensitivity to truth, as well as the strength of the epistemic position in which the subject is with respect to this belief. Attempts to explicate the relevant concepts more formally with the help of systems of spheres of possible worlds (à la Lewis and Grove) must take care to (...) keep apart the very different roles that systems of spheres can play. Nozicks sensitivity account turns out to be closer to the stability analysis of knowledge (versions of which I identify in Plato, Descartes, Klein and Lehrer) than one might have suspected. (shrink)

I argue that to know that a proposition is true one must have justification for being certain that the proposition is true. That is, one must have infallible epistemic justification for believing the proposition. It is widely accepted among epistemologists that we rarely, if ever, have such strong justification for our beliefs. It follows that there is precious little that we know. That conclusion is unacceptable to many philosophers. I argue that the positions that lead to the skeptical conclusion are (...) well-motivated and that the skeptical conclusion is implicitly accepted by ordinary speakers. My dissertation has three main components: a metaphilosophical position, an epistemological position, and an error theory. First, the metaphilosophical position. One very important part of philosophy is the analysis of our ordinary concepts. Analysis of our concepts begins with reflecting on what we are inclined to say about various actual and possible cases when considered under specific descriptions. This traditional method has recently come under attack, due in part to the rise of semantic externalism. I agree with externalists that if ‘meaning is reference’ then there is little reason to think reflecting on our concepts from the armchair will provide insight to the nature of the concepts we investigate. I defend a version of semantic internalism which grounds meaning in factors with which subjects are directly acquainted. That view supports the traditional methodology. Furthermore, as the goal of philosophical analysis is to accurately describe concepts of philosophical interest, the only kind of objection that could be decisive against a proposed analysis is that it does not correctly describe our concept. That opens the door to a skeptical analysis of knowledge. Second, the epistemological position. I argue that the unacceptability of sentences of the form “S knows that p but it is possible for S that not-p” is best explained by the hypothesis that our concept of knowledge requires having justification for being certain that what one believes is true. I offer as a criterion of justified certainty the idea that when one knows a proposition is true, one is in a position to decisively answer questions about one’s knowledge of that proposition. I survey a number of competing theories of knowledge and show that they allow for the possibility of knowledge when one fails my criterion of decisive answerability. Those views fail my criterion because according to those views there is nothing the subject is aware of that guarantees for the subject that the allegedly known proposition is true. On that basis, I contend that knowledge is direct awareness of the factors that constitute the truth of the proposition one believes. Third, the error theory. Of course, we rarely have direct awareness of the factors that constitute the truth of the propositions we believe. So, our knowledge attributions are generally false. Yet, they are overwhelmingly natural to make. I argue that competent speakers are often quick to recognize knowledge attributions as a kind of ‘loose talk’ akin to the way we loosely ascribe geometric properties to ordinary objects. We regularly call objects ‘square’ that are not even close to being square, and we are quick to recognize this when challenged. I argue that we do this because we are so accustomed to communicating using strict language to make false claims that we often do not attend to the literal falsity of what we are saying. While we accept very demanding standards for knowledge, the phenomenon of recognizing that our knowledge claims are regularly false is as pervasive as our use of loose speech. (shrink)

If you put chimpanzees from different communities together you can expect mayhem - they are not keen on treating each other nicely. There is closely related species of apes, however, whose members have countless encounters with unrelated specimen on a daily basis and yet almost all get through the day in one piece - that species is us, homo sapiens. But what makes us get along, most of the time? Morality as such is, perhaps surprisingly, not a mainstream research topic (...) in social psychology. Most textbooks in the field do not even mention the term morality at all (and focus on 'prosociality' instead). This relative lack of 'coverage' might have to do with the difficulty of operationalising 'morality' in a fitting way (more on this below). However, morality certainly is a social phenomenon and therefore the collection of Fargas, Jussim, and Van Lange is certainly a step in the right direction; it offers an extensive overview of the field and is suggestive of the vast potential of studying morality through the lens of social psychology. (shrink)

I challenge a cornerstone of the Gettier debate: that a proposed analysis of the concept of knowledge is inadequate unless it entails that people don’t know in Gettier cases. I do so from the perspective of Carnap’s methodology of explication. It turns out that the Gettier problem per se is not a fatal problem for any account of knowledge, thus understood. It all depends on how the account fares regarding other putative counter examples and the further Carnapian desiderata of exactness, (...) fruitfulness and simplicity. Carnap proposed his methodology more than a decade before Gettier’s seminal paper appeared, making the present solution to the problem a candidate for being the least ad hoc proposal on the market, one whose independent standing cannot be questioned, among solutions that depart from the usual method of revising a theory of knowledge in the light of counterexamples. As an illustration of the method at work, I reconstruct reliabilism as an attempt to provide an explication of the concept 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)

A traditional line of inquiry in epistemology tried to analyze the concept of knowledge into its constituent components. In virtue of understanding these alleged more basic concepts, such as truth, justification, and belief, it was hoped that a complete and informative theory of knowledge would emerge. According to the revolutionary approach advocated here, one which originates in Timothy Williamson's Knowledge and Its Limits, better success can be achieved by reversing this conceptual analysis structure by taking knowledge as the fundamental explanatory (...) tool in epistemological theorizing. I defend the view that this knowledge-theoretic approach exceeds the explanatory value of its conceptual analysis competitor in the sense that the best explanations of epistemologically significant phenomena are appropriately expressed in terms of knowledge per se. (shrink)

Reflective equilibrium has been considered a paradigm method involving intuitions. Some philosophers have recently claimed that it is trivial and can even accommodate the sort of scepticism about the reliability of intuitions advocated by experimental philosophers. I discuss several ways in which reflective equilibrium could be thought of as trivial and argue that it is inconsistent with scepticism about the reliability of intuitions.

John Cook Wilson (1849–1915) was Wykeham Professor of Logic at New College, Oxford and the founder of ‘Oxford Realism’, a philosophical movement that flourished at Oxford during the first decades of the 20th century. Although trained as a classicist and a mathematician, his most important contribution was to the theory of knowledge, where he argued that knowledge is factive and not definable in terms of belief, and he criticized ‘hybrid’ and ‘externalist’ accounts. He also argued for direct realism in perception, (...) criticizing both empiricism and idealism, and argued for a moderate nominalist view of universals as being in rebus and only ‘apprehended’ by their particulars. His influence helped swaying Oxford away from idealism and, through figures such as H. A. Prichard, Gilbert Ryle, or J. L. Austin, his ideas were also to some extent at the origin of ‘moral intuitionism’ and ‘ordinary language philosophy’ which defined much of Oxford philosophy until the second half of the twentieth-century. Nevertheless, his name and legacy were all but forgotten for generations after World War II. Still, his views on knowledge are with us today, being in part at work in the writings of philosophers as diverse as John McDowell, Charles Travis, and Timothy Williamson. (shrink)

Internalism and externalism are both false. What is needed to convert true belief into knowledge is the appropriate blend of subjective and objective factors to yield the appropriate sort of connection between mind and the world. The sort of knowledge explicated is calledmetaknowledge and is knowledge that involves the evaluation of incoming information in terms of a background system. It is proposed that knowledge is equivalent to undefeated justification which is justification on the basis of every system that eliminates or (...) corrects any error in what a person accepts. The system of such system is called the ultrasystem of the person. This account appeals both to internal factors and external factors and involves appeal to both normative requirements and empirical constraints. Justification is defined in terms of a comparative notion of rationality adapted from Chisholm. (shrink)

The Gettier Problem (henceforth GP) is a milestone in contemporary epistemology. Half a century after the philosophical earthquake caused by the well-known Gettier article (1963), solutions continue to appear and the discussion resurfaces. Because we, like many, choose to adopt an optimistic stance towards the possibility of finding a plausible answer to the GP, in this paper we present an unconventional solution to solve it. Crucially, we argue that the only plausible and non-falsifiable definition of the propositional knowledge is the (...) one given by an “open” formula that contains a placeholder or a “variable” – on the third necessary condition – which takes a value according to which, depending on the circumstances, is necessary and sufficient for epistemic success. (shrink)

Abstract Can the wise person be fooled? The Stoics take a very strong view on this question, holding that the wise person (or sage) is never deceived and never believes anything that is false. This seems to be an implausibly strong claim, but it follows directly from some basic tenets of the Stoic cognitive and psychological world-view. In developing an account of what wisdom really requires, I will explore the tenets of the Stoic view that lead to this infallibilism about (...) wisdom, and show that many of the elements of the Stoic picture can be preserved in a more plausible fallibilist approach. Specifically, I propose to develop a Stoic fallibilist virtue epistemology that is based on the Stoic model of the moral virtues. This model of the intellectual virtues will show that (in keeping with a folk distinction) the wise person is never befooled, though that person might be fooled. Content Type Journal Article Pages 1-14 DOI 10.1007/s12136-012-0158-0 Authors Sarah Wright, Department of Philosophy, University of Georgia, 107 Peabody Hall, Athens, GA 30602, USA Journal Acta Analytica Online ISSN 1874-6349 Print ISSN 0353-5150. (shrink)

Foley and Turri have recently given objections to the defeasibility theory of propositional knowledge. Here, I give an objection of a quite different stripe by looking at what the theory must say about knowing that you know. I end with some remarks on how this objection relates to rival theories and how this might be a worry for some of these.

Pure virtue epistemology faces the fake barn challenge. This paper explains how it can be met. Thus, it is argued that the thought experiment contains a hidden ambiguity concerning the visual ability typically ascribed to, or denied, fake barn subjects. Disambiguation shows fake barn subjects to have limited knowledge of the target proposition. This accords with a pure virtue-theoretic conception of knowledge that predicts and explains all the intuitions elicited by the thought experiment. As a result, the relationship between knowledge, (...) luck and ability is illuminated, and our epistemological theorizing improved. (shrink)

There is a widespread opinion that the realist idea that whether a proposition is true or false typically depends on how things are independently of ourselves is bound to turn truth, in Davidson's words, into “something to which humans can never legitimately aspire”. This opinion accounts for the ongoing popularity of “epistemic” theories of truth, that is, of those theories that explain what it is for a proposition (or statement, or sentence, or what have you) to be true or false (...) in terms of some epistemic notion, such as provability, justifiability, verifiability, rational acceptability, warranted assertibility, and so forth, in some suitably characterized epistemic situation. My aim in this paper is to show that the widespread opinion is erroneous and that the (legitimate) epistemological preoccupation with the accessibility of truth does not warrant the rejection of the realist intuition that truth is, at least for certain types of propositions, radically nonepistemic. (shrink)

The paper critically discusses two prominent arguments against closure principles for knowledge. The first one is the “argument from aggregation”, claiming that closure under conjunction has the consequence that, if one individually knows i premises, one also knows their i-fold conjunction—yet, every one of the premises might exhibit interesting positive epistemic properties while the i-fold conjunction might fail to do so. The second one is the “argument from concatenation”, claiming that closure under entailment has the consequence that, if one knows (...) a premise, one also knows each of its remote consequences one arrives at—yet, again, the premise might exhibit interesting positive epistemic properties while some of its remote consequences might fail to do so. The paper firstly observes that the ways in which these two arguments try to establish that the relevant closure principle has the relevant problematic consequence are strikingly similar. They both crucially involve showing that, given the features of the case, the relevant closure principle acts in effect as a soritical principle, which is in turn assumed to lead validly to the relevant problematic consequence. There are however nontransitive logics of vagueness where soritical principles do not have any problematic consequence. Assuming that one of these logics is the correct logic of vagueness, the paper secondly observes that both arguments describe situations where knowledge is arguably vague in the relevant respects, so that a tolerant logic should be used in reasoning about it, with the effect that the relevant soritical principle no longer validly leads to the relevant problematic consequence. This shows an interesting respect in which the gap between validity and good inference that arguably arises in a transitive framework can be bridged in a tolerant one, thereby approximating better certain features of our epistemic lives as finite subjects. Moreover, even for those who do not subscribe to tolerant logics, the paper’s two observations jointly indicate that, for all the arguments from aggregation and concatenation show, the status of the relevant closure principles should be no worse than that assigned by one’s favoured theory of vagueness to soritical principles, which only rarely is plain falsity and can indeed get arbitrarily close to full truth. (shrink)

In his Meditations On First Philosophy, Descartes points out the awakedreaming indistinguishability problem, which calls into question the reliability of our knowledge about the external world. The argument can be understood as follows: P1) Nothing can rule out the subject being duped into believing she is in X when she is actually in Y. P2) A person can know that she is in Y only if there is something to rule out her being duped into believing she is in X (...) when she is actually in Y. C) Hence, the subject cannot know that she is in Y. The problem can be interpreted in the form of A1 where X represents a dream state and Y represents an awake state. It can also be interpreted in the form of A2 where X represents an awake state and Y represents a dream state. I define the problem in the form of A1 and A2. The problem also involves an epistemological aspect and a phenomenological aspect. The epistemological aspect concerns the question of whether dream states and awake states are fundamentally indistinguishable. If so, the problem would be irresolvable in principle and result in a great epistemic threat. The phenomenological aspect concerns how the experience appears to the subject and affects the judgment she makes about her current state. In order to fully resolve the problem, as I will argue, we need to show that both A1 and A2 are unsound and resolve both aspects of the problem. McGinn, Ichikawa, and Sosa try to resolve the awakedreaming indistinguishability problem by defending the imagination view of dreaming. Among the three, Ichikawa holds the strongest version, where he denies that percepts and beliefs occur in dreams; McGinn denies percepts occur in dreams while Sosa denies beliefs occur in dreams. I argue that their arguments, namely drawing a sharp distinction between percepts and images along with denying beliefs occur in dreams, are misguided. They fail to resolve any form or any aspect of the indistinguishability problem. My goal of this research is to reinvigorate the imagination view of dreaming. Instead of holding a sharp distinction between percepts and images along with denying belief occur in dreams, I attempt to bridge the gap between lucid dreaming and non-lucid dreaming to defend this view. I contend that the imagination view of dreaming, upon modification, can resolve the problem. (shrink)

Many contemporary philosophers are committed – either implicitly or explicitly – to Propositionalism about thought-experimental intuitions. According to this view, thought-experimental intuitions are phenomenally conscious, spontaneous, and non-theoretical; most importantly, Propositionalists claim that intuitions bear consciously accessible propositional content. The negative project of this essay is a critique of, the rejection of which is tantamount to rejecting Propositionalism. In addition, I propose an alternative position – namely, Interpretationalism. According to Interpretationalism, intuitions possess the features ascribed in -; however, they do (...) not bear consciously accessible propositional content. Instead, intuitions acquire cognitive significance by virtue of being interpreted in light of a subject’s background beliefs. (shrink)