Most epistemologists hold that knowledge entails belief. However, proponents of this claim rarely offer a positive argument in support of it. Rather, they tend to treat the view as obvious and assert that there are no convincing counterexamples. We find this strategy to be problematic. We do not find the standard view obvious, and moreover, we think there are cases in which it is intuitively plausible that a subject knows some proposition P without—or at least without determinately—believing that P. Accordingly, (...) we present five plausible examples of knowledge without (determinate) belief, and we present empirical evidence suggesting that our intuitions about these scenarios are not atypical. (shrink)

What does it mean to know how to do something? This book develops a comprehensive account of know-how, a crucial epistemic goal for all who care about getting things right, not only with respect to the facts, but also with respect to practice. It proposes a novel interpretation of the seminal work of Gilbert Ryle, according to which know-how is a competence, a complex ability to do well in an activity in virtue of guidance by an understanding of what it (...) takes to do so. This idea is developed into a full-fledged account, Rylean responsibilism, which understands know-how in terms of the normative guidance and responsible control of one's acts. Within the complex current debate about know-how, this view occupies a middle ground position between the intellectualist claim that know-how just is propositional or objectual knowledge and the anti-intellectualist claim that know-how just is ability. In genuine know-how, practical ability and guiding intellect are both necessary, but essentially intertwined. (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)

We distinguish between two categories of belief—thin belief and thick belief—and provide evidence that they approximate genuinely distinct categories within folk psychology. We use the distinction to make informative predictions about how laypeople view the relationship between knowledge and belief. More specifically, we show that if the distinction is genuine, then we can make sense of otherwise extremely puzzling recent experimental findings on the entailment thesis (i.e. the widely held philosophical thesis that knowledge entails belief). We also suggest that the (...) distinction can be applied to debates in the philosophy of mind and metaethics. (shrink)

Knowledge is widely thought to entail belief. But Radford has claimed to offer a counterexample: the case of the unconfident examinee. And Myers-Schulz and Schwitzgebel have claimed empirical vindication of Radford. We argue, in defense of orthodoxy, that the unconfident examinee does indeed have belief, in the epistemically relevant sense of dispositional belief. We buttress this with empirical results showing that when the dispositional conception of belief is specifically elicited, people’s intuitions then conform with the view that knowledge entails (dispositional) (...) belief. (shrink)

Scientific consensus is widely deferred to in public debates as a social indicator of the existence of knowledge. However, it is far from clear that such deference to consensus is always justified. The existence of agreement in a community of researchers is a contingent fact, and researchers may reach a consensus for all kinds of reasons, such as fighting a common foe or sharing a common bias. Scientific consensus, by itself, does not necessarily indicate the existence of shared knowledge among (...) the members of the consensus community. I address the question of under what conditions it is likely that a consensus is in fact knowledge based. I argue that a consensus is likely to be knowledge based when knowledge is the best explanation of the consensus, and I identify three conditions—social calibration, apparent consilience of evidence, and social diversity, for knowledge being the best explanation of a consensus. (shrink)

This book addresses key conceptual issues relating to the modern scientific and engineering use of computer simulations. It analyses a broad set of questions, from the nature of computer simulations to their epistemological power, including the many scientific, social and ethics implications of using computer simulations. The book is written in an easily accessible narrative, one that weaves together philosophical questions and scientific technicalities. It will thus appeal equally to all academic scientists, engineers, and researchers in industry interested in questions (...) related to the general practice of computer simulations. (shrink)

We investigate claims about the frequency of "know" made by philosophers. Our investigation has several overlapping aims. First, we aim to show what is required to confirm or disconfirm philosophers’ claims about the comparative frequency of different uses of philosophically interesting expressions. Second, we aim to show how using linguistic corpora as tools for investigating meaning is a productive methodology, in the sense that it yields discoveries about the use of language that philosophers would have overlooked if they remained in (...) their "armchairs of an afternoon", to use J.L. Austin’s phrase. Third, we discuss facts about the meaning of "know" that so far have been ignored in philosophy, with the aim of reorienting discussions of the relevance of ordinary language for philosophical theorizing. (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)

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)

Several influential characterizations of paternalism or its distinctive wrongness emphasize a belief or judgement that it typically involves—namely, 10 the judgement that the paternalized is likely to act irrationally, or some such. But it's not clear what about such a belief can be morally objectionable if it has the right epistemic credentials (if it is true, say, and is best supported by the evidence). In this paper, I elaborate on this point, placing it in the context of the relevant epistemological (...) discussions. I explain how 15 evidentialism is opposed to such thoughts; I show that possible ways of rejecting evidentialism (along lines analogous to those of pragmatic encroachment) won't work; and I sketch an account of the wrongness of paternalism that doesn't depend on any flaw in the belief about others' likely behaviour. (shrink)

In a single-iteration fake barn case, the agent correctly identifies an object of interest on the first try, despite the presence of nearby lookalikes that could have mislead her. In a multiple-iteration fake barn case, the agent first encounters several fakes, misidentifies each of them, and then encounters and correctly identifies a genuine item of interest. Prior work has established that people tend to attribute knowledge in single-iteration fake barn cases, but multiple-iteration cases have not been tested. However, some theorists (...) contend that multiple-iteration cases are more important and will elicit a strong tendency to deny knowledge. Here I report a behavioural experiment investigating knowledge judgments in multiple-iteration fake barn cases. The main finding is that people tend to attribute knowledge in these cases too. Ironically, the results indicate that the presence of fakes could prevent iterated errors from lowering knowledge attributions. The results also provide evidence that ordinary knowledge attributions are based on attributions of cognitive ability. (shrink)

The standard view in epistemology is that propositional knowledge entails belief. Positive arguments are seldom given for this entailment thesis, however; instead, its truth is typically assumed. Against the entailment thesis, Myers-Schulz and Schwitzgebel (Noûs, forthcoming) report that a non-trivial percentage of people think that there can be propositional knowledge without belief. In this paper, we add further fuel to the fire, presenting the results of four new studies. Based on our results, we argue that the entailment thesis does not (...) deserve the default status that it is typically granted. We conclude by considering the alternative account of knowledge that Myers-Schulz and Schwitzgebel propose to explain their results, arguing that it does not explain ours. In its place we offer a different explanation of both sets of findings—the conviction account, according to which belief, but not knowledge, requires mental assent. (shrink)

We consider a range of cases—both hypothetical and actual—in which agents apparently know how to \ but fail to believe that the way in which they in fact \ is a way for them to \. These “no-belief” cases present a prima facie problem for Intellectualism about knowledge-how. The problem is this: if knowledge-that entails belief, and if knowing how to \ just is knowing that some w is a way for one to \, then an agent cannot both know (...) how to \ and fail to believe that w, the way that she \s, is a way for her to \. We discuss a variety of ways in which Intellectualists might respond to this challenge and argue that, ultimately, this debate converges with another, seemingly distinct debate in contemporary epistemology: how to attribute belief in cases of conflict between an agent’s avowals and her behavior. No-belief cases, we argue, reveal how Intellectualism depends on the plausibility of positing something like “implicit beliefs”—which conflict with an agent’s avowed beliefs—in many cases of apparent knowledge-how. While there may be good reason to posit implicit beliefs elsewhere, we suggest that there are at least some grounds for thinking that these reasons fail to carry over to no-belief cases, thus applying new pressure to Intellectualism. (shrink)

It has recently been argued that indeterminacy and indeterminism make most ordinary counterfactuals false. I argue that a plausible way to avoid such counterfactual skepticism is to postulate the existence of primitive modal facts that serve as truth-makers for counterfactual claims. Moreover, I defend a new theory of ‘might’ counterfactuals, and develop assertability and knowledge criteria to suit such unobservable ‘counterfacts’.

When extended cognition is extended into mainstream epistemology, an awkward tension arises when considering cases of environmental epistemic luck. Surprisingly, it is not at all clear how the mainstream verdict that agents lack knowledge in cases of environmental luck can be reconciled with principles central to extended cognition.

I provide a novel knowledge-first account of justification that avoids the pitfalls of existing accounts while preserving the underlying insight of knowledge-first epistemologies: that knowledge comes first. The view I propose is, roughly, this: justification is grounded in our practical knowledge (know-how) concerning the acquisition of propositional knowledge (knowledge-that). I first refine my thesis in response to immediate objections. In subsequent sections I explain the various ways in which this thesis is theoretically superior to existing knowledge-first accounts of justification. The (...) upshot is a virtue-theoretic, knowledge-first view of justification that is internalist-friendly and able to explain more facts about justification than any other available view. (shrink)

The tripartite account of propositional, fallibilist knowledge that p as justified true belief can become adequate only if it can solve the Gettier Problem. However, the latter can be solved only if the problem of a successful coordination of the resources (at least truth and justification) necessary and sufficient to deliver propositional, fallibilist knowledge that p can be solved. In this paper, the coordination problem is proved to be insolvable by showing that it is equivalent to the ''''coordinated attack'''' problem, (...) which is demonstrably insolvable in epistemic logic. It follows that the tripartite account is not merely inadequate as it stands, as proved by Gettier-type counterexamples, but demonstrably irreparable in principle, so that efforts to improve it can never succeed. (shrink)

The verb ‘to know’ can be used both in ascriptions of propositional knowledge and ascriptions of knowledge of acquaintance. In the formal epistemology literature, the former use of ‘know’ has attracted considerable attention, while the latter is typically regarded as derivative. This attitude may be unsatisfactory for those philosophers who, like Russell, are not willing to think of knowledge of acquaintance as a subsidiary or dependent kind of knowledge. In this paper we outline a logic of knowledge of acquaintance in (...) which ascriptions like ‘Mary knows Smith’ are regarded as formally interesting in their own right, remaining neutral on their relation to ascriptions of propositional knowledge. The resulting logical framework, which is based on Hintikka’s modal approach to epistemic logic, provides a fresh perspective on various issues and notions at play in the philosophical debate on acquaintance. (shrink)

Epistemic luck is a generic notion used to describe any of a number of ways in which it can be accidental, coincidental, or fortuitous that a person has a true belief. For example, one can form a true belief as a result of a lucky guess, as when one believes through guesswork that “C” is the right answer to a multiple-choice question and one’s belief just happens to be correct. One can form a true belief via wishful thinking; for example, (...) an optimist’s belief that it will not rain may luckily turn out to be correct, despite forecasts for heavy rain all day. One can reason from false premises to a belief that coincidentally happens to be true. One can accidentally arrive at a true belief through invalid or fallacious reasoning. And one can fortuitously arrive at a true belief from testimony that was intended to mislead but unwittingly reported the truth. In all of these cases, it is just a matter of luck that the person has a true belief. -/- Until the twenty-first century, there was nearly universal agreement among epistemologists that epistemic luck is incompatible with knowledge. Call this view “the incompatibility thesis.” In light of the incompatibility thesis, epistemic luck presents epistemologists with three distinct but related challenges. The first is that of providing an accurate analysis of knowledge (in terms of individually necessary and jointly sufficient conditions for “S knows that p,” where ‘S’ represents the knower and ‘p’ represents the proposition known). An adequate analysis of knowledge must succeed in specifying conditions that rule out all instances of knowledge-destroying epistemic luck. The second challenge is to resolve the skeptical paradox that the ubiquity of epistemic luck generates: As will become clear in section 2c, epistemic luck is an all-pervasive phenomenon. Coupling this fact with the incompatibility thesis entails that we have no propositional knowledge. The non-skeptical epistemologist must somehow reconcile the strong intuition that epistemic luck is not compatible with knowledge with the equally evident observation that it must be. The third challenge concerns the special skeptical threat that epistemic luck seems to pose for more reflective forms of knowledge, such as knowing that one knows. Each of these challenges will be explored in the present article. (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.

Orthodoxy has it that knowledge is a composite of belief and non-mental factors. However, Timothy Williamson suggests that orthodoxy implies that the concept of belief is acquired before the concept of knowledge, whereas developmental data suggest the reverse. More recently, Jennifer Nagel reviews the psychological evidence, building a psychological case that the concept of knowledge emerges prior to belief. I assess the psychological state of the art and find support for the opposite conclusion. Overall the empirical evidence supports the orthodox (...) view that the concept of belief is prior to the concept of knowledge. (shrink)

Standard epistemology takes it for granted that there is a special kind of value: epistemic value. This claim does not seem to sit well with act utilitarianism, however, since it holds that only welfare is of real value. I first develop a particularly utilitarian sense of “epistemic value”, according to which it is closely analogous to the nature of financial value. I then demonstrate the promise this approach has for two current puzzles in the intersection of epistemology and value theory: (...) first, the problem of why knowledge is better than mere true belief, and second, the relation between epistemic justification and responsibility. (shrink)

This paper reviews the largely psychological literature surrounding apparent failures of human rationality (sometimes referred to as 'the Rationality Wars') and locates it with respect to concepts and issues within more traditional epistemological inquiry. The goal is to bridge the gap between these two large and typically disconnected literatures – concerning rationality and the psychology of human reasoning, on the one hand, and epistemological theories of justified or rational belief, on the other – and to do so in such as (...) way as to expose interesting points of contact and convergence between them. (shrink)

The Gettier problem has stymied epistemologists. But, whether or not this problem is resolvable, we still must face an important question: Why does the Gettier problem arise in the first place? So far, philosophers have seen it as either a problem peculiar to the concept of knowledge, or else an instance of a general problem about conceptual analysis. But I would like to steer a middle course. I argue that the Gettier problem arises because knowledge is a thick concept, and (...) a Gettier-like problem is just what we should expect from attempts at analyzing a thick concept. Section 2 is devoted to establishing the controversial claim that knowledge is thick, and, in Sect. 3, I show that there is a general problem for analyzing thick concepts of which the Gettier problem is a special instance. I do not take a stand on whether the Gettier problem, or its general counterpart, is resolvable. My primary aim is to bring these problems into better focus. (shrink)

I argue that so-called 'background knowledge' in confirmation theory has little, if anything, to do with 'knowledge' in the sense of mainstream epistemology. I argue that it is better construed as 'background information', which need not be believed in, justified, or true.

Faced with evidence that what a person said is false, we can nevertheless trust them and so believe what they say – choosing to give them the benefit of the doubt. This is particularly notable when the person is a friend, or someone we are close to. Towards such persons, we demonstrate a remarkable epistemic partiality. We can trust, and so believe, our friends even when the balance of the evidence suggests that what they tell us is false. And insofar (...) as belief is possible, it is also possible to acquire testimonial knowledge on those occasions when the friends know what they tell us. This paper seeks to explain these psychological and epistemological possibilities. (shrink)

Much of present-day epistemology is divided between internalists and externalists. Different as these views are, they have in common that they strip justification from its dialectical component in order to block the skeptic’s argument from disagreement. That is, they allow that one may have justified beliefs even if one is not able to defend it against challenges and resolve the disagreements about them. Lammenranta (2008, 2011a) recently argued that neither internalism nor externalism convinces if we consider the argument in its (...) most interesting format. In this paper I zoom in on this debate, and fix further details of Lammenranta’s lead. Specifically, I will side with skepticism that justification is dialectical, yet only if certain conditions are in place. (shrink)

Richard Foley has suggested that the search for a good theory of epistemic justification and the analysis of knowledge should be conceived of as two distinct projects. However, he has not offered much support for this claim, beyond highlighting certain salutary consequences it might have. In this paper, I offer some further support for Foley’s claim by offering an argument and a way to conceive the claim in a way that makes it as plausible as its denial, and thus levelling (...) the playing field. The burden of proof then lies with those who seek to deny Foley’s radical suggestion. (shrink)

In discussions of Fitch’s paradox, it is usually assumed without further argument that knowledge is factive, that if a subject knows that p, then p is true. It is argued that this common assumption is not as well-founded as it should be, and that there in fact are certain reasons to be suspicious of the unrestricted version of the factiveness claim. There are two kinds of reason for this suspicion. One is that unrestricted factiveness leads to paradoxes and unexpected results, (...) the other is that the usual arguments for factiveness are not as compelling as is commonly thought. There may in fact be some kinds of contexts, where factiveness doesn’t hold for knowledge—the usual arguments for factiveness don’t suffice to support the claim that knowledge is unrestrictedly factive. Perhaps all that can be shown is that knowledge is at times factive, or that it is default factive, as it were: this doesn’t show that there can’t be counterexamples, however. Certain aspects of knowledge without unrestricted factiveness are examined briefly. (shrink)

Safety-based theories of knowledge face a difficulty surrounding necessary truths: no subject could have easily falsely believed such a proposition. Failing to predict that ill-grounded beliefs in such propositions do not constitute knowledge, standard safety theories are therefore less informative than desired. Some have suggested that the subjects at issue could easily have believed some related false proposition; but they have given no indication as to what makes a proposition related. I suggest a solution to this problem: a belief is (...) safe iff its subject could not easily have believed a false answer to the same question. (shrink)

Can an explanation of a set of beliefs cast doubt on the things believed? In particular, can an evolutionary explanation of religious beliefs call the contents of those beliefs into question? Yes - under certain circumstances. I distinguish between natural histories of beliefs and genealogies. A natural history of a set of beliefs is an explanation that puts them down to naturalistic causes. (I try to give an account of natural explanations which favors a certain kind of ‘methodological atheism’ without (...) begging any crucial questions against theists.) A genealogy is an explanation which somehow subverts the claims believed, usually by putting down the beliefs to unreliable causal mechanisms. Some genealogies are natural histories, such as Aquinas’s explanation of the prevalence of Islam and Gibbon’s explanation of the prevalence of Christianity. But not all genealogies are natural histories and not all natural histories are genealogies: witness the Primitive Christians’ explanation of the prevalence of Paganism which relies crucially on supernatural agencies and Hume’s explanation of our moral beliefs which defines moral truth in terms of the idealized outputs of our natural belief-forming mechanisms. However both believers and non-believers postulate a natural propensity of to devotion on the part of human beings a ‘sensus divinitatis’ which often results in false positives and is therefore unreliable. Thus the evolutionary explanation of this propensity does not add much to the skeptical case against religion. I conclude by arguing, as against Plantinga that since on his own showing our sensus divinitatis often malfunctions under optimum conditions, its unreliability constitutes a defeater for the claim that Christian beliefs are properly basic. (shrink)

A detailed, clear, and comprehensive overview of the current philosophical debate on. The question of when, and under what circumstances, the practice of torture might be justified has received a great deal of attention in the last decade in both academia and in the popular media. Many of these discussions are, however, one-sided with other perspectives either ignored or quickly dismissed with minimal argument. In On the Ethics of Torture, Uwe Steinhoff provides a complete account of the philosophical debate surrounding (...) this highly contentious subject. Steinhoff’s position is that torture is sometimes, under certain narrowly circumscribed conditions, justified, basing his argument on the right to self-defense. His position differs from that of other authors who, using other philosophical justifications, would permit torture under a wider set of conditions. After having given the reader a thorough account of the main arguments for permitting torture under certain circumstances, Steinhoff explains and addresses the many objections that have been raised to employing torture under any circumstances. This is an indispensible work for anyone interested in one of the most controversial subjects of our times. (shrink)

What clinicians, biomedical scientists, and other health care professionals know as individuals or as groups and how they come to know and use knowledge are central concerns of medical epistemology. Activities associated with knowledge production and use are called epistemic practices. Such practices are considered in biomedical and clinical literatures, social sciences of medicine, philosophy of science and philosophy of medicine, and also in other nonmedical literatures. A host of different kinds of knowledge claims have been identified, each with different (...) uses and logics of justification. A general framework is needed to situate these diverse contributions in medical epistemology, so we can see how they fit together. But developing such a framework turns out to be quite tricky. In this survey, three possible frameworks are considered along with the difficulties associated with each of them. The essay concludes with a fourth framework, which considers any epistemology as part of a practice that is oriented toward overcoming errors that emerge in antecedently given practices where knowledge is developed and used. As medicine indirectly advances health by directly mitigating disease, so epistemology indirectly advances knowledge by directly mitigating error. (shrink)

Which role do concepts play in a person's actions? Do concepts underwrite the very idea of agency in somebody's acting? Or is the appeal to concepts in action a problematic form of over-intellectualization which obstructs a proper picture of genuine agency? Within the large and complicated terrain of these questions, the debate about know-how has been of special interest in recent years. In this paper, I shall try to spell out what know-how can tell us about the role of concepts (...) in action. I will argue that the fact that people possess and exercise know-how is indeed suited to deliver a number of important insights as to where and how concepts play a role in action. But I shall argue that these insights are limited in that they fail to cover the whole realm of relevant phenomena. (shrink)

The author argues that is not obvious what it means for our beliefs and assertions to be "truth-directed", and that we need to weaken our ordinary notion of a belief if we are to deal with radical scepticism without surrendering to idealism. Topics examined also include whether there could be alien conceptual schemes and what might happen to us if we abandoned genuine belief in place of mere pragmatic acceptance. A radically new "ecological" model of knowledge is defended.

In this paper, the Carneades argumentation system is extended to represent a procedural view of inquiry in which evidence is marshalled to support or defeat claims to knowledge. The model is a sequence of moves in a collaborative group inquiry in which parties take turns making assertions about what is known or not known, putting forward evidence to support them, and subjecting these moves to criticisms. It is shown how this model of evaluating evidence in an inquiry is based on (...) a defeasible logic using forms of argument that admit exceptions. It is contended that reasoning from absence of knowledge is as important to inquiry as positive reasoning from evidence to knowledge. The philosophical conflict between this view of reasoning about knowledge and the true-belief-plus view is explored by airing objections and replies on both sides. (shrink)

Earl Conee and Richard Feldman claim that mentalism identifies the core of internalist epistemology. This is what I call identifying ur-internalism. Their version of ur-internalism differs from the traditional one ? viz., accessibilism ? by not imposing requirements stipulating that subjects must have reflective access to facts which justify their beliefs for these beliefs to be justified. Instead, justification simply supervenes on the mental lives of subjects. I argue that mentalism fails to establish itself as ur-internalism by demonstrating that the (...) strong supervenience claim used by Conee and Feldman is consistent with cognitive externalism (often called ?the extended mind hypothesis?). Briefly, cognitive externalism claims that the mental states themselves (rather than their contents) constitutively depend on factors outside the bodily individual. Given this possibility, I claim Conee and Feldman's supervenience principle no longer suits the purposes to which they put it. (shrink)

This paper investigates a limitation of the model of belief and knowledge prevailing in mainstream economics, namely the state-space model. Because of its set-theoretic nature, this model has difficulties in capturing the difference between expressions that designate the same object but have different meanings, i.e., expressions with the same extension but different intensions. This limitation generates puzzling results concerning what individuals believe or know about the world as well as what individuals believe or know about what other individuals believe or (...) know about the world. The paper connects these puzzling results to two issues that are relevant for economic theory beyond the state-space model, namely, framing effects and the distinction between the model-maker and agents that appear in the model. Finally, the paper discusses three possible solutions to the limitations of the state-space model, and concludes that the two alternatives that appear practicable also have significant drawbacks. (shrink)

I argue that knowledge is a particular kind of concept known as a thick concept. Examples of thick concepts include courage, generosity, loyalty, brutality, and so forth. These concepts are commonly said to combine both evaluation and description, and one of the main goals of this dissertation is to provide a new account of how a thick concept combines these elements. It is argued that thick concepts are semantically evaluative, and that they combine evaluation and description in a way similar (...) to that of concepts like good qua dancer and bad qua violinist. In the final chapter, this basic idea is applied to the concept of knowledge. There, the concept of knowledge is analyzed in terms of good qua belief. The upshot is that two central epistemological problems—the Gettier Problem and the Value Problem—can be resolved. (shrink)

Helen Frowe has recently offered what she calls a “practical” account of self-defense. Her account is supposed to be practical by being subjectivist about permissibility and objectivist about liability. I shall argue here that Frowe first makes up a problem that does not exist and then fails to solve it. To wit, her claim that objectivist accounts of permissibility cannot be action-guiding is wrong; and her own account of permissibility actually retains an objectivist (in the relevant sense) element. In addition, (...) her attempt to restrict subjectivism primarily to “urgent” situations like self-defense contradicts her own point of departure and is either incoherent or futile. Finally, the only actual whole-heartedly objectivist account she criticizes is an easy target; while those objectivist accounts one finds in certain Western European jurisdictions are immune to her criticisms. Those accounts are also clearly superior to hers in terms of action-guidingness. (shrink)

Relativists about knowledge ascriptions think that whether a particular use of a knowledge-ascribing sentence, e.g., “Keith knows that the bank is open” is true depends on the epistemic standards at play in the assessor’s context—viz., the context in which the knowledge ascription is being as- sessed for truth or falsity. Given that the very same knowledge-ascription can be assessed for truth or falsity from indefinitely many perspectives, relativism has a striking consequence. When I ascribe knowledge to someone (e.g., when I (...) say that, at a particular time, “Keith knows that the bank is open”), what I’ve said does not get a truth-value absolutely, but only relatively. If this semantic thesis about the word “knows” and its cognates is true, what implications would this have for epistemology, the philosophical theory of knowledge? e present aim will be to engage with this mostly unexplored question, and then to consider how the epistemological conclusions drawn might bear on the plausibility of a relativist semantics for “knows”. (shrink)

We propose an account of the subject’s cognition and its relation to the world that allows for an articulation of the phenomenon of ideology. We argue that ideology is a form of what we call ‘a priori activity’: it transcendentally conditions the intelligibility of thought and practice. But we draw from strands of post-Kantian philosophy of science and social philosophy in repudiating Kant’s view that the a priori is necessary and fixed. Instead, we relativize the a priori: we argue that (...) it is contingent, and therefore revisable. More precisely, it is conditioned materially, in that it is enmeshed with and shaped by material social practice. We conclude with some remarks about the possibility of agency over the relativized, materially conditioned a priori—that is, about the possibility of critique. (shrink)

Gettier cases are used to show that having a justified true belief is not sufficient for knowledge. They are cases in which an epistemic agent has a belief that is both justified and true, but intuitively cannot be taken to count as knowledge. Modal epistemology is the field of philosophy that tackles questions regarding the sources of our knowledge of modalities (possibility and necessity) and what offers justification for beliefs about what is possible or necessary. Part of the tradition in (...) modal epistemology is to consider conceivability as a guide to metaphysical possibility. As such, if an agent can conceive that P, then the agent is justified to believe that P is metaphysically possible. In this paper I will discuss the possibility of constructing Gettier cases for a tripartite, conceivability-based, definition of modal knowledge. (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)

The secondary literature on religious epistemology has focused extensively on whether religious experience can provide evidence for God’s existence. In this article, I suppose that religious experience can do this, but I consider whether it can provide adequate evidence for justified belief in God. I argue that it can. This requires a couple of moves. First, I consider the threshold problem for evidentialism and explain pragmatic encroachment (PE) as a solution to it. Second, I argue that religious experience can justify (...) belief in God if one adopts PE, but this poses a dilemma for the defender of the veridicality of religious experience. If PE is true, then whether S has a justified belief in God on the basis of religious experience depends on how high the stakes are for having an experience with God. This requires one to determine whether the stakes are high or low for experiencing God, which puts the experient of God in an awkward position. If the stakes are not high, then justified belief in God on the basis of religious experience will be easier to come by, but this requires conceding that experiencing God is not that important. If the stakes are high, then the experient can maintain the importance of experience with God but must concede that justified belief in God on the basis of experience with God is less likely to happen, perhaps impossible. (shrink)

The question whether art is of any epistemic value is an old question in the philosophy of art. Whereas many contemporary artists, art-critics, and art-historians answer this question affirmatively, many contemporary philosophers remain skeptical. If art is of epistemic significance, they maintain, then it has to contribute to our quest of achieving our most basic epistemic aim, namely knowledge.Unfortunately, recent and widely accepted analyses of knowledge make it very hard to see how art might significantly contribute to the quest of (...) achieving this aim. Hence, by the lights of recent epistemology, it is questionable whether art is of any epistemic value. In order to hold on to the epistemic value of art, one has three options: (a) reject the recent analyses of knowledge that make the epistemic value of art questionable, (b) accept the recent analyses of knowledge but argue that they are compatible with the epistemic value of art, or (c) find another epistemic aim (besides knowledge) and show that art is of significant help in achieving this aim. In this paper I will argue that, at least with respect to pictorial art, option (c) seems promising. By reconsidering some basic insights and ideas from Nelson Goodman we can identify (objective) understanding as an epistemic aim to which pictorial art makes a significant contribution. (shrink)

This article further explains and develops a recent, comprehensive semantic naturalization theory, namely the interactive indexing (II) theory as described in my 2008 Minds and Machines article Semantic Naturalization via Interactive Perceptual Causality (Vol. 18, pp. 527–546). Folk views postulate a concrete intentional relation between cognitive states and the worldly states they are about. The II theory eliminates any such concrete intentionality, replacing it with purely causal relations based on the interactive theory of perception. But intentionality is preserved via purely (...) abstract propositions about the world that index, or correlate with, appropriate cognitive states. Further reasons as to why intentionality must be abstract are provided, along with more details of an II-style account of representation, language use and propositional attitudes. All cognitive representation is explained in terms of classification or sorting dispositions indexed by appropriate propositions. The theory is also related to Fodor’s representational theory of mind, with some surprisingly close parallels being found in spite of the purely dispositional basis of the II theory. In particular, Fodor’s insistence that thinking about an item cannot be reduced to sorting dispositions is supported via a novel two-level account of cognition—upper level propositional attitudes involve significant intermediate processing of a broadly normative epistemic kind prior to the formation of sorting dispositions. To conclude, the weak intentional realism of the II theory—which makes intentional descriptions of the world dispensable—is related to Dennett’s ‘intentional stance’ view, and distinguished from strong (indispensable) intentional realist views. II-style dispositions are also defended. (shrink)