According to MODERATISM, perceptual justification requires that one independently takes for granted propositional hinges like <There is an external world>, <I am not a brain in a vat (BIV)>, and so on. This view faces the truth problem: to offer an account of truth for hinges that is not threatened by skepticism. Annalisa Coliva has tried to solve the truth problem by combining the claim that external world propositions have a substantive truth property like correspondence with the claim that hinges (...) have a deflationary truth property. I argue that the resulting view cannot offer a coherent characterization of ‘skeptical switch scenarios’ while providing an effective anti-skeptical strategy. In a more positive vein, I defend an approach that combines a correspondence conception of truth with epistemological disjunctivism. (shrink)

Bertrand Russell’s epistemology had the interesting structural feature that it made propositional knowledge (“S knows that p”) asymmetrically dependent upon what Russell called knowledge by acquaintance. On this view, a subject lacking any knowledge by acquaintance would be unable to know that p for any p. This is something that virtually nobody has defended since Russell, and in this paper I initiate a sympathetic reconsideration.

Experiences of urges, impulses, or inclinations are among the most basic elements in the practical life of conscious agents. This article develops a theory of urges and their epistemology. The article motivates a tripartite framework that distinguishes urges, conscious experiences of urges, and exercises of capacities that agents have to control their urges. The article elaborates the elements of the tripartite framework, in particular, the phenomenological contribution of motor imagery. It argues that experiences of urges and exercises of control over (...) urges play coordinate roles in enabling an agent’s awareness of their impulses. (shrink)

Does phenomenal force, the distinctive phenomenology attributed to perceptual experience, really form an integral part of the latter? If not, what implications does it have for perceptual justification? In this paper, I first argue for a metacognitive account, according to which phenomenal force constitutes a separate, metacognitive state. This account opens up a previously unexplored path for challenging phenomenal conservatism or dogmatism, which has been a prominent theory of perceptual justification over the past two decades. Moreover, I investigate several alternative (...) possibilities in which phenomenal force might still be deemed as significant, but ultimately demonstrate that its epistemic role remains marginal at best. (shrink)

Self-verifying judgments like _I exist_ seem rational, and self-defeating ones like _It will rain, but I don’t believe it will rain_ seem irrational_._ But one’s evidence might support a self-defeating judgment, and fail to support a self-verifying one. This paper explains how it can be rational to defy one’s evidence if judgment is construed as a mental performance or act, akin to inner assertion. The explanation comes at significant cost, however. Instead of causing or constituting beliefs, judgments turn out to (...) be mere epiphenomena, and self-verification and self-defeat lack the broader philosophical import often claimed for them. (shrink)

According to the guise of the good, a desire for P represents P as good in some respect. ‘Perceptualism’ further claims that desires involve an awareness of value analogous to perception. Perceptualism explains why desires justify actions and how desires can end the regress of practical justification. However, perception paradigmatically represents the actual environment, while desires paradigmatically represent prospective states. An experience E is an awareness of O when the nature of E depends on the nature of O. How could (...) desires depend on the merely possible? Extant perceptualist accounts have not adequately addressed this question. I propose a novel account of how desires can be an awareness of value. An awareness of value involves the successful exercise of a capacity to discriminate value out of non-evaluative representations. The resulting content and phenomenology of such a desire depends in the right way on the value properties of the desired state. An agent requires the right view of the non-evaluative features of a state to discriminate its evaluative features. I argue that imaginings are uniquely able to provide such a view, and so enable value discriminations. My account retains the epistemological attractions of perceptualism despite the disanalogy between desire and perception. (shrink)

Echo chambers have received widespread attention in recent years, but there is no agreement over whether they are always epistemically bad for us. Some argue they’re inherently epistemically bad, whilst others claim they can be epistemically good. This paper has three aims. First, to bring together recent studies in this debate, taxonomizing different ways of thinking about the epistemic status of echo chambers. Second, to consider and reject several accounts of what makes echo chambers epistemically harmful or not, and then (...) offer an alternative account which builds on some features of existing accounts. In our view, echo chambers – even those that are truth-conducive – are always epistemically harmful because of their reasons-undermining features, e.g. the way that they impede the development of epistemic reasons which can answer and withstand challenges. This account captures important ideas behind several theories in the epistemology of echo chambers, but offers a richer explanation that does not suffer from their limitations. (shrink)

Imagine a zombie world that looks “from the outside” just like ours, but where there is no phenomenal consciousness. Creatures that look like us move about just as we do and make the same noises we do, but nobody experiences or feels anything. How much of the epistemic value that’s exemplified in our world survives in that one? The short answer is: any kind of epistemic value that requires the occurrence of consciousness for its exemplification cannot exist in that world, (...) but epistemic value that doesn’t require consciousness can exist. The real question, though, is what kinds of epistemic value require the occurrence of consciousness. We will consider four central epistemic values: justification, truth, acquaintance, and understanding. (shrink)

It is commonly thought that we depend fundamentally on the “evidence of the senses” for our empicial beliefs, including and most directly, our beliefs about our local environment, the spatial world around us. The ultimate evidence we have for our perceptual beliefs is provided in some way by perception or perceptual experience. But what is this evidence? There seem to be three main options: external factualism allows that the evidence include facts about the external world; internal factualism takes facts that (...) involve only the internal, mental world—like facts about one’s perceptual experiences or appearances—to count as one’s perceptual evidence; and non-factualism takes propositions, including false ones, to count as evidence—for example, propositional contents of appearances or seemings. We shall see that all these options face significant challenges. Some might conclude that perceptual beliefs can be justified without depending on evidence. Others might choose to accept skepticism: our perceptual beliefs are not justified. I shall end, however, by tentatively suggesting that there is a sort of internal fact that is a plausible candidate for perceptual evidence that has been overlooked. (shrink)

Crispin Wright is widely known for having introduced epistemic entitlement, a species of non‐evidential warrant, as a response to certain skeptical challenges. This paper investigates a fundamental issue concerning entitlement: it appears to be quite generous, as it appears to apply indiscriminately to anti‐skepticial hypotheses as well as a range of radically different—indeed, even incompatible—propositions. It argues that the generosity of entitlement is reflective of an underlying commitment to a form of epistemic relativism. In addition, the paper presents an axiology (...) that helps entitlement theorists to address the pressing issue of how, given the absence of evidence, there can be anything epistemically good about acceptance of anti‐skeptical hypotheses and other cornerstones for inquiry. Lastly, the paper argues that the issues of generosity and epistemic relativism are rather deeply rooted: they surface at the level of value. It explains why. (shrink)

Comment on Declan Smithies's book The Epistemic Role of Consciousness (2019).

This thesis develops a novel framework for explaining delusions. In Chapter 1, I introduce the two fundamental challenges posed by delusions: the evidence challenge lies in explaining the flagrant ways delusions flout evidence; and the specificity challenge lies in explaining the fact that patients’ delusions are often about a few specific themes, and patients rarely have a wide range of delusional or odd beliefs. In Chapter 2, I discuss the strengths and weaknesses of current theories of delusions, which typically appeal (...) to one or both of two factors: anomalous experience and reasoning abnormality. I argue that anomalous experience can help explain the specificity of delusions, but has difficulties in addressing the evidence challenge; reasoning abnormality can help address the evidence challenge, but has difficulties in explaining the specificity of delusions. This suggests that there may be an important factor that has not been captured by current theories of delusions. To search for this missing factor, in Chapter 3, I turn to normal believing. Inspired by the literature on Cartesian clarity and phenomenal dogmatism, I develop a dual-force framework of believing, according to which beliefs can be understood as the results of the interaction between the justificatory force and causal force of evidence and the justificatory force and causal force of clear experience, in which something clearly seems to be so to the subject. This framework suggests that the missing factor may be the clear experience with its distinctive phenomenal clarity that compels assent. In Chapter 4, I return to delusions, and argue that the dualforce framework can help us to get a better grip on some personal descriptions of delusions; make progress in addressing the evidence and specificity challenges of delusions; and shed new light on the underpinnings of delusions. In the end, I conclude with some remaining questions for future study. (shrink)

According to a widely shared generic conception of inferential justification—‘the standard conception’—an agent is inferentially justified in believing that p only if she has antecedently justified beliefs in all the non-redundant premises of a good argument for p. This conception tends to serve as the starting-point in contemporary debates about the nature and scope of inferential justification: as neutral common ground between various competing, more specific, conceptions. But it’s a deeply problematic starting-point. This paper explores three questions that haven’t been (...) given the attention they deserve, that complicate the application of the standard conception to cases, and that reveal it to be underspecified at the core—in ways that aren’t resolved but inherited by more specific (extant) versions of it. The goal isn’t to answer the questions, but to articulate them, explain what turns on them, and invite a critical re-examination of the standard conception. (shrink)

An increasing number of epistemologists defend the notion that some perceptual experiences can immediately justify some beliefs and do so in virtue of (some of) their phenomenal properties. But this view, which we may call phenomenal dogmatism, is also the target of various objections. Here I want to consider an objection that may be put as follows: what is so special about perceptual phenomenology that only it can immediately justify beliefs, while other kinds of phenomenology—including quite similar ones—remain ‘epistemically inert’? (...) I will argue that, to overcome this objection, the phenomenal dogmatist should incorporate into her view a general principle—I call it the ‘experiential attitude/doxastic content link’ principle—that essentially extends the view from the perceptual case to other phenomenal states. (shrink)

What justifies our beliefs about what other people say? According to epistemic inferentialism​, the justification of comprehension-based beliefs depends on the justification of other beliefs, e.g., beliefs about what words the speaker uttered or even what sounds they produced. According to epistemic non-inferentialism, the justification of comprehension-based beliefs ​does not depend on the justification of other beliefs. This paper offers a new defense of epistemic non-inferentialism. First, I discuss three counterexamples to epistemic non-inferentialism provided recently by Brendan Balcerak Jackson. I (...) argue that only one of Balcerak Jackson’s counterexamples is effective, and that it is effective against only one version of epistemic non-inferentialism, viz. language comprehension dogmatism. Second, I propose an alternative version of epistemic non-inferentialism, viz. comprehension-process reliabilism, which is immune to these counterexamples. I conclude that we should follow Balcerak Jackson in his rejection of language comprehension dogmatism but not all the way to the endorsement of epistemic inferentialism. Comprehension-process reliabilism is superior to both these alternatives. (shrink)

Folk and philosophers alike argue whether particular emotions are rational. However, these debates presuppose that emotions are eligible for rationality. Drawing on examples of how we manage our own emotions through strategies such as taking medication, I argue that the general permissibility of such management demonstrates that emotions are ineligible for rationality. It follows that emotions are never irrational or rational. Because neither perception nor emotion is eligible for rationality, this reveals a significant epistemic continuity between them, lending support to (...) perceptual views of emotion. (shrink)

In this paper, we present and defend a natural yet novel analysis of normative reasons. According to what we call support-explanationism, for a fact to be a normative reason to φ is for it to explain why there's normative support for φ-ing. We critically consider the two main rival forms of explanationism—ought-explanationism, on which reasons explain facts about ought, and good-explanationism, on which reasons explain facts about goodness—as well as the popular Reasons-First view, which takes the notion of a normative (...) reason to be normatively fundamental. Support-explanationism, we argue, enjoys many of the virtues of these views while avoiding their drawbacks. We conclude by exploring several further important implications: among other things, we argue that the influential metaphor of ‘weighing’ reasons is inapt, and propose a better one; that, contrary to what Berker (2019) suggests, there's no reason for non-naturalists about normativity to accept the Reasons-First view; and that, contrary to what Wodak (2020b) suggests, explanationist views can successfully accommodate what he calls ‘redundant reasons’. (shrink)

Some philosophers accept what I call minimalist views about composition. They either deny that composition ever occurs, or they only allow that composition occurs when some things are taken up into a life. While minimalists often take their views to be somewhat revisionary, they usually want to distinguish their views from truly radical views such as the view that there is no external world at all. They often do this by noting that, although they don’t believe that there are tables, (...) chairs, or planets, they do believe that there are mereological simples arranged tablewise, chairwise, and planetwise. In this paper, I appeal to the nature of perceptual experience to present a problem for this move. I contend that, given some plausible assumptions, compositional minimalists cannot consistently maintain that they are justified in their minimalism and justified in believing propositions about the arrangements of mereological simples. I will argue that this commits such minimalists to external world skepticism. (shrink)

According to the perceptual theory of emotions, emotions are perceptions of evaluative properties. The account has recently faced a barrage of criticism recently by critics who point out varies disanalogies between emotion and paradigmatic perceptual experiences. What many theorists fail to note however, is that many of the disanalogies that have been raised to exclude emotions from being perceptual states that represent evaluative properties have also been used to exclude high-level properties from appearing in the content of perception. This suggests (...) that emotions are perceptions of high level properties and perceptual theorists can marshal the arguments used by proponents of high-level perception to defend the perceptual theory. This paper therefore defends an account of emotion as high-level perception. (shrink)

To be acquainted with something (in the philosophical sense of “acquainted” discussed here) is to be directly aware of it. The idea that we are acquainted with certain things we experience has been discussed throughout the history of Western Philosophy, but in the early 20th century it gained especially focused attention among analytic philosophers who drew their inspiration from Bertrand Russell's work on acquaintance. Since then, many philosophers—particularly those working on self‐knowledge or perception—have used the notion of acquaintance to explain (...) various facts about human experience and knowledge. In this paper, I offer an overview of this work, with particular focus on the resurgent literature on acquaintance in contemporary analytic philosophy. After more fully explaining what acquaintance is (or is supposed to be), I describe some reasons for thinking that we are indeed acquainted with certain things we experience, and then I survey some of the facts about experience and knowledge that acquaintance may help explain. (shrink)

According to (what I will call) an inner awareness theory of consciousness, you are in a (phenomenally) conscious state only if you are aware, in some sense, of your being in the state. This theory is widely held, but what arguments are there for holding it? In this paper, I gather together in a systematic way the main arguments for holding the theory and suggest that none of them is persuasive. I end the paper by asking what our attitude to (...) the theory should be if there is no existing argument for it. (shrink)

According to accessibilism, there is an accessibility condition on justification. More specifically, accessibilism claims that facts about justification are a priori accessible, where a priori is used in the traditional sense that a condition is a priori just in case it doesn't depend on any of the sense modalities. The most prominent argument for accessibilism draws on BonJour and Lehrer's unfamiliar faculty scenarios. Recently, however, several objections have been raised against it. In this article, I defend the argument against three (...) prominent objections from the recent literature. (shrink)

Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, EarlyView.

A Série Investigação Filosófica é uma série de livros de traduções de verbetes da Enciclopédia de Filosofia da Stanford (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy) e de outras plataformas internacionalmente reconhecidas, que intenciona servir tanto como material didático para os professores das diferentes sub-áreas e níveis da Filosofia quanto como material de estudo para a pesquisa e para concursos da área. Nós, professores, sabemos o quão difícil é encontrar bom material em português para indicarmos. E há uma certa deficiência na graduação brasileira (...) de filosofia, principalmente em localizações menos favorecidas, com relação ao conhecimento de outras línguas, como o inglês e o francês. Tentamos, então, suprir essa deficiência, ao introduzirmos essas traduções ao público de língua portuguesa, sem nenhuma finalidade comercial e meramente pela glória da filosofia. (shrink)

A characterization of epistemic rationality, or epistemic justification, is typically taken to require a process of conceptual clarification, and is seen as comprising the core of a theory of (epistemic) rationality. I propose to explicate the concept of rationality. -/- It is essential, I argue, that the normativity of rationality, and the purpose, or goal, for which the particular theory of rationality is being proposed, is taken into account when explicating the concept of rationality. My position thus amounts to an (...) instrumentalist position about theories of epistemic rationality. Since there are different purposes, or goals, for which theories of rationality are proposed, the method of explication leaves room for different characterizations of rationality. I focus on two such (kinds of) purposes: first, the purpose of guiding the formation (or maintenance) of doxastic states and, second, the purpose of assessing (the formation or maintenance of) doxastic states. I conclude by outlining a pluralistic picture concerning rationality. (shrink)

Solving the meta-problem of consciousness requires, among other things, explaining why we are so reluctant to endorse various forms of illusionism about the phenomenal. I will try to tackle this task in two steps. The first consists in clarifying how the concept of consciousness precludes the possibility of any distinction between 'appearance' and 'reality'. The second consists in spelling out our reasons for recognizing the existence of something that satisfies that concept.

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

The informal logic movement began as an attempt to develop – and teach – an alternative logic which can account for the real life arguing that surrounds us in our daily lives – in newspapers and the popular media, political and social commentary, advertising, and interpersonal exchange. The movement was rooted in research and discussion in Canada and especially at the University of Windsor, and has become a branch of argumentation theory which intersects with related traditions and approaches (notably formal (...) logic, rhetoric and dialectics in the form of pragma-dialectics). In this volume, some of the best known contributors to the movement discuss their views and the reasoning and argument which is informal logic’s subject matter. Many themes and issues are explored in a way that will fuel the continued evolution of the field. Federico Puppo adds an insightful essay which considers the origins and development of informal logic and whether informal logicians are properly described as a “school” of thought. In considering that proposition, Puppo introduces readers to a diverse range of essays, some of them previously published, others written specifically for this volume. (shrink)

According to infinitism, all justification comes from an infinite series of reasons. Peter Klein defends infinitism as the correct solution to the regress problem by rejecting two alternative solutions: foundationalism and coherentism. I focus on Klein's argument against foundationalism, which relies on the premise that there is no justification without meta-justification. This premise is incompatible with dogmatic foundationalism as defended by Michael Huemer and Time Pryor. It does not, however, conflict with non-dogmatic foundationalism. Whereas dogmatic foundationalism rejects the need for (...) any form of meta-justification, non-dogmatic foundationalism merely rejects Laurence BonJour's claim that meta-justification must come from beliefs. Unlike its dogmatic counterpart, non-dogmatic foundationalism can allow for basic beliefs to receive meta-justification from non-doxastic sources such as experiences and memories. Construed thus, non-dogmatic foundationalism is compatible with Klein's principle that there is no justification without meta-justification. I conclude that Klein's rejection of foundationalism. fails. Nevertheless, I agree with Klein that when in response to a skeptical challenge we engage in the activity of defending our beliefs, the number of reasons we can give is at least in principle infinite. I argue that this type of infinity is benign because, when we continue to give reasons, we will eventually merely repeat previously stated reasons. Consequently, I reject Klein's claim that the more reasons we give the more we increase the justification of our beliefs. (shrink)

A subject S's belief that Q is well-grounded if and only if it is based on a reason of S that gives S propositional justification for Q. Depending on the nature of S's reason, the process whereby S bases her belief that Q on it can vary. If S's reason is non-doxastic––like an experience that Q or a testimony that Q––S will need to form the belief that Q as a spontaneous and immediate response to that reason. If S's reason (...) is doxastic––like a belief that P––S will need to infer her belief that Q from it. The distinction between these two ways in which S's beliefs can be based on S's reasons is widely presupposed in current epistemology but––we argue in this paper––is not exhaustive. We give examples of quite ordinary situations in which a well-grounded belief of S appears to be based on S's reasons in neither of the ways described above. To accommodate these recalcitrant cases, we introduce the notion of enthymematic inference and defend the thesis that S can base a belief that Q on doxastic reasons P1, P2, …, Pn via inferring enthymematically Q from P1, P2, …, Pn. (shrink)

What accounts for the capacity of ordinary speakers to comprehend utterances of their language? The phenomenology of hearing speech in one’s own language makes it tempting to many epistemologists to look to perception for an answer to this question. That is, just as a visual experience as of a red square is often taken to give the perceiver immediate justification for believing that there is a red square in front of her, perhaps an auditory experience as of the speaker asserting (...) that p gives the competent hearer immediate justification for believing that the speaker has asserted that p. My aim here is to offer reasons for resisting this temptation. I argue that the perceptual model cannot adequately account for the hearer’s justification in many cases. The arguments here also allow us to draw certain further morals about the role of phenomenology in the epistemology of perception. (shrink)

Theories of emotional justification investigate the conditions under which emotions are epistemically justified or unjustified. I make three contributions to this research program. First, I show that we can generalize some familiar epistemological concepts and distinctions to emotional experiences. Second, I use these concepts and distinctions to display the limits of the ‘simple view’ of emotional justification. On this approach, the justification of emotions stems only from the contents of the mental states they are based on, also known as their (...) cognitive bases. The simple view faces the ‘gap problem’: If cognitive bases and emotions (re)present their objects and properties in different ways, then cognitive bases are not sufficient to justify emotions. Third, I offer a novel solution to the gap problem based on emotional dispositions. This solution (1) draws a line between the justification of basic and non-basic emotions, (2) preserves a broadly cognitivist view of emotions, (3) avoids a form of value skepticism that threatens inferentialist views of emotional justification, and (4) sheds new light on the structure of our epistemic access to evaluative properties. (shrink)

According to a captivating picture, epistemic justification is essentially a matter of epistemic or evidential likelihood. While certain problems for this view are well known, it is motivated by a very natural thought—if justification can fall short of epistemic certainty, then what else could it possibly be? In this paper I shall develop an alternative way of thinking about epistemic justification. On this conception, the difference between justification and likelihood turns out to be akin to the more widely recognised difference (...) between ceteris paribus laws and brute statistical generalisations. I go on to discuss, in light of this suggestion, issues such as classical and lottery-driven scepticism as well as the lottery and preface paradoxes. (shrink)

A perennial epistemological question is whether things can be known just as they are in the absence of any awareness of them. This epistemological question is posterior to ontological considerations and more specific ones pertaining to mind. In light of such considerations, the author propounds a naïve realist, foundationalist account of knowledge of things in themselves, one that makes crucial use of the work of Brentano. After introducing the resources provided by Brentano’s study of mind, the author reveals the ontological (...) framework in which it takes place. Doing so is instrumental to illuminating acquaintance, the state that enables the direct engagement of a mind and some other thing. The author discusses this state and shows how it has the epistemic heft, with a Brentanian account of judgment, to provide the foundations of one’s knowledge of the world. A naïve realist, foundationalist account of knowledge is open to a compelling objection; the author presents this objection with the means of undermining it. In conclusion, the author recurs to the opening theme of the primacy of ontology and suggests that familiar misgivings about knowing things in themselves are all based on questionable—and ultimately untenable—ontological presuppositions. (shrink)

I argue—contra moderate grounding pluralists such as Kit Fine and more extreme grounding pluralists such as Jessica Wilson—that there is fundamentally only one grounding/in-virtue-of relation. I also argue that this single relation is indispensable for normative theorizing—that we can’t make sense of, for example, the debate over consequentialism without it. It follows from what I argue that there is no metaethically-pure normative ethics.

This paper takes a closer look at ordinary thought and talk about motivating reasons, in an effort to better understand how it works. This is an important first step in understanding whether—and if so, how—such thought and talk should inform or constrain our substantive theorizing. One of the upshots is that ordinary judgments about motivating reasons are at best a partial and defeasible guide to what really matters, and that so-called factualists, propositionalists, and statists are all partly right, as well (...) as partly wrong, when it comes to the question of what motivating reasons “are”. (shrink)

In this paper, I defend Moorean Dogmatism against a novel objection raised by Adam Leite. Leite locates the defectiveness of the Moorean reasoning explicitly not in the failure of the Moorean argument to transmit warrant from its premises to its conclusion but rather in the failure of an epistemic agent to satisfy certain epistemic responsibilities that arise in the course of conscious and deliberate reasoning. I will first show that there exist cases of Moorean reasoning that are not put into (...) jeopardy by the considerations that Leite presents. Second, I will argue that certain commitments of Leite’s concerning the notion of warrant are in tension with his verdict that the Moorean reasoning is defective. (shrink)

In previous work, I have suggested a doxastic account of perceptual experience according to which experiences form a kind of belief: Beliefs with what I have called “phenomenal” or “looks-content”. I have argued that this account can not only accommodate the intuitive reason providing role of experience, but also its justificatory role. I have also argued that, in general, construing experience and perceptual beliefs, i.e. the beliefs most directly based on experience, as having different contents best accounts for the defeasibility (...) of experiential reasons. In this paper, I shall have a closer look at the evidential or inferential relation between looks-propositions and the contents of perceptual beliefs and argue for a form of what I shall call “Pollockianism” about experiential reasons: such reasons are good unless defeated. Questions to be investigated include: Does the resulting picture of perceptual justification contain an externalist element? Is it compatible with Bayesianism? And how does it do with respect to problems that have been raised for other forms of Pollockianism such as dogmatism or phenomenal conservatism? (shrink)

This chapter focuses on the relationship between consciousness and knowledge, and in particular on the role perceptual consciousness might play in justifying beliefs about the external world. We outline a version of phenomenal dogmatism according to which perceptual experiences immediately, prima facie justify certain select parts of their content, and do so in virtue of their having a distinctive phenomenology with respect to those contents. Along the way we take up various issues in connection with this core theme, including the (...) possibility of immediate justification, the dispute between representational and relational views of perception, the epistemic significance of cognitive penetration, the question of whether perceptual experiences are composed of more basic sensations and seemings, and questions about the existence and epistemic significance of high-level content. In a concluding section we briefly consider how some of the topics pursued here might generalize beyond perception. (shrink)

According to many, to have epistemic justification to believe P is just for it to be epistemically permissible to believe P. Others think it is for believing P to be epistemically good. Yet others think it has to do with being epistemically blameless in believing P. All such views of justification encounter problems. Here, a new view of justification is proposed according to which justification is a kind of composite normative status. The result is a view of justification that offers (...) hope of solving some longstanding epistemological problems. (shrink)

One important strand of Sellars’s attack on classical foundationalism from Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind is his thesis about the priority of is-talk over looks-talk. This thesis has been criticized extensively in recent years, and classical foundationalism has found several contemporary defenders. I revisit Sellars’s thesis and argue that is-talk is epistemically prior to looks-talk in a way that undermines classical foundationalism. The classical foundationalist claims that epistemic foundations are constituted by the agent’s set of looks-judgments. However, I argue (...) that only a subset of these looks-judgments are even candidates to serve as foundations for the agent’s empirical knowledge, and membership in this subset is determined by the agent’s theory of how the world is. Thus, the epistemic force of the looks-judgments in this subset is dependent on the agent’s theory of how the world is. This means that these looks-judgments aren’t foundational at all, as the agent’s theory of how the world is is epistemically is prior to the epistemic status of these looks-judgments. This is the sense in which judgments about how the world is are epistemically prior to judgments about how things look. This conclusion allows concrete elaboration of another of Sellars’s well-know claims: “I do wish to insist that the metaphor of ‘foundation’ is misleading in that it keeps us from seeing that if there is a logical dimension in which other empirical propositions rest on observation reports, there is another logical dimension in which the latter rest on the former”. (shrink)

You can come to know that you believe that p partly by reflecting on whether p and then judging that p. Call this procedure “the transparency method for belief.” How exactly does the transparency method generate known self-attributions of belief? To answer that question, we cannot interpret the transparency method as involving a transition between the contents p and I believe that p. It is hard to see how some such transition could be warranted. Instead, in this context, one mental (...) action is both a judgment that p and a self-attribution of a belief that p. The notion of embedded mental action is introduced here to explain how this can be so and to provide a full epistemic explanation of the transparency method. That explanation makes sense of first-person authority and immediacy in transparent self-knowledge. In generalized form, it gives sufficient conditions on an attitude’s being known transparently. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to argue that what I call the simple theory of introspection can be extended to account for our introspective knowledge of what we believe as well as what we consciously experience. In section one, I present the simple theory of introspection and motivate the extension from experience to belief. In section two, I argue that extending the simple theory provides a solution to Moore’s paradox by explaining why believing Moorean conjunctions always involves some degree (...) of irrationality. In section three, I argue that it also solves the puzzle of transparency by explaining why it’s rational to answer the question whether one believes that p by answering the question whether p. Finally, in section four, I defend the simple theory against objections by arguing that self-knowledge constitutes an ideal of rationality. (shrink)

This chapter first surveys general issues in the epistemic internalism / externalism debate: what is the distinction, what motivates it, and what arguments can be given on both sides. -/- The second part of the chapter will examine the internalism / externalism debate as regards to the specific case of the epistemology of memory belief.

According to a traditional Cartesian epistemology of perception, perception does not provide one with direct knowledge of the external world. Instead, your immediate perceptual evidence is limited to facts about your own visual experience, from which conclusions about the external world must be inferred. Cartesianism faces well-known skeptical challenges. But this chapter argues that any anti-Cartesian view strong enough to avoid these challenges must license a way of updating one’s beliefs in response to anticipated experiences that seems diachronically irrational. To (...) avoid this result, the anti-Cartesian must either license an unacceptable epistemic chauvinism, or else claim that merely reflecting on one’s experiences defeats perceptual justification. This leaves us with a puzzle: Although Cartesianism faces problems, avoiding them brings a new set of problems. (shrink)

Quite recently, Luciano Floridi has put forward the fascinating suggestion that knowledge should be analyzed as special kind of information, in particular as accounted information. As I will try tentatively to show, one important consequence of Floridi’s proposal is that the notion of justification, and of evidence, should play no role in a philosophical understanding of knowledge. In this paper, I shall suggest one potential difficulty with which Floridi’s proposal might be consequently afflicted, yet accept the fundamental suggestion that traditional (...) epistemology should be merrily wedded with the philosophy of information; in particular, I shall plead for the less drastic conclusion, according to which, although knowledge should be taken to entail justification, it is the very notion of evidence—in particular of perceptual evidence—that should be analyzed in information-theoretic terms. By so doing, my principal aim will be to explain away an apparent difficulty—which is preliminary to the preoccupations motivating Floridi’s more ambitious attempt—from which Conee and Feldman’s Evidentialism is apparently afflicted. So, the conclusion that I will try to establish is that the notion of perceptual evidence, once it is appropriately analyzed in information-theoretic terms, should play an important role in our understanding of knowledge. (shrink)

According to the perceptual model, our knowledge of others' minds is a form of perceptual knowledge. We know, for example, that Jones is angry because we can literally see that he is. In this essay, I argue that mental states do not have the kind of distinctive looks that could sufficiently justify perceptual knowledge of others’ mentality. I present a puzzle that can arise with respect to mental states that I claim does not arise for non-mental properties like being an (...) apple and argue that this is explained by the fact that the looks of non-mental properties adhere to a certain explanatory principle that does not hold for mental states. This shows, I argue, that, even if we think mental states do have looks, these cannot offer sufficient grounds for perceptual knowledge of others' minds. In the final section of the essay, I suggest an alternative way of thinking about our knowledge of others' minds and about the sorts of looks or appearances that might be associated with mental states. (shrink)