We very often grant that a person can gain knowledge on the basis of epistemic artifacts such as telescopes, microscopes and so on. However, this intuition threatens to undermine virtue reliabilism according to which one knows that p if and only if one’s believing the truth that p is the product of a reliable cognitive belief-forming process; in an obvious sense epistemic artifacts are not parts of one’s overall cognitive system. This is so, unless the extended cognition hypothesis (HEC) is (...) true. According to HEC when parts of the environment become properly coupled to the agent’s brain then they too can be considered constitutive parts of the overall cognitive mechanism—i.e. cognition potentially extends to the world surrounding the agent. Interestingly, HEC and the broader framework of virtue reliabilism share some intriguing similarities, which render these two views mutually supportive. Making these similarities explicit provides a principled account of the way in which our knowledge-conducive cognitive characters may extend beyond our natural cognitive capacities by incorporating epistemic artifacts. (shrink)

The paper deals with the paradox that rationality demands rational substantiation which can’t be given in principle. Thus it is argued that only intuition can prevail against skepticism and subjectivism. But intuition is "transcendent" to rationality and therefore its acceptance as the substantiation of rationality implies existence of transcendental reality. In itself it has infinite regress qua infinite reiteration of reality levels without any qualitative ontological alteration, therefore only infinite transcendence is able to ground a finite immanence.

Dualism in the Epistemology of Testimony and the Ability Intuition Content Type Journal Article DOI 10.1007/s11406-010-9291-4 Authors Spyridon Orestis Palermos, Department of Philosophy, School of Philosophy, Psychology and Language Sciences (PPLS), The University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, UK Journal Philosophia Online ISSN 1574-9274 Print ISSN 0048-3893.

Children learn and come to know things about the world at a very young age through the testimony of their caregivers. The challenge comes in explaining how children acquire such knowledge. Since children indiscriminately receive testimony, their testimony-based beliefs seem unreliable, and, consequently, should fail to qualify as knowledge. In this paper I discuss some attempted explanations by Sandy Goldberg and John Greco and argue that they fail. I go on to suggest that what generates the problem is a hidden (...) assumption that the standards for testimonial knowledge are invariant between children and cognitively mature adults. I propose that in order to adequately explain how children acquire testimonial knowledge we should reject this hidden assumption. I then argue that understanding knowledge in terms of intellectual skills gives us a plausible framework to do so. (shrink)

There is widespread consensus that there are undercutting and rebutting defeaters that diminish or destroy the warrant of a belief B. I argue that there are counterparts of defeaters: the counterparts of undercutting defeaters are “requirement fulfillment beliefs”, the counterparts of rebutting defeaters are “consistency beliefs”. These beliefs confirm the warrant of B, I therefore call them “confirmers”.