This paper takes a critical look at the idea that knowledge involves reflective access to reasons that provide rational support. After distinguishing between different kinds of awareness, I argue that the kind of awareness involved in awareness of reasons is awareness of something general rather than awareness of something that instances some generality. Such awareness involves the exercise of conceptual capacities and just is knowledge. Since such awareness is knowledge, this kind of awareness cannot play any interesting role in a (...) story about how knowledge is acquired. After arguing that reflective access to reasons is not a precondition on acquiring knowledge, I look at one motivation for introducing this kind of access requirement. I argue that the argument for the access requirement rests on a mistaken assumption about the relationship between reasons and responsibility. While the target of this critical discussion is a version of epistemological disjunctivism, the criticism applies mutatis mutandis to many traditional internalist views in epistemology. (shrink)

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

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)

Wordly internalists claim that while internal duplicates always share the same evidence, our evidence includes non-trivial propositions about our environment. It follows that some evidence is false. Worldly internalism is thought to provide a more satisfying answer to scepticism than classical internalist views that deny that these propositions about our environment might belong to our evidence and to provide a generally more attractive account of rationality and reasons for belief. We argue that worldly internalism faces serious difficulties and that its (...) apparent advantages are illusory. First, it cannot adequately handle some not terribly strange cases of perceptual error. Second, it cannot explain why one should plan to use their evidence to update their beliefs. The second issue allows us to explain why cases of misplaced certainty do not require us to introduce false evidence into our views and that why the alleged advantage of worldly internalism in resisting sceptical pressures is illusory. (shrink)

There are many important dimensions of epistemic evaluation, one of which is justification. We don’t just evaluate beliefs for truth, reliability, accuracy, and knowledge, but also for justification. However, in the epistemological literature, there is much disagreement about the nature of justification and how it should be understood. One of the controversies that has separated the contemporary epistemological discourse into two opposing camps has to do with the internalism-externalism distinction. Whereas internalists defend certain core assumptions about justification from the pre-Gettier (...) tradition, externalists generally think that the traditional conception is untenable and should be replaced. In this compilation thesis, I argue for, defend, and develop a particular brand of internalism, both in general and with respect to specific sources of justification. In papers 1 and 2, I defend a couple of well-known arguments for mentalism and accessibilism. Moreover, I also point out how prominent versions of these theses are vulnerable to serious problems (e.g., about over-intellectualization and vicious regresses). Part of my goal in the first couple of papers is to figure out what commitments the internalist should take on in order to avoid the externalist's objections, while at the same time receiving support from considerations that have motivated internalism in the past. In papers 3 and 4, I start from the assumption that mentalism is true and attempt to answer the following questions: 1) which non-factive mental states can play a justification-conferring role with respect to empirical belief? And 2) why does this set of states play the epistemic role it does? In response to question 1, I argue that all and only one's beliefs and perceptual experiences have justificatory relevance. In response to question 2, I argue that one's beliefs and perceptual experiences are one's strongly representational states, and that strongly representational states necessarily provide support to certain empirical propositions. Having done so, I then defend mentalism about scientific evidence from a couple of prominent objections in the recent literature. Lastly, in papers 5 and 6, I argue for a particular brand of internalism about testimonial and memorial justification and show how that position has a dialectical advantage over its main competitors. (shrink)

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.

According to the knowledge view of evidence notoriously defended by Timothy Williamson (2000), for any subject, her evidence consists of all and only her propositional knowledge (E=K). Many have found (E=K) implausible. However, few have offered arguments against Williamson’s positive case for (E=K). In this paper, I propose an argument against Williamson’s positive case in favour of (E=K). Central to my argument is the possibility of the knowledge of necessary truths. I also draw some more general conclusions concerning theorizing about (...) evidence. (shrink)

In this article I focus on some unduly neglected common-sense considerations supporting the view that one's evidence is the propositions that one knows. I reply to two recent objections to these considerations.

In this paper, I present a puzzle about epistemic rationality. It seems plausible that it should be rational to believe a proposition if you have sufficient evidential support for it. It seems plausible that it rationality requires you to conform to the categorical requirements of rationality. It also seems plausible that our first-order attitudes ought to mesh with our higher-order attitudes. It seems unfortunate that we cannot accept all three claims about rationality. I will present three ways of trying to (...) resolve this tension and argue that the best way to do this is to reject the idea that strong evidential support is the stuff rationality is made of. In the course of doing this, I shall argue that there is a special class of propositions about the requirements of rationality that we cannot make rational mistakes about and explain how this can be. (shrink)

Epistemic externalism offers one of the most prominent responses to the sceptical challenge. Externalism has commonly been interpreted as postulating a crucial asymmetry between the actual-world agent and their brain-in-a-vat counterpart: while the actual agent is in a position to know she is not envatted, her biv counterpart is not in a position to know that she is envatted, or in other words, only the former is in a position to know whether or not she is envatted. In this paper, (...) I argue that there is in fact no such asymmetry: assuming epistemic externalism, both the actual world agent and their biv counterpart are in a position to know whether or not they are envatted. After an introduction, I present the main argument. I examine to what extent the argument survives when one accepts additional externalist-friendly commitments: semantic externalism, a sensitivity condition on knowledge, and epistemic contextualism. Finally, I discuss the implications of my conclusion to a variety of debates in epistemology. (shrink)

This paper focuses on the relation between epistemic reasons and the subject’s epistemic perspective. It tackles the questions of whether epistemic reasons are dependent on the perspective of the subject they are reasons for, and if so, whether they are dependent on the actual or the potential perspective. It is argued that epistemic reasons are either independent or minimally dependent on the subject’s epistemic perspective. In particular, I provide three arguments supporting the conclusion that epistemic reasons are not dependent on (...) the subject’s actual perspective. Furthermore, I show that variants of these arguments apply against popular views holding that epistemic reasons depend on the subject’s potential perspective, such as the view that epistemic reasons are facts that one is in a position to know. (shrink)