In this entry, we provide an overview of some of the methodological debates surrounding contextualism and consider whether they are, in effect, based on an underlying methodological dispute. We consider three modes of motivation of epistemic contextualism including i) the method of cases, ii) the appeal to linguistic analogies and iii) the appeal to conceptual analogies and functional roles. We also consider the methodological debates about contextualism arising from experimental philosophy. We conclude that i) there is no distinctive methodological doctrine (...) or set of methodological doctrines that is centrally invoked by all epistemic contextualists and ii) the substantive dispute about the truth of contextualism very frequently, although not invariably, reflects an underlying methodological dispute. (shrink)

Max Deutsch’s new book argues against the commonly held ‘myth’ that philosophical methodology characteristically employs intuitions as evidence. While I am sympathetic to the general claim that philosophical methodology has been grossly oversimplified in the intuition literature, the particular claim that it is a myth that philosophers rely on intuitions as evidence is open to several very different interpretations. The plausibility and consequences of a rejection of the ‘myth’ will depend on the notion of evidence one employs, the notion of (...) intuition one holds, and how one understands the idea of ‘relying on’ or ‘employing’ something as evidence. I describe what I take to be the version of The Myth which is most plausibly undermined by Deutsch’s arguments; however, I also argue that the falsity of this myth has only minimal consequences for the viability of the experimental philosophy research project. (shrink)

We argue that many intuitions do not have conscious propositional contents. In particular, many of the intuitions had in response to philosophical thought experiments, like Gettier cases, do not have such contents. They are more like hunches, urgings, murky feelings, and twinges. Our view thus goes against the received view of intuitions in philosophy, which we call Mainstream Propositionalism. Our positive view is that many thought-experimental intuitions are conscious, spontaneous, non-theoretical, non-propositional psychological states that often motivate belief revision, but they (...) require interpretation, in light of background beliefs, before a subject can form a propositional judgment as a consequence of them. We call our view Interpretationalism. We argue (i) that Interpretationalism avoids the problems that beset Mainstream Propositionalism and (ii) that our view meshes well with empirical results in contemporary cognitive science. (shrink)

In “Facts: Particulars of Information Units?”, Kratzer proposed a causal analysis of knowledge in which knowledge is defined as a form of de re belief of facts. In support of Kratzer’s view, I show that a certain articulation of the de re/de dicto distinction can be used to integrally account for the original pair of Gettier cases. In contrast to Kratzer, however, I think such an account does not fundamentally require a distinction between facts and true propositions. I then discuss (...) whether this account might be generalized and whether it can give us a reductive analysis of knowledge as de re true belief. Like Kratzer, I think it will not, in particular the distinction appears inadequate to account for Ginet-Goldman cases of causally connected but unreliable belief. Nevertheless, I argue that the de re belief analysis allows us to account for a distinction Starmans and Friedman recently introduced between apparent evidence and authentic evidence in their empirical study of Gettier cases, in a way that questions their claim that a causal disconnect is not operative in the contrasts they found. (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)

Assertion is fundamental to our lives as social and cognitive beings. By asserting we share knowledge, coordinate behavior, and advance collective inquiry. Accordingly, assertion is of considerable interest to cognitive scientists, social scientists, and philosophers. This paper advances our understanding of the norm of assertion. Prior evidence suggests that knowledge is the norm of assertion, a view known as “the knowledge account.” In its strongest form, the knowledge account says that knowledge is both necessary and sufficient for assertability: you should (...) make an assertion if and only if you know that it is true. The knowledge account has been rejected on the grounds that it conflicts with our ordinary practice of evaluating assertions. This paper reports four experiments that address an important objection of this sort, which focuses on a class of examples known as “Gettier cases.” The results undermine the objection and, in the process, provide further evidence for the knowledge account. The findings also teach some important general lessons about intuitional methodology and the curation of genres of thought experiment. (shrink)

Intuitions is presented as a counterpart of Rethinking Intuition ( DePaul and Ramsey 1998 ). 1 After 16 years, it revisits the topic of the place of intuitions in philosophy in light of two developments...

The developing body of empirical work on the "Gettier effect" indicates that, in general, the presence of a Gettier-type structure in a case makes participants less likely to attribute knowledge in that case. But is that a sufficient reason to diverge from a JTB theory of knowledge? I argue that considerations of good model selection, and worries about noise and overfitting, should lead us to consider that a live, open question. The Gettier effect is perhaps so transient, and so sensitive (...) to other, epistemologically-inappropriate factors, that it raises the question of whether it ought to be counted as something to include in our theories -- or as a piece of noise to be excluded from them. (shrink)

Epistemic invariantism, or invariantism for short, is the position that the proposition expressed by knowledge sentences does not vary with the epistemic standard of the context in which these sentences can be used. At least one of the major challenges for invariantism is to explain our intuitions about scenarios such as the so-called bank cases. These cases elicit intuitions to the effect that the truth-value of knowledge sentences varies with the epistemic standard of the context in which these sentences can (...) be used. In this paper, I will defend invariantism against this challenge by advocating the following, somewhat deflationary account of the bank case intuitions: Readers of the bank cases assign different truth-values to the knowledge claims in the bank cases because they interpret these scenarios such that the epistemic position of the subject in question differs between the high and the low standards case. To substantiate this account, I will argue, first, that the bank cases are underspecified even with respect to features that should uncontroversially be relevant for the epistemic position of the subject in question. Second, I will argue that readers of the bank cases will fill in these features differently in the low and the high standards case. In particular, I will argue that there is a variety of reasons to think that the fact that an error-possibility is mentioned in the high standards case will lead readers to assume that this error-possibility is supposed to be likely in the high standards case. (shrink)

Much discussion about experimental philosophy and philosophical methodology has been framed in terms of the reliability of intuitions, and even when it has not been about reliability per se, it has been focused on whether intuitions meet whatever conditions they need to meet to be trustworthy as evidence. But really that question cannot be answered independently from the questions, evidence for what theories arrived at by what sorts of inferences? I will contend here that not just philosophy's sources of evidence, (...) but also its inferential resources, are in great need of closer examination. (shrink)

There is a traditional conception of knowledge but it is not the Justified True Belief analysis Gettier attacked. On the traditional view, knowledge consists in having a belief that bears a discernible mark of truth. A mark of truth is a truth-entailing property: a property that only true beliefs can have. It is discernible if one can always tell that a belief has it, that is, a sufficiently attentive subject believes that a belief has it if and only if it (...) has it. Requiring a mark of truth makes the view infallibilist. Requiring it to be discernible makes the view internalist. I call the view Classical Infallibilism. (shrink)

Der Beitrag beleuchtet einen bisher kaum gewürdigten Grund dafür, dass die Gettier-Debatte nicht zu einer systematisch verbesserten Analyse des Wissensbegriffs geführt hat. Es wird die These entwickelt und verteidigt, dass diejenigen Komplikationen, die einen Gettierfall zu einem solchen machen, sich stets in den blinden Flecken der Situationsrepräsentation des epistemischen Subjekts befinden. Diese These ist in die metaphilosophische Fragestellung eingebettet, was das Gettierproblem uns über das Verhältnis von sprachlichen Intuitionen und Begriffsanalysen lehrt. Es gibt unter kompetenten Sprechern beträchtliche Einmütigkeit darüber, dass (...) paradigmatische Gettierfälle als Fälle von Nichtwissen zu klassifizieren sind, aber ungleich weniger Einigkeit darüber, ob und wie die klassische Analyse des Wissensbegriffs verbessert werden kann. Zu der Frage, warum es so schwer ist, konvergierende sprachliche Intuitionen über Einzelfälle in eine gettierfallsichere allgemeine Analyse zu überführen, werden folgende Thesen entwickelt: Was in Gettierfällen konfligiert, sind nicht Analyse und Intuition als solche, sondern die Charakterisierung eines Situationstyps und die Beurteilung einer einzelnen Situation angesichts einer bestimmten Gettierkomplikation. Die Aufgabe, eine allgemeine Beschreibung der mit Wissen unvereinbaren Komplikationen zu geben, geht weit über die kompetente Beurteilung von Einzelfällen hinaus. Möglicherweise ist sie unlösbar, weil das wörtliche Zutreffen der Beschreibung einer epistemischen Situation niemals garantieren kann, dass sich in den Leerstellen der Beschreibung keine Gettierkomplikation verbirgt. (shrink)

What is the rationale for the methodological innovations of experimental philosophy? This paper starts from the contention that common answers to this question are implausible. It then develops a framework within which experimental philosophy fulfills a specific function in an otherwise traditionalist picture of philosophical inquiry. The framework rests on two principal ideas. The first is Frank Jackson’s claim that conceptual analysis is unavoidable in ‘serious metaphysics’. The second is that the psychological structure of concepts is extremely intricate, much more (...) so than early practitioners of conceptual analysis had realized. This intricacy has implications for the activity of analyzing concepts: while the central, coarser, more prominent contours of a concept may be identified from the armchair, the finer details of the concept’s structure require experimental methods to detect. (shrink)

Immediate striking feelings without any conscious inference are viewed as one of the sources of truth by many philosophers. It is often claimed that there is a long tradition in philosophy of viewing intuitive propositions as true without need for further justification, since the intuitiveness, for traditional philosophy, suggests that the proposition is self-evident. In philosophical discussions, it was extremely common for philosophers to argue for the intuitiveness of their theories. Contemporary philosophers have put increasing attention and effort into the (...) study of this methodology in philosophy. They explicitly use the term ‘intuition’ and ‘appealing to intuition’ to refer to such common practice in philosophy. Recently there are numerous papers discussing the topic of intuition, its reliability, evidential status, and what philosophy ought to be. These disputes have lasted for several decades and it seems the disputes may even continue for several more decades. Despite the excessive usage of the term ‘intuition’, there are still polarized attitudes towards intuition: not only on the question of whether we should appeal to intuition in doing philosophy, but also on what ‘intuition’ means. The latter problem, the divergence of understanding on ‘intuition’, seems to be the main factor causing endless disputes of this topic and it should be the problem primarily solved. There are philosophers who notice the problem that there is no general agreement on the accounts of intuition. However, surprisingly, most of them have not attempted to solve the problem, but just simply give their own accounts of intuition, or claim that it is improbable to have general agreement on the definition of ‘intuition’ instead. In fact, it is possible to have a general acceptable theory of intuition. The main aims of the thesis are to provide the method of seeking the good candidates for a general acceptable theory of intuition and to use the method in seeking one of the good theories. In order to achieve the goals, the thesis will provide the ground for the discussion, by specifying several features of intuition as the desiderata of a good theory; and examine several theories of intuition that have been offered in recent literature as example. We will find that, unfortunately, among the theories selected in philosophy, there still seems to be no satisfactory account of intuition. Nevertheless, there seems a promising account of intuition offered in psychology. The thesis will argue the psychological account is one of the good candidates of general acceptable theory of intuition. If not, we at least have a method of seeking the good theories of intuition. (shrink)

Cognitive scientists have revealed systematic errors in human reasoning. There is disagreement about what these errors indicate about human rationality, but one upshot seems clear: human reasoning does not seem to fit traditional views of human rationality. This concern about rationality has made its way through various fields and has recently caught the attention of philosophers. The concern is that if philosophers are prone to systematic errors in reasoning, then the integrity of philosophy would be threatened. In this paper, I (...) present some of the more famous work in cognitive science that has marshaled this concern. Then I present reasons to think that those with training in philosophy will be less prone to certain systematic errors in reasoning. The suggestion is that if philosophers could be shown to be less prone to such errors, then the worries about the integrity of philosophy could be constrained. Then I present evidence that, according to performance on the CRT (Frederick 2005), those who have benefited from training and selection in philosophy are indeed less prone to one kind of systematic error: irrationally arbitrating between intuitive and reflective responses. Nonetheless, philosophers are not entirely immune to this systematic error, and their proclivity for this error is statistically related to their responses to a variety of philosophical questions. So, while the evidence herein puts constraints on the worries about the integrity of philosophy, it by no means eliminates these worries. The conclusion, then, is that the present evidence offers prima facie reasons to ascribe a mitigated privilege to philosophers' ability to rationally arbitrate between intuitive and reflective responses. (shrink)

Little is known about the aetiology of philosophical intuitions, in spite of their central role in analytic philosophy. This paper provides a psychological account of the intuitions that underlie philosophical practice, with a focus on intuitions that underlie the method of cases. I argue that many philosophical intuitions originate from spontaneous, early-developing, cognitive processes that also play a role in other cognitive domains. Additionally, they have a skilled, practiced, component. Philosophers are expert elicitors of intuitions in the dialectical context of (...) professional philosophy. If this analysis is correct, this should lead to a reassessment of experimental philosophical studies of expertise. (shrink)

The term “Gettier Case” is a technical term frequently applied to a wide array of thought experiments in contemporary epistemology. What do these cases have in common? It is said that they all involve a justified true belief which, intuitively, is not knowledge, due to a form of luck called “Gettiering.” While this very broad characterization suffices for some purposes, it masks radical diversity. We argue that the extent of this diversity merits abandoning the notion of a “Gettier case” in (...) a favour of more finely grained terminology. We propose such terminology, and use it to effectively sort the myriad Gettier cases from the theoretical literature in a way that charts deep fault lines in ordinary judgments about knowledge. (shrink)

The paper explains how Gettier’s conclusion can be reached on general theoretical grounds within the framework of epistemic logic, without reliance on thought experiments. It extends the argument to permissive conceptions of justification that invalidate principles of multi-premise closure and require neighbourhood semantics rather than semantics of a more standard type. The paper concludes by recommending a robust methodology that aims at convergence in results between thought experimentation and more formal methods. It also warns against conjunctive definitions as sharing several (...) of the drawbacks of disjunctive definitions. (shrink)

Nearly all success is due to some mix of ability and luck. But some successes we attribute to the agent’s ability, whereas others we attribute to luck. To better understand the criteria distinguishing credit from luck, we conducted a series of four studies on knowledge attributions. Knowledge is an achievement that involves reaching the truth. But many factors affecting the truth are beyond our control and reaching the truth is often partly due to luck. Which sorts of luck are compatible (...) with knowledge? We find that knowledge attributions are highly sensitive to lucky events that change the explanation for why a belief is true. By contrast, knowledge attributions are surprisingly insensitive to lucky events that threaten but ultimately fail to change the explanation for why a belief is true. These results shed light on our concept of knowledge, help explain apparent inconsistencies in prior work on knowledge attributions, and constitute progress toward a general understanding of the relation between success and luck. (shrink)

In “Normativity and Epistemic Intuitions”, Weinberg, Nichols and Stich famously argue from empirical data that East Asians and Westerners have different intuitions about Gettier -style cases. We attempted to replicate their study about the Car case, but failed to detect a cross - cultural difference. Our study used the same methods and case taken verbatim, but sampled an East Asian population 2.5 times greater than NEI’s 23 participants. We found no evidence supporting the existence of cross - cultural difference about (...) the intuition concerning the Gettier car case. Taken together with the failures of both of the existing replication studies, our results provide strong evidence that the purported cross - cultural difference in Gettier intuitions does not exist. (shrink)

To address the underrepresentation of women in philosophy effectively, we must understand the causes of the early loss of women. In this paper we challenge one of the few explanations that has focused on why women might leave philosophy at early stages. Wesley Buckwalter and Stephen Stich offer some evidence that women have different intuitions than men about philosophical thought experiments. We present some concerns about their evidence and we discuss our own study, in which we attempted to replicate their (...) results for 23 different responses to 14 scenarios . We also conducted a literature search to see if other philosophers or psychologists have tested for gender differences in philosophical intuitions. Based on our findings, we argue that that it is unlikely that gender differences in intuitions play a significant role in driving women from philosophy. (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)

Do laypeople and philosophers differ in their attributions of knowledge? Starmans and Friedman maintain that laypeople differ from philosophers in taking ‘authentic evidence’ Gettier cases to be cases of knowledge. Their reply helpfully clarifies the distinction between ‘authentic evidence’ and ‘apparent evidence’. Using their sharpened presentation of this distinction, we contend that the argument of our original paper still stands.

This paper examines causal theories of reference with respect to how plausible an account they give of non-physical natural kind terms such as ‘gene’ as well as of the truth of the associated theoretical claims. I first show that reference fixism for ‘gene’ fails. By this, I mean the claim that the reference of ‘gene’ was stable over longer historical periods, for example, since the classical period of transmission genetics. Second, I show that the theory of partial reference does not (...) do justice to some widely held realist intuitions about classical genetics. This result is at loggerheads with the explicit goals usually associated with partial theories of reference, which is to defend a realist semantics for scientific terms. Thirdly, I show that, contrary to received wisdom and perhaps contrary to physics and chemistry, neither reference fixism nor partial reference are necessary in order to hold on to scientific realism about biology. I pinpoint the reasons for this in the nature of biological kinds, which do not even remotely resemble natural kinds (i.e., Lockean real essences) as traditionally conceived. (shrink)

In one of the earlier influential papers in the field of experimental philosophy titled Normativity and Epistemic Intuitions published in 2001, Jonathan M. Weinberg, Shaun Nichols and Stephen Stich reported that respondents answered Gettier type questions differently depending on their ethnic background as well as socioeconomic status. There is currently a debate going on, on the significance of the results of Weinberg et al. (2001) and its implications for philosophical methodology in general and epistemology in specific. Despite the debates, however, (...) to our knowledge, there has not been a replication attempt of the experiments of the original paper. We collected data from four different sources (two on-line and two in-person) to replicate the experiments. Despite several different data sets and in various cases larger sample sizes and hence greater power to detect differences, we failed to detect significant differences between the above-mentioned ethnic and socioeconomic groups. Our results suggest that epistemic intuitions are more robust across ethnic and socioeconomic groups than Weinberg et al. (2001) indicates. Given our data, we believe that the notion of differences in epistemic intuitions among different ethnic and socioeconomic groups that follows from Weinberg et al. (2001) needs to be corrected. (shrink)

Nearly all philosophers agree that only true things can be known. But does this principle reflect actual patterns of ordinary usage? Several examples in ordinary language seem to show that ‘know’ is literally used non-factively. By contrast, this paper reports five experiments utilizing explicit paraphrasing tasks, which suggest that non-factive uses are actually not literal. Instead, they are better explained by a phenomenon known as protagonist projection. It is argued that armchair philosophical orthodoxy regarding the truth requirement for knowledge withstands (...) current empirical scrutiny. (shrink)

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)

This paper aims to determine whether we can locate temporal passage in a non-dynamical (block universe) world. In particular, we seek to determine both whether temporal passage can be located somewhere in our world if it is non-dynamical, and also to home in on where in such a world temporal passage can be located, if it can be located anywhere. We investigate this question by seeking to determine, across three experiments, whether the folk concept of temporal passage can be satisfied (...) in our world if it is non-dynamical, and, if it can, what sort of thing in our world satisfies that concept. In particular, we focus on the question of whether that concept (if satisfied) is satisfied by something mind-dependent or something mind-independent. In other words, we ask, is temporal passage something that is at least partially in the mind, or is it entirely external to the mind? We find, contrary to what is often assumed by dynamists and non-dynamists alike, that the folk concept of temporal passage is satisfied in our world conditional on it being non-dynamical, and that the concept is satisfied by something mind-independent. This provides further ammunition for recent deflationary accounts of temporal passage that attempt to locate passage somewhere in our non-dynamical world. (shrink)

This paper reports the first study in the literature that adopts a bibliometric approach to systematically explore the scholarship in the young and fast‐growing research field of experimental philosophy. Based on a corpus of 1,248 publications in experimental philosophy from the past two decades retrieved from the PhilPapers website, the study examined the publication trend, the influential experimental philosophers, the impactful works, the popular publication venues, and the major research themes in this subarea of philosophy. It found, first, an overall (...) growing trend in publications in experimental philosophy, encompassing four developmental stages. Second, it found that significant changes in topics of interest have taken place, with some gaining increasing attention, others seemingly going out of fashion, and still others remaining popular constantly. Third, the study identified lists of leading philosophers, frequently cited publications, and popular journals helpful for researchers and newcomers to get a quick start in learning about the field. (shrink)

Epistemologists have long believed that epistemic luck undermines propositional knowledge. Action theorists have long believed that agentive luck undermines intentional action. But is there a relationship between agentive luck and epistemic luck? While agentive luck and epistemic luck have been widely thought to be independent phenomena, we argue that agentive luck has an epistemic dimension. We present several thought experiments where epistemic luck seems to undermine both knowledge-how and intentional action and we report experimental results that corroborate these judgments. These (...) findings have implications for the role of knowledge in a theory of intentional action and for debates about the nature of knowledge-how and the significance of knowledge representation in folk psychology. (shrink)

Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, Volume 104, Issue 2, Page 434-453, March 2022.

We present three experiments that explore the robustness of the _authentic-apparent effect_—the finding that participants are less likely to attribute knowledge to the protagonist in apparent- than in authentic-evidence Gettier cases. The results go some way towards suggesting that the effect is robust to assessments of the justificatory status of the protagonist’s belief. However, not all of the results are consistent with an effect invariant across two demographic contexts: American and Indian nationalities.

Traditional epistemology of knowledge and belief can be succinctly characterized as JTB-epistemology, i.e., it is characterized by the thesis that knowledge is justified true belief. Since Gettier’s trail-blazing paper of 1963 this account has become under heavy attack. The aim of is paper is to study the Gettier problem and related issues in the framework of topological epistemic logic. It is shown that in the framework of topological epistemic logic Gettier situations necessarily occur for most topological models of knowledge and (...) belief. On the other hand, there exists a special class of topological models (based on so called nodec spaces) for which traditional JTB-epistemology is valid. Further, it is shown that for each topological model of Stalnaker’s combined logic KB of knowledge and belief a canonical JTB-model (its JTB-doppelganger) can be constructed that shares many structural properties with the original model but is free of Gettier situations. The topological model and its JTB-doppelganger both share the same justified belief operator and have very similar knowledge operators. Seen from a somewhat different perspective, the JTB-account of epistemology amounts to a simplification of a more general epistemological account of knowledge and belief that assumes that these two concepts may differ in some cases. The JTB-account of knowledge and belief assumes that the epistemic agent’s cognitive powers are rather large. Thereby in the JTB-epistemology Gettier cases do not occur. Eventually, it is shown that for all topological models of Stalnaker’s KB- logic Gettier situations are topologically characterized as nowhere dense situations. This entails that Gettier situations are epistemologically invisible in the sense that they can neither be known nor believed with justification with respect to the knowledge operator and the belief operator of the models involved. Keywords. Stalnaker’s logic KB of knowledge and belief; Topological epistemology; Epistemic Invisibility; Doxastic invisibility; Gettier cases; . (shrink)

A growing body of empirical evidence suggests that folk knowledge attribution practices regarding some epistemological thought experiments differ significantly from the consensus found in the philosophical literature. More specifically, laypersons are likely to ascribe knowledge in the so-called Authentic Evidence Gettier-style cases, while most philosophers deny knowledge in these cases. The intuitions shared by philosophers are often used as evidence in favor (or against) certain philosophical analyses of the notion of knowledge. However, the fact that these intuitions are not universal, (...) as non-philosophers do not sympathize with verdicts made by philosophers, is problematic and requires some explanation. Recently, a promising theoretical approach emerged that could be used to explain away unexpected folk knowledge attributions. According to the protagonist projection hypothesis, when subjects answer questions about some hypothetical scenario, their judgments might result from adopting the cognitive perspective of the protagonist in the given scenario. Previous experimental findings suggest protagonist projection might be responsible for problematic knowledge attributions in Gettier-style cases. This paper reports data collected in an experiment which focused on five different Authentic Evidence Gettier-style scenarios and investigated the impact of protagonist projection on folk knowledge ascriptions in such cases. The results bring some support to the protagonist projection hypothesis, but do not allow to explain away a substantial number of problematic folk knowledge attributions. (shrink)

This article presents a novel challenge to epistemic internalism. The challenge rests on a set of cases which feature subjects forming beliefs under conditions of “bad ideology”—that is, conditions in which pervasively false beliefs have the function of sustaining, and are sustained by, systems of social oppression. In such cases, the article suggests, the externalistic view that justification is in part a matter of worldly relations, rather than the internalistic view that justification is solely a matter of how things stand (...) from the agent’s individual perspective, becomes the more intuitively attractive theory. But these “bad ideology” cases do not merely yield intuitive verdicts that favor externalism over internalism. These cases are, moreover, analogous to precisely those canonical cases widely taken to be counterexamples to externalism: cases featuring brains-in-vats, clairvoyants, and dogmatists. That is, such “bad ideology” cases are, in all relevant respects, just like cases that are thought to count against externalism—except that they intuitively favor externalism. This, the author argues, is a serious worry for internalism. What is more, it bears on the debate over whether externalism is a genuinely “normative” epistemology. (shrink)

This chapter reviews some faults of the theoretical literature and findings from the experimental literature on “Gettier” cases. Some “Gettier” cases are so poorly constructed that they are unsuitable for serious study. Some longstanding assumptions about how people tend to judge “Gettier” cases are false. Some “Gettier” cases are judged similarly to paradigmatic ignorance, whereas others are judged similarly to paradigmatic knowledge, rendering it a theoretically useless category. Experimental procedures can affect how people judge “Gettier” cases. Some important central tendencies (...) in judging “Gettier” cases appear to be robust against demographic variation in biological sex, age, language, and culture, although there could be some interesting differences related to culture and personality traits. Some remaining questions regarding Gettier’s cases, “Gettier” cases, and “the Gettier problem” concern the psychology and sociology of contemporary anglophone theoretical epistemology. Some remaining questions regarding the empirical study of knowledge judgments concern mechanisms underlying observed behavioral patterns. (shrink)

I review recent work from armchair and cross-cultural epistemology on whether humans possess a knowledge concept as part of a universal “folk epistemology.” The work from armchair epistemology fails because it mischaracterizes ordinary knowledge judgments. The work from cross-cultural epistemology provides some defeasible evidence for a universal folk epistemology. I argue that recent findings from comparative psychology establish that humans possess a species-typical knowledge concept. More specifically, recent work shows that knowledge attributions are a central part of primate social cognition, (...) used to predict others’ behavior and guide decision-making. The core primate knowledge concept is that of truth detection (across different sensory modalities) and retention (through memory) and may also include rudimentary forms of indirect truth discovery through inference. In virtue of their evolutionary heritage, humans inherited the primate social-cognitive system and thus share this core knowledge concept. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to analyze methodological problems of cross-cultural research in experimental philosophy. By studying five research projects, representing two distinct approaches to the examination of cross-cultural differences in philosophical intuitions, I point out the difficulties related to the content validity that appear in the choice of some cultural affiliation indicators. I criticize various indicators of cultural affiliation that are used in experimental philosophy (selfidentification, language) and suggest which indicators, and how, should be chosen in that kind (...) of research. I also argue that some problems related to bilingualism, translation, and the possible influence of language on the owned or reported philosophical intuitions may be impossible to transcend in cross-cultural research in experimental philosophy. It may be impossible to assess the differences between cultural philosophical intuitions. (shrink)

This paper defends a challenge, inspired by arguments drawn from contemporary ordinary language philosophy and grounded in experimental data, to certain forms of standard philosophical practice. The challenge is inspired by contemporary philosophers who describe themselves as practicing “ordinary language philosophy”. Contemporary ordinary language philosophy can be divided into constructive and critical approaches. The critical approach to contemporary ordinary language philosophy has been forcefully developed by Avner Baz, who attempts to show that a substantial chunk of contemporary philosophy is fundamentally (...) misguided. I describe Baz’s project and argue that while there is reason to be skeptical of its radical conclusion, it conveys an important truth about discontinuities between ordinary uses of philosophically significant expressions (“know”, e.g.) and their use in philosophical thought experiments. I discuss some evidence from experimental psychology and behavioral economics indicating that there is a risk of overlooking important aspects of meaning or misinterpreting experimental results by focusing only on abstract experimental scenarios, rather than employing more diverse and more ecologically valid experimental designs. I conclude by presenting a revised version of the critical argument from ordinary language. (shrink)

In this article, I use Edmund Gettier’s Ten Coins hypothetical scenario to illustrate some reasoning errors in the use of definite descriptions. The Gettier problem, central as it is to modern epistemology, is first and foremost an argument, which Gettier (Analysis 23(6):121–123, 1963) constructs to prove a contrary conclusion to a widely held view in epistemology. Whereas the epistemological claims in the case have been extensively analysed conceptually, the strategies and tools from other philosophical disciplines such as analytic philosophy of (...) language, logic and argumentation that Gettier deploys in the case have scarcely received any attention. This work abstracts from the epistemological content and examines Gettier’s handling of the definite description involved, and how that affects the cogency of his argument. (shrink)

Within the existing metaphilosophical literature on experimental philosophy, a great deal of attention has been devoted to the claim that there are large differences in philosophical intuitions between people of different demographic groups. Some philosophers argue that this claim has important metaphilosophical implications; others argue that it does not. However, the actual empirical work within experimental philosophy seems to point to a very different sort of metaphilosophical question. Specifically, what the actual empirical work suggests is that intuitions are surprisingly robust (...) across demographic groups. Prior to empirical study, it seemed plausible that unexpected patterns of intuition found in one demographic group would not emerge in other demographic groups. Yet, again and again, empirical work obtains the opposite result: that unexpected patterns found in one demographic group actually emerge also in other demographic groups. I cite 30 studies that find this sort of robustness. I then argue that to the extent that metaphilosophical work is to engage with the actual findings from experimental philosophy, it needs to explore the implications of the surprising robustness of philosophical intuitions across demographic differences. (shrink)

We investigated, experimentally, the contention that the folk view, or naïve theory, of time, amongst the population we investigated is dynamical. We found that amongst that population, ~ 70% have an extant theory of time that is more similar to a dynamical than a non-dynamical theory, and ~ 70% of those who deploy a naïve theory of time deploy a naïve theory that is more similar to a dynamical than a non-dynamical theory. Interestingly, while we found stable results across our (...) two experiments regarding the percentage of participants that have a dynamical or non-dynamical extant theory of time, we did not find such stability regarding which particular dynamical or non-dynamical theory of time they take to be most similar to our world. This suggests that there might be two extant theories in the population—a broadly dynamical one and a broadly non-dynamical one—but that those theories are sufficiently incomplete that participants do not stably choose the same dynamical theory as being most similar to our world. This suggests that while appeals to the ordinary view of time may do some work in the context of adjudicating disputes between dynamists and non-dynamists, they likely cannot do any such work adjudicating disputes between particular brands of dynamism. (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)

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)

Sackris and Beebe (2014) report the results of a series of studies that seem to show that there are cases in which many people are willing to attribute knowledge to a protagonist even when her belief is unjustified. These results provide some reason to conclude that the folk concept of knowledge does not treat justification as necessary for its deployment. In this paper, we report a series of results that can be seen as supporting this conclusion by going some way (...) towards ruling out an alternative account of Sackris and Beebe’s results—the possibility that the knowledge attributions that they witnessed largely stem from protagonist projection, a phenomenon in language use and interpretation in which the speaker uses words that the relevant protagonist might use to describe her own situation and the listener interprets the speaker accordingly. With that said, we do caution the reader against drawing the conclusion too strongly, on the basis of results like those reported here and by Sackris and Beebe. There are alternative possibilities regarding what drives the observed knowledge attributions in cases of unjustified true belief that must be ruled out before, on the basis of such results, we can conclude with much confidence that the folk concept of knowledge does not treat justification as necessary for its deployment. (shrink)

In this paper, first, I briefly discuss various types of obstacles and difficulties for cross-cultural study and in particular failure of translational equivalence of linguistic stimuli and questions by referring to the literature in cultural psychology. Second, I summarize the extant cross-cultural studies of semantic judgments about reference and truth-value with regard to proper names, with a focus on Sytsma et al.’s (2015) study that examined the differences between English and Japanese. Lastly, I introduce and discuss the two recent studies (...) of semantic judgments in Japanese that my colleagues and I conducted. These two studies suggest that the translation Sytsma et al. used failed to consider the linguistic features characteristic of Japanese and other East Asian languages, and thereby failed to ensure translational equivalence. (shrink)

Assertions are the centre of gravity in social epistemology. They are the vehicles we use to exchange information within scientific groups and society as a whole. It is therefore essential to determine under which conditions we are permitted to make an assertion. In this paper we argue and provide empirical evidence for the view that the norm of assertion is justified belief: truth or even knowledge are not required. Our results challenge the knowledge account advocated by, e.g. Williamson (1996), in (...) general, and more specifically, put into question several studies conducted by Turri (2013, 2016) that support a knowledge norm of assertion. Instead, the justified belief account championed by, e.g. Douven (2006), seems to prevail. (shrink)

The mentioning of error-possibilities makes us less likely to ascribe knowledge. This paper offers a novel psychological account of this data. The account appeals to “subadditivity,” a well-known psychological tendency to judge possibilities as more likely when they are disjunctively described.