Knowledge ascriptions of the form ‘S knows that p’ are a central area of research in philosophy. But why do humans think and talk about knowledge? What are knowledge ascriptions for? This article surveys a variety of proposals about the role of knowledge ascriptions and attempts to provide a unified account of these seemingly distinct views.

Philosophers of mind and epistemologists are increasingly making room in their theories for epistemic emotions (E-emotions) and, drawing on metacognition research in psychology, epistemic – or noetic or metacognitive – feelings (E-feelings). Since philoso- phers have only recently begun to draw on empirical research on E-feelings, in particular, we begin by providing a general characterization of E-feelings (section 1) and reviewing some highlights of relevant research (section 2). We then turn to philosophical work on E-feelings and E-emotions, situating the contributions (...) to the focus section (two articles devoted to E-feelings and two devoted to E-emotions) with respect to both the existing literature and each other (section 3). We conclude by brie y describing some promising avenues for further philosophical research on E-feelings and E-emotions (section 4). (shrink)

Whether it seems that you know something depends in part upon practical factors. When the stakes are low, it can seem to you that you know that p, but when the stakes go up it'll seem to you that you don't. The apparent sensitivity of knowledge to stakes presents a serious challenge to epistemologists who endorse a stable semantics for knowledge attributions and reject the idea that whether you know something depends on how much is at stake. After arguing that (...) previous attempts to meet this challenge fall short, I offer a new solution: theunassertability account. The account starts with the observation that high stakes subjects aren't in an epistemic position to assert. We generally presuppose that knowing is sufficient for epistemically proper assertion, but this presupposition only stands up to scrutiny if we draw a distinction between two notions of epistemic propriety, and we shouldn't expect ordinary speakers to draw it. A subject in a high stakes situation who fails to draw the distinction will be led by the sufficiency claim to treat anything she isn't in a position to assert as something she isn't in a position to know. The sensitivity of epistemically proper assertion to practical factors explains the merely apparent sensitivity of knowledge to stakes. (shrink)

I investigate whether degreed beliefs are able to play the predictive, explanatory, and modeling roles that they are frequently taken to play. The investigation focuses on evidence—both from sources familiar in epistemology as well as recent work in behavioral economics and cognitive psychology—of variability in agents' apparent degrees of belief. Although such variability has been noticed before, there has been little philosophical discussion of its breadth or of the psychological mechanisms underlying it. Once these are appreciated, the inadequacy of degrees (...) of belief becomes clear. I offer a theoretical alternative to degrees of belief, what I call the filter theory. (shrink)

To what extent should we trust our natural instincts about knowledge? The question has special urgency for epistemologists who want to draw evidential support for their theories from certain intuitive epistemic assessments while discounting others as misleading. This paper focuses on the viability of endorsing the legitimacy of Gettier intuitions while resisting the intuitive pull of skepticism – a combination of moves that most mainstream epistemologists find appealing. Awkwardly enough, the “good” Gettier intuitions and the “bad” skeptical intuitions seem to (...) be equally strong. This chapter argues that it is not a coincidence that these two types of intuition register with equal force: they are generated by a common mechanism. However, the input to this mechanism is interestingly different in the two types of case, and different in a way that can support the mainstream view that Gettier cases tell us something about knowledge where skeptical intuitions involve systematic error. (shrink)

Recently, some philosophers have defended the idea that knowledge is an interest-relative notion. According to this thesis, whether an agent knows P may depend on the practical costs of her being wrong about P. This perspective marks a radical departure from traditional accounts that take knowledge to be a purely intellectual concept. I think there is much to say on behalf of the interest-relative notion. In this paper, I report on some new evidence which strongly suggests that ordinary people’s attributions (...) of knowledge are in fact sensitive to practical interests. This is noteworthy because recent experiments have been interpreted by many to support the opposite conclusion. I also argue that the new results support an invariantist but interest-relativist account of knowledge, a thesis known as Interest Relative Invariantism (IRI). I do not make the case here that IRI gives us the very best explanation of the results presented here. Any such attempt would require an in-depth survey of the last few decades of work in epistemology. I only want to argue here that IRI gives us a simple and elegant explanation of the new data, and that the same cannot be said about traditional contextualism, a leading competitor to IRI. (shrink)

Over the years I’ve written many papers defending an idiosyncratic version of interest-relative epistemology. This book collects and updates the views I’ve expressed over those papers. -/- Interest-relative epistemologies all start in roughly the same way. A big part of what makes knowledge important is that it rationalises action. But for almost anything we purportedly know, there is some action that it wouldn’t rationalise. I know what I had for breakfast, but I wouldn’t take a bet at billion to one (...) odds about it. Knowledge has practical limits. The first idiosyncratic feature of my version of interest-relative epistemology is how those limits are identified. Other interest-relative philosophers typically say that the limits have to do with stakes; in high stakes situations knowledge goes away. That’s no part of my view. I think knowledge goes away in long odds situations. High stakes situations are almost always are long odds situations, for reasons to do with the declining marginal utility of money. But the converse isn’t true. On my view, knowledge often goes away in cases where it is trivial to check before action. This idea, that interests matter in long odds cases, and not just in high stakes cases, is the main constant in what I’ve written on interest-relativity over the years. -/- But there are three other respects in which the view I’m going to set out and defend in this book is very different from the view I set out in older papers. -/- I used to identify the practical limits on knowledge with cases where relying on the purported knowledge would get the wrong answer. I focused, that is, on the outputs of inquiry. Knowledge goes away if relying on it would lead one to make a mistake. I now think I was looking at the wrong end of inquiry. Knowledge goes away if the thinker starts conducting an inquiry where the purported knowledge is an inappropriate starting point, and inappropriate for the special reason that it might be false. Now one way we can tell that something is a bad starting point is that starting there will mean we end up at the wrong place. But it’s not the only way. Sometimes a bad starting point will lead to the right conclusion for the wrong reasons. As the Nyāya philosophers argued, rational inquiry starts with knowledge. If it would be irrational to start this inquiry with a particular belief, that belief isn’t knowledge. -/- Not all inquiries are practical inquiries, but many are. And practical inquiries are usually going to be at the center of attention in this book. But what is someone trying to figure out when they conduct a practical inquiry? I used to think that they were trying to figure out which option maximised expected utility, and to a first approximation identified knowledge with those things one could conditionalise on without changing the option that maximised expected utility. As noted in the previous paragraph, I no longer think that we can identify knowledge with what doesn’t change our verdicts. But more importantly, I no longer think that expected utility maximisation is as central to practical inquiry as I once did. There are some theoretical reasons from game theory that raise some doubts about expected utility maximisation. Weak dominance reasoning is part of our theory of rational choice, and can’t be modelled as expected utility maximisation. Perhaps some kinds of equilibrium seeking are parts of practical inquiry, and can’t be modelled as expected utility maximisation. But there are also very practical reasons to think that practical inquiry doesn’t aim at expected utility maximisation. When there are a lot of very similar options - think about selecting a can from a supermarket shelf - and it’s more trouble than it’s worth to figure out which of them maximises expected utility, it’s best to ignore the differences between them and just pick. As I’ll argue in Chapter 6, this makes a big difference to how interests and knowledge interact. -/- In the version of interest-relativity that I’m defending here, everything in epistemology is interest-relative. Knowledge, rational belief, and evidence are all interest-relative. But they are all interest-relative in slightly different ways. The main aim here is to defend the interest-relativity of knowledge. A common objection to interest-relative theories of knowledge is that they can’t be extended into theories of all the things we care about in epistemology. Here I try to meet that challenge. The way I do so is a little messy. It would be nice if there was some part of epistemology that’s interest-invariant, as I used to think, or if all the interest-relative notions were interest-relative in the same way, as other interest-relative epistemologists argue. For better or worse, that’s not the view I’m defending. Interests matter throughout epistemology, and we just have to go case by case to figure out how and why they matter. (shrink)

Epistemic Courage is a timely and thought-provoking exploration of the ethics of belief, which shows why epistemology is no mere academic abstraction - the question of what to believe couldn't be more urgent. Jonathan Ichikawa argues that a skeptical, negative bias about belief is connected to a conservative bias that reinforces the status quo.

Body checking, characterized by the repeated visual or physical inspection of particular parts of one’s own body (e.g. thighs, waist, or upper arms) is one of the most prominent behaviors associated with eating disorders, particularly Anorexia Nervosa (AN). In this paper, we explore the explanatory potential of the Recalcitrant Fear Model of AN (RFM) in relation to body checking. We argue that RFM, when combined with certain plausible auxiliary hypotheses about the cognitive and epistemic roles of emotions, is able to (...) explain key characteristics of body checking, including how body checking behavior becomes habitual and compulsive. (shrink)

Predictive processing theorists have claimed PTSD and depression are maladaptive and epistemically distorting because they entail undesirably wide gaps between top-down models and bottom-up information inflows. Without denying this is sometimes so, the “maladaptive” label carries questionable normative assumptions. For instance, trauma survivors facing significant risk of subsequent attacks may overestimate threats to circumvent further trauma, “bringing forth” concretely safer personal spaces, to use enactive terminology, ensuring the desired gap between predicted worries and outcomes. The violation of predictive processing can (...) go in the opposite direction too, as when depression coincides with energy-depletion, and hence objectively strenuous situations in which things look farther away because they are (accurately anticipated to be) harder to reach. These examples partly encapsulate what predictive processing theorists call “active inference,” yet with differences. In the first case, actions fruitfully obviate predictions rather than fulfilling them. In the second, mental models do not dysregulate bodily processes, making coping harder. Instead, problems (e.g., personal obstacles, gastric illness) deplete energy, eliciting a depressive and adaptive slow-down. Some predictive proponents apply correspondence criteria when alleging mismatches between internal models and the world, while incongruously asserting that the brain did not evolve to see things veridically, but to execute actions. An alternative is to adopt pluralistic, pragmatic epistemologies suited to the complexity of mind. The upshot is that mental outlooks can depart from the norm without epistemically being distorted and that mismatches between anticipatory worries and outcomes, when they actually exist, can be a measure of adaptive and epistemic success. (shrink)

Philosophers and psychologists sometimes categorize emotions like surprise and curiosity as specifically epistemic. Is there some reasonably unified and interesting class of emotions here? If so, what unifies it? This paper proposes and defends an evaluative account of epistemic emotions: What it is to be an epistemic emotion is to have fittingness conditions that distinctively involve some epistemic evaluation. We argue that this view has significant advantages over alternative proposals and is a promising way to identify a limited and interesting (...) class of emotions. (shrink)

According to pragmatic encroachment, whether an epistemic attitude towards p has some positive epistemic status (e.g., whether a belief is epistemically rational or justified, or it amounts to knowledge) partially depends on practical factors such as the costs of being wrong or the practical goals of the agent. Pragmatic encroachment comes in many varieties. This survey article provides an overview of different kinds of pragmatic encroachment. It focuses on three dimensions under which kinds of pragmatic encroachment differ: the type of (...) epistemic status affected by practical factors, the type of practical factors affecting the epistemic status, and the type of normative considerations encroaching on the epistemic status. (shrink)

Kierkegaard's pseudonym Johannes Climacus famously defines faith as a risky “venture” that requires “holding fast” to “objective uncertainty.” Yet puzzlingly, he emphasizes that faith requires resolute conviction and certainty. Moreover, Climacus claims that all beliefs about contingent propositions about the external world “exclude doubt” and “nullify uncertainty,” but also that uncertainty is “continually present” in these very same beliefs. This paper argues that these apparent contradictions can be resolved by interpreting Climacus as a belief‐credence dualist. That is, Climacus holds that (...) beliefs and credences (i.e., degrees of belief) are two irreducibly distinct types of mental states. Beliefs are resolutions that close inquiry, thereby excluding doubt and reflecting subjective certainty by disregarding the possibility of error. Credences, by contrast, reflect assessments of evidential probabilities, thereby encoding a recognition of “objective uncertainty” by acknowledging the possibility of error. In addition to solving a vexing interpretive puzzle and showing how Kierkegaard anticipates contemporary views about the nature of belief and credence, this paper demonstrates that Kierkegaard developed a sophisticated account of the nature of belief, doubt, and certainty that merits serious philosophical consideration. (shrink)

According to a widely discussed view, knowledge plays a significant normative role in action: It is epistemically rational to treat p as your reason for action if and only if you know that p. As many philosophers have observed, however, this view clashes with the claim that knowledge is moderate and stable. For, granting that claim, there will be high stakes cases in which knowledge seems insufficient. To deal with such cases, some philosophers embracing the knowledge norm combine three independently (...) plausible claims. First, they say that no non-trivial condition is luminous; second, they say that doing something while not being in a position to know that that is appropriate is bad (in high stakes cases); third, they say that in the high stakes cases in question, the subject knows but fails to be in a position to know that she knows (Williamson Philos Q 55:213–235, 2005). This paper argues that this account can overcome the main objections already raised in the literature, but that it still faces the apparently insurmountable challenge of providing a natural and helpful way of substantiating the second claim. (shrink)

According to evidentialist views, credence in a proposition p should be proportional to the degree of evidential support that one has in favor of p. However, empirical evidence suggests that our credences are systematically sensitive to practical factors. In this article, I provide a cost–benefit analysis of credences' practical sensitivity. The upshot of this analysis is that credences sensitive to practical factors fare better than practically insensitive ones along several dimensions. All things considered, our credences should be sensitive to practical (...) factors. (shrink)

The aim of this collection is to show how work in the analytic philosophical tradition can shed light on the nature, value, and experience of anxiety. Contrary to widespread assumptions, anxiety is not best understood as a mental disorder, or an intrinsically debilitating state, but rather as an often valuable affective state which heightens our sensitivity to potential threats and challenges. As the contributions in this volume demonstrate, learning about anxiety can be relevant for debates, not only in the philosophy (...) of emotion, but also in epistemology, value theory, and the philosophy of psychopathology. In this introductory article, we also show that there is still much to discover about the relevance that anxiety may have for moral action, self-understanding, and mental health. (shrink)

The threshold view says that a person forms an outright belief P if and only if her credence for P reaches a certain threshold. Using computer simulations, I compare different versions of the threshold view to understand how they perform under time pressure in decision problems. The results illuminate the strengths and weaknesses of the various cognitive strategies in different decision contexts. A threshold view that performs well across diverse contexts is likely to be a cognitively flexible and context-dependent fusion (...) of several of the existing theories. The results of the simulations also cast doubts on the possibility of a threshold view that is both simple enough to streamline our reasoning while also allowing us to form good action-guiding beliefs. (shrink)

Incessant checking is undeniably problematic from a practical point of view. But what is epistemically wrong with checking again (and again)? The starting assumption for this paper is that establishing what goes wrong when individuals check their stove ten times in a row requires understanding the nature of the doxastic attitude that compulsive re-checkers are in, as they go back to perform another check. Does the re-checker know that the stove is off, and is thus looking for more of what (...) she already has (Whitcomb, D. 2010. “Curiosity was Framed.” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 81 (3): 664–687.)? Or is she an inquirer who repeatedly loses her knowledge and finds herself inquiring again and again into the same question (Friedman, J. 2019. “Checking Again.” Philosophical Issues 29 (1): 84–96.)? I present what I see as the three main hypotheses currently available, and propose a refinement to Taylor's ‘what-if questioning’ account (2020). (shrink)

Can you rationally double-check what you already know? In this paper, I argue that you can. Agents can know that something is true and rationally double-check it at the very same time. I defend my position by considering a wide variety of cases where agents double-check their beliefs to gain epistemic improvements beyond knowledge. These include certainty, epistemic resilience, and sensitivity to error. Although this phenomenon is widespread, my proposal faces two types of challenges. First, some have defended ignorance norms, (...) on which agents are only allowed to inquire about things they don’t already know. Second—motivated by strong conceptions of belief or pragmatic encroachment—some have argued that doublechecking destroys knowledge. I argue that these competing views fail to capture both the epistemic value of double-checking and the many reasons why agents might double-check. Moreover, they rely on overly strong assumptions about what inquiry, knowledge, or belief requires. Finally, I marshal linguistic data in favor of the compatibility of knowledge and doublechecking. (shrink)

Emotions have long been of interest to philosophers and have deep historical roots going back to the Ancients. They have also become one of the most exciting areas of current research in philosophy, the cognitive sciences, and beyond. -/- This book explains the philosophy of the emotions, structuring the investigation around seven fundamental questions: What are emotions? Are emotions natural kinds? Do animals have emotions? Are emotions epistemically valuable? Are emotions the foundation for value and morality? Are emotions the basis (...) for responsibility? Do emotions make us better people? -/- In the course of exploring these questions, the book also discusses cutting-edge empirical research on emotion, feminist approaches to emotions and their value, and methodological questions on how to theorize about the emotions. The book also contains in-depth discussions of specific emotions like compassion, disgust, anxiety, and curiosity. It also highlights emerging trends in emotion research. (shrink)

Orthodoxy in the contemporary debate on knowledge ascriptions holds that the truth‐value of knowledge ascriptions is purely a matter of truth‐relevant factors. One familiar challenge to orthodoxy comes from intuitive practical factor effects . But practical factor effects turn out to be hard to confirm in experimental studies, and where they have been confirmed, they may seem easy to explain away. We suggest a novel experimental paradigm to show that practical factor effects exist. It trades on the idea that people (...) retract knowledge attributions when practical factors shift. We also explain why the resulting data raise a serious challenge to orthodoxy. (shrink)

In this paper, I discuss the ways in which epistemic anxiety promotes well-being, specifically by examining the positive contributions that feelings of epistemic anxiety make toward intellectually virtuous inquiry. While the prospects for connecting the concept of epistemic anxiety to the two most prominent accounts of intellectual virtue, i.e., “virtue-reliabilism” and “virtue-responsibilism”, are promising, I primarily focus on whether the capacity for epistemic anxiety counts as an intellectual virtue in the reliabilist sense. As I argue, there is a close yet (...) unexplored connection between feelings of epistemic anxiety and the form of inference commonly known as “Inference to the Best Explanation” (IBE). Specifically, I argue that both the recognition that some fact requires an explanation—a necessary first step in applying IBE—and the subsequent motivation to employ IBE are typically facilitated by feelings of epistemic anxiety. So, provided IBE is truth-conducive the capacity for epistemic anxiety should count as an intellectual virtue in the reliabilist sense. After outlining my main argument, I address the challenge that the capacity for epistemic anxiety has the potential to be misleading. To respond to this challenge, I discuss how our recognition that a fact requires an explanation must in part be a species of practical knowledge, rather than theoretical knowledge. For the agent to skillfully distinguish between facts that require an explanation and facts that do not, she must develop the virtuous disposition to feel the appropriate amount of epistemic anxiety. Despite the many negative aspects associated with anxiety, as I conclude, being disposed to feel the appropriate amount of epistemic anxiety is ultimately good for us. (shrink)

On an ‘internalist’ picture, knowledge isn’t necessary for understanding the nature of perception and perceptual experience. This contrasts with the ‘knowledge first’ picture, according to which it’s essential to the nature of successful perceiving as a mental state that it’s a way of knowing. It’s often thought that naturalistic theorizing about the mind should adopt the internalist picture. However, I argue that a powerful, recently prominent framework for scientific study of the mind, ‘predictive processing,’ instead supports the knowledge first picture. (...) Under predictive processing, it’s intrinsic to successful perceiving that it’s a state with the kind of modal robustness that’s distinctive of knowledge, which gives us reason to think of successful perceiving along knowledge first lines. Furthermore, I argue that the predictive processing framework encourages us to conceptualize experiences which don’t amount to knowledge along knowledge first lines, as states which by their nature fall short of knowledge. (shrink)

How does doubt come about? What are the mechanisms responsible for our inclinations to reassess propositions and collect further evidence to support or reject them? In this paper, I approach this question by focusing on what might be considered a distorting mirror of unreasonable doubt, namely the pathological doubt of patients with obsessive–compulsive disorder (OCD). Individuals with OCD exhibit a form of persistent doubting, indecisiveness, and over-cautiousness at pathological levels (Rasmussen and Eisen in Psychiatr Clin 15(4):743–758, 1992; Reed in Obsessional (...) experience and compulsive behaviour: a cognitive-structural approach, Academic Press, Cambridge, 1985; Tolin et al. in Cogn Ther Res 27(6):657–669, 2003). I argue that the failure in OCD is of an affective nature, involving both excessive epistemic anxiety and hyperactive feelings of uncertainty. I further argue that our adaptive disposition to inquire about the right matters—that is, about propositions which are both epistemically risky and imply harmful possibilities—might depend on these affective mechanisms. (shrink)

Radical moral encroachment is the view that belief itself is morally evaluable, and that some moral properties of belief itself make a difference to epistemic rationality. To date, almost all proponents of radical moral encroachment hold to an asymmetry thesis: the moral encroaches on rational belief, but not on rational credence. In this paper, we argue against the asymmetry thesis; we show that, insofar as one accepts the most prominent arguments for radical moral encroachment on belief, one should likewise accept (...) radical moral encroachment on credence. We outline and reject potential attempts to establish a basis for asymmetry between the attitude types. Then, we explore the merits and demerits of the two available responses to our symmetry claim: (i) embracing moral encroachment on credence and (ii) denying moral encroachment on belief. (shrink)

This guide accompanies the following article(s): Jackson, E., Philosophy Compass 15/6 (2020) pp. 1-13 10.1111/phc3.12668.x.

A plausible principle about the felicitous use of indicative conditionals says that there is something strange about asserting an indicative conditional when you know whether its antecedent is true. But in most contexts there is nothing strange at all about asserting indicative conditionals like ‘If Oswald didn’t shoot Kennedy, then someone else did’. This paper argues that the only compelling explanation of these facts requires the resources of contextualism about knowledge.

Plausibly, how much is at stake in some salient practical task can affect how generously people ascribe knowledge of task-relevant facts. There is a metaphysical puzzle about this phenomenon, and an empirical puzzle. Metaphysically: there are competing theories about when and how practical stakes affect whether it is correct to ascribe knowledge. Which of these theories is the right one? Empirically: experimental philosophy has struggled to find a stakes-effect on people’s knowledge ascriptions. Is the alleged phenomenon just a philosopher’s fantasy? (...) I propose a new psychological account of when and why people’s knowledge ascriptions are sensitive to stakes. My hypothesis is motivated by empirical research on how people’s judgements are sensitive to their social context. Specifically, people’s evaluations are sensitive to their ‘psychological distance’ from the scenarios they are considering. When using ‘fixed-evidence probes’, experimental philosophy has found that what’s at stake for a fictional character in a made-up scenario has little or no effect on how participants ascribe knowledge to them. My hypothesis predicts this finding: the scenarios are too ‘psychologically distant’ to participants. Our empirical puzzle is resolved: the stakes-effect often present in the wild won’t be present in vignette studies. (This illustrates a widespread problem with X-phi vignette studies: if people might judge differently in other social contexts, we can’t generalize from the results of these experiments. That is, vignette studies are of doubtful ‘external validity’.) The hypothesis also resolves our metaphysical puzzle. It predicts that people do not ascribe knowledge in a way deemed correct by any of the standard philosophical views, namely classical invariantism, interest-relative invariantism, and contextualism. Our knowledge ascriptions shift around in the way that’s most useful for social beings like us, and this pattern in our judgements can only be endorsed by a genuinely relativist metaphysics for knowledge. (shrink)

Sometimes epistemologists theorize about belief, a tripartite attitude on which one can believe, withhold belief, or disbelieve a proposition. In other cases, epistemologists theorize about credence, a fine-grained attitude that represents one’s subjective probability or confidence level toward a proposition. How do these two attitudes relate to each other? This article explores the relationship between belief and credence in two categories: descriptive and normative. It then explains the broader significance of the belief-credence connection and concludes with general lessons from the (...) debate thus far. (shrink)

I offer an epistemic framework for theorising about faith. I suggest that epistemic faith is a disposition to believe or infer according to particular methods, despite a kind of tendency to perceive an epistemic shortcoming in that method. Faith is unjustified, and issues into unjustified beliefs, when the apparent epistemic shortcomings are actual; it is justified when the epistemic worries are unfounded. Virtuous faith is central to a great deal of epistemology. A rational agent will manifest faith in their perceptual (...) abilities, in determining which experts and testifiers to trust, in their a priori reasoning, and in the epistemic capacities that are specific to their social environment. To ignore faith is to ignore a crucial element of our social and individualistic epistemic lives. One exercises faith when one forms beliefs despite a kind of apparent epistemic shortcoming, which may or may not correspond to a genuine weakness in evidential support. For example, standing on a bridge one knows to be safe, despite one's natural but irrational fear, can manifest a kind of epistemic faith. So too can forming perceptual beliefs, or engaging in logical inferences, despite lacking a dialectically satisfying response to skeptical arguments. The same goes for beliefs that are informed by one's ideological stance – these too count as manifestations of faith, and under some circumstances, such faith is epistemically appropriate. One upshot of my project will be that an intuitively appealing neutrality ideal for education and discourse is untenable. I'll conclude with some discussion of practical questions about whether, when, and why it can be worthwhile engaging seriously with people who have radically opposed views and frameworks. (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)

Purists think that changes in our practical interests can’t affect what we know unless those changes are truth-relevant with respect to the propositions in question. Impurists disagree. They think changes in our practical interests can affect what we know even if those changes aren’t truth-relevant with respect to the propositions in question. I argue that impurists are right, but for the wrong reasons, since they haven’t appreciated the best argument for their own view. Together with “Minimalism and the Limits of (...) Warranted Assertability Maneuvers,” “The Pragmatic Encroachment Debate,” and “Anti-Intellectualism” (below), this paper constitutes my attempt to refute the entire pragmatic encroachment debate. As I show in this paper, there is an argument for impurism sitting in plain sight that is considerably more plausible than any extant argument for pragmatism. (shrink)

Belief is a familiar attitude: taking something to be the case or regarding it as true. But we are more confident in some of our beliefs than in others. For this reason, many epistemologists appeal to a second attitude, called credence, similar to a degree of confidence. This raises the question: how do belief and credence relate to each other? On a belief-first view, beliefs are more fundamental and credences are a species of beliefs, e.g. beliefs about probabilities. On a (...) credence-first view, credences are more fundamental and beliefs are a species of credence, e.g. credence above some threshold. In this thesis, I develop and defend a third view that I call belief-credence dualism. On this view, belief and credence are independent, equally fundamental attitudes, and neither reduces to the other. I begin by motivating the project: why should we care about the relationship between belief and credence? I argue it has broad implications for many debates in epistemology and beyond. Then, I defend dualism, arguing that it can explain features of our mental lives that a credence-first view and a belief-first view cannot. I also argue that dualism has attractive, interesting implications when applied to the pragmatic encroachment debate. Finally, I explore implications of dualism, both for the nature of evidence and how faith might go beyond the evidence but nonetheless be epistemically rational. I conclude that the human mind is, in some ways, complex, but we should be happy with this conclusion also long as each mental state we posit has a clear role to play. (shrink)

Human social intelligence includes a remarkable power to evaluate what people know and believe, and to assess the quality of well- or ill-formed beliefs. Epistemic evaluations emerge in a great variety of contexts, from moments of deliberate private reflection on tough theoretical questions, to casual social observations about what other people know and think. We seem to be able to draw systematic lines between knowledge and mere belief, to distinguish justified and unjustified beliefs, and to recognize some beliefs as delusional (...) or irrational. This article outlines the main types of epistemic evaluations, and examines how our capacities to perform these evaluations develop, how they function at maturity, and how they are deployed in the vital task of sorting out when to believe what others say. (shrink)

Belief-credence dualism is the view that we have both beliefs and credences and neither attitude is reducible to the other. Pragmatic encroachment is the view that practical stakes can affect the epistemic rationality of states like knowledge or justified belief. In this paper, I argue that dualism offers a unique explanation of pragmatic encroachment cases. First, I explain pragmatic encroachment and what motivates it. Then, I explain dualism and outline a particular argument for dualism. Finally, I show how dualism can (...) explain the intuitions that underlie pragmatic encroachment. My basic proposal is that in high-stakes cases, it is not that one cannot rationally believe that p; instead, one ought not to rely on one's belief that p. One should rather rely on one's credence in p. I conclude that we need not commit ourselves to pragmatic encroachment in order to explain the intuitiveness of the cases that motivate it. (shrink)

For a long time philosophers have struggled to reach a definition of knowledge that is fully satisfactory from an intuitive standard. However, what could be so fuzzy about the concept of knowledge that it makes our intuitions to not obviously support a single analysis? One particular approach from a naturalistic perspective treats this question from the point of view of the psychology of concepts. According to it, this failure is explained by the structure of our folk concept of knowledge, which (...) organizes its constitutive information in a much looser way than we assume when we rely on intuitive knowledge ascriptions. I will adopt the same starting point here, but argue against the proposed answer and defend the view that this difficulty is explained not by something related to the specific structure of our concept of knowledge but, on the contrary, by its lack of structure. I claim that our folk concept of knowledge should be understood as a primitive mental state concept. (shrink)

I explore how rational belief and rational credence relate to evidence. I begin by looking at three cases where rational belief and credence seem to respond differently to evidence: cases of naked statistical evidence, lotteries, and hedged assertions. I consider an explanation for these cases, namely, that one ought not form beliefs on the basis of statistical evidence alone, and raise worries for this view. Then, I suggest another view that explains how belief and credence relate to evidence. My view (...) focuses on the possibilities that the evidence makes salient. I argue that this makes better sense of the difference between rational credence and rational belief than other accounts. (shrink)

Certain well-known intuitions suggest that, contrary to traditional thinking in epistemology, knowledge judgements are shifty—i.e., that judgements about whether somebody knows something can shift in stringency with context. Some take these intuitions to show that knowledge judgements are shifty. Jennifer Nagel and Mikkel Gerken have argued, however, that closer attention to the psychological processes which underlie knowledge judgements shows how traditional non-shifty thinking can be preserved. They each defend moderate classical invariantism—the view that the epistemic standard for knowing is always (...) moderate—by drawing on recent work in cognitive psychology. This paper argues that neither attempt succeeds. (shrink)

In this paper, I argue that the relationship between belief and credence is a central question in epistemology. This is because the belief-credence relationship has significant implications for a number of current epistemological issues. I focus on five controversies: permissivism, disagreement, pragmatic encroachment, doxastic voluntarism, and the relationship between doxastic attitudes and prudential rationality. I argue that each debate is constrained in particular ways, depending on whether the relevant attitude is belief or credence. This means that epistemologists should pay attention (...) to whether they are framing questions in terms of belief or in terms of credence and the success or failure of a reductionist project in the belief-credence realm has significant implications for epistemology generally. (shrink)

In the past few years there has been a turn towards evaluating the empirical foundation of epistemic contextualism using formal (rather than armchair) experimental methods. By-and-large, the results of these experiments have not supported the original motivation for epistemic contextualism. That is partly because experiments have only uncovered effects of changing context on knowledge ascriptions in limited experimental circumstances (when contrast is present, for example), and partly because existing experiments have not been designed to distinguish between contextualism and one of (...) its main competing theories, subject-sensitive invariantism. In this paper, we discuss how a particular, "third-person", experimental design is needed to provide evidence that would support contextualism over subject-sensitive invariantism. In spite of the theoretical significance of third-person knowledge ascriptions for debates surrounding contextualism, no formal experiments evaluating such ascriptions that assess contextualist claims have previously been conducted. In this paper, we conduct an experiment specifically designed to examine that central gap in contextualism’s empirical foundation. The results of our experiment provide crucial support for epistemic contextualism over subject-sensitive invariantism. (shrink)

In this chapter, we follow Edward Craig?s advice: ask what the concept of knowledge does for us and use our findings as clues about its application conditions. What a concept does for us is a matter of what we can do with it, and what we do with concepts is deploy them in thought and language. So, we will examine the purposes we have in attributing knowledge. This chapter examines two such purposes, agent evaluation and informant-suggestion, and brings the results (...) to bear on an important debate about the application conditions of the concept of knowledge?the debate between contextualists and their rivals. (shrink)

We consider the complex interactions between rape culture and epistemology. A central case study is the consideration of a deferential attitude about the epistemology of sexual assault testimony. According to the deferential attitude, individuals and institutions should decline to act on allegations of sexual assault unless and until they are proven in a formal setting, i.e., a criminal court. We attack this deference from several angles, including the pervasiveness of rape culture in the criminal justice system, the epistemology of testimony (...) and norms connecting knowledge and action, the harms of tacit idealizations away from important contextual factors, and a contextualist semantics for 'knows' ascriptions. (shrink)

A recent skeptical challenge denies deliberation is essential to virtuous agency: what looks like genuine deliberation is just a post hoc rationalization of a decision already made by automatic mechanisms (Haidt 2001; Doris 2015). Annas’s account of virtue seems well-equipped to respond: by modeling virtue on skills, she can agree that virtuous actions are deliberation-free while insisting that their development requires significant thought. But Annas’s proposal is flawed: it over-intellectualizes deliberation’s developmental role and under-intellectualizes its significance once virtue is acquired. (...) Doing better requires paying attention to a distinctive form of anxiety—one that functions to engage deliberation in the face of decisions that automatic mechanisms alone cannot resolve. (shrink)

Introduces contextualism about knowledge ascriptions, and provides a brief summary of the contributions to the Routledge Handbook of Epistemic Contextualism.

Epistemology orthodoxy is a purist one in the sense that it separates out the epistemic from the practical. What counts as evidence is independent of what we care about. Which beliefs count as justified and which count as knowledge are independent of our practical concerns. In recent years, many epistemologists have abandoned such purist views and embraced varying degrees of pragmatic encroachment on the epistemic. I survey a variety of these views and explore the main arguments that proponents of pragmatic (...) encroachment have offered in addition to the main criticisms of the pragmatic approach. (shrink)

Intellectualists disagree with anti-intellectualists about the relationship between knowledge and truth. According to intellectualists, this relationship is intimate. Knowledge entails true belief, and in fact everything required for knowledge is somehow relevant to the probability that the belief in question is true. According to anti-intellectualists, this relationship isn’t intimate. Or, at least, it’s not as intimate as intellectualists think. Factors that aren’t in any way relevant to the probability that a belief is true can make a difference to whether it (...) counts as knowledge. In this paper, I give a new argument for anti-intellectualism and draw out consequences of this argument for the pragmatic encroachment debate. The standard purist objection to pragmatism is that pragmatism entails anti-intellectualism. As I show, anti-intellectualism follows from premises that are plausible even if purism is true, so the standard purist objection to pragmatism fails. (shrink)

‘Know-that’, like so many natural language expressions, exhibits patterns of use that provide evidence for its context-sensitivity. A popular family of views – call it prag- matic invariantism – attempts to explain the shifty patterns by appeal to a pragmatic thesis: while the semantic meaning of ‘know-that’ is stable across all contexts of use, sentences of the form ‘S knows [doesn’t know] that p’ can be used to communicate a pragmatic content that depends on the context of use. In this (...) paper, the author argues that pragmatic invariantism makes inaccurate predictions for a wide range of well- known use data and is committed to attributing systematic pragmatic error to ordinary speakers. But pragmatic error is unprecedented, and it is doubtful that speakers are systematically wrong about what they intend to communicate. (shrink)