Epistemology has recently witnessed a number of efforts to rehabilitate rationalism, to defend the existence and importance of a priori knowledge or warrant construed as the product of rational insight or apprehension (Bealer 1987; Bigelow 1992; BonJour 1992, 1998; Burge 1998; Butchvarov 1970; Katz 1998; Plantinga 1993). This effort has sometimes been coupled with an attack on naturalistic epistemology, especially in BonJour 1994 and Katz 1998. Such coupling is not surprising, because naturalistic epistemology is often associated with thoroughgoing empiricism and (...) the rejection of the a priori. In this paper, however, I shall present a conception of naturalistic epistemology that is entirely compatible with a priori justification or knowledge. The resulting conception, I claim, gives us a better appreciation of the respective merits of the rational and the empirical, as well as a better understanding of how moderate epistemological naturalism comports, at least in principle, with moderate rationalism. This paper defends moderate rationalism; but it does not defend everything rationalists have often wanted, only what it is reasonable to grant them. (shrink)

In this paper we survey some main arguments for and against epistemological contextualism. We distinguish and discuss various kinds of contextualism, such as attributer contextualism (the most influential version of which is semantic, conversational, or radical contextualism); indexicalism; proto-contextualism; Wittgensteinian contextualism; subject, inferential, or issue contextualism; epistemic contextualism; and virtue contextualism. Starting with a sketch of Dretske's Relevant Alternatives Theory and Nozick's Tracking Account of Knowledge, we reconstruct the history of various forms of contextualism and the ways contextualists try to (...) handle some notorious epistemological quandaries, especially skepticism and the lottery paradox. Then we outline the most important problems that contextualist theories face, and give overviews of their criticisms and defenses as developed in this issue. (shrink)

This paper critically surveys 20 years of recent work on radical skepticism. It focuses on three key issues. First, it starts by exploring how philosophers have recently challenged our understanding of radical skeptical arguments. It then unpacks and critically evaluates some influential reactions to radical skepticism: structuralism, knowledge-first epistemology, epistemological disjunctivism, and hinge epistemology. Third, it explores some novel developments of pragmatism, like pragmatic skepticism, gauges its anti-skeptical import, and reflects on the ways in which radical skeptical epistemology and ethics (...) might meet. (shrink)

The problem of skepticism is often understood as a paradox: a valid argument with plausible premises whose conclusion is that we lack justification for perceptual beliefs. Typically, this conclusion is deemed unacceptable, so a theory is offered that posits conditions for justification on which some premise is false. The theory defended here is more general, and explains why the paradox arises in the first place. Like Strawson’s (Introduction to logical theory, Wiley, New York, 1952) “ordinary language” approach to induction, the (...) theory posits something built into the very notion of justification: it is loaded with a bias towards the proposition that we are not massively deceived. Beyond the paradox, remaining skeptical problems consist of metaphysical and practical questions: whether we are massively deceived, or why we should use our loaded notion rather than some other. Such challenges have profound epistemological significance, but they are not problems that an a priori theory of justification can solve. (shrink)

Many philosophers think that moral objectivism is supported by stable features of moral discourse and thinking. When engaged in moral reasoning and discourse, people behave ‘as if’ objectivism were correct, and the seemingly most straightforward way of making sense of this is to assume that objectivism is correct; this is how we think that such behavior is explained in paradigmatically objectivist domains. By comparison, relativist, error-theoretic or non-cognitivist accounts of this behavior seem contrived and ad hoc. After explaining why this (...) argument should be taken seriously (recent arguments notwithstanding), I argue that it is nevertheless undermined by considerations of moral disagreement. Even if the metaphysical, epistemic and semantic commitments of objectivism provide little or no evidence against it, and even if the alternative explanations of ‘objectivist’ traits of moral discourse and thinking are speculative or contrived, objectivism is itself incapable of making straightforward sense of these traits. Deep and widespread moral disagreement or, rather, the mere appearance of such disagreement, strongly suggests that the explanations operative in paradigmatically objective discourse fail to carry over to the moral case. Since objectivism, no less than relativism, non-cognitivism and error-theories, needs non-trivial explanations of why we behave ‘as if’ objectivism were correct, such behavior does not presently provide reason to accept objectivism. (shrink)

_ Source: _Page Count 25 This is a pre-print. Please cite only the revised published version. This paper presents an original, ambitious, truth-directed transcendental argument for the existence of an ‘external world’. It begins with a double-headed starting-point: Stroud’s own remarks on the necessary conditions of language in general, and Hegel’s critique of the “fear of error.” The paper argues that the sceptical challenge requires a particular critical concept of thought as that which may diverge from reality, and that this (...) concept is possible only through reflection on situations of error, in which how things are thought to be diverges from how things really are with independent items in an objective world. The existence of such a world is therefore a necessary condition of the possibility of scepticism: such scepticism is therefore false. I defend the argument against objections from Stroud’s sceptic and others. Drawing on Heidegger, the paper concludes by indicating that the chain of necessary conditions includes practical engagement with the world. (shrink)

Indicative judgments pertain to what is true. Epistemic modal judgments pertain to what must or might be true relative to a body of information. A standard view is that epistemic modals implicitly quantify over alternative possibilities, or ways things could turn out. On this view, a proposition must be true just in case it is true in all the possibilities consistent with the available information, and a proposition might be true just in case it is true in at least one (...) possibility consistent with the available information. I report three experiments testing this view of epistemic modals. The results show that although modal judgments are sensitive to information about alternative possibilities, the standard quantification theory mischaracterizes the ordinary meaning of modals. I then report two more experiments testing the hypothesis that epistemic modals express willingness to attribute knowledge based on the available information. The results support this hypothesis. The results also show that the difference between “inside” and “outside” probabilistic information, familiar from the judgment and decision-making literature, affects epistemic modal judgments. (shrink)

It is commonly held that our intuitive judgements about imaginary problem cases are justified a priori, if and when they are justified at all. In this paper I defend this view — ‘rationalism’ — against a recent objection by Timothy Williamson. I argue that his objection fails on multiple grounds, but the reasons why it fails are instructive. Williamson argues from a claim about the semantics of intuitive judgements, to a claim about their psychological underpinnings, to the denial of rationalism. (...) I argue that the psychological claim — that a capacity for mental simulation explains our intuitive judgements — does not, even if true, provide reasons to reject rationalism. (More generally, a simulation hypothesis, about any category of judgements, is very limited in its epistemological implications: it is pitched at a level of explanation that is insensitive to central epistemic distinctions.) I also argue that Williamson’s semantic claim — that intuitive judgements are judgements of counterfactuals — is mistaken; rather, I propose, they are a certain kind of metaphysical possibility judgement. Several other competing proposals are also examined and criticized. (shrink)

This paper deals with the semantic issues of epistemological contextualism - the doctrine according to which the truth-conditions of knowledge ascribing sentences vary depending on the context in which they are uttered. According to the contextualist, a sentence of the form "S knows that p" does not express a complete proposition. Different utterances of this same sentence, in different contexts of utterance, can express different propositions: "know" is context-dependent. Little attention has been paid to a precise formulation of the semantic (...) contextualist thesis grounding epistemological contextualism. My goal is then to assess differences and similarities between "know" and context-sensitive terms in a natural language – in particular pure indexicals and demonstratives: my remarks are a strong argument against the postulation of an indexical element in ascriptions of propositional knowledge. (shrink)

Hong Oak Yun is a person who is over three inches tall. And now you know who Hong Oak Yun is. For if someone were to ask you ‘Who is Hong Oak Yun?’, you could answer that Hong Oak Yun is a person who is over three inches tall, and you would know what you were saying. So you know an answer to the question ‘Who is Hong Oak Yun?’, and that is sufficient for knowing who Hong Oak Yun is. (...) Getting to know who a person is may be easier than you think. (shrink)

_If you were free in doing something and morally responsible for it, you could have done otherwise. That_ _has seemed a pretty firm proposition among the old, new, clear, unclear and other propositions in the_ _philosophical discussion of freedom and determinism. If you were free in what you did, there was an_ _alternative. It is also at least natural to think that if determinism is true, you can never do otherwise than_ _you do. G. E. Moore, that Cambridge reasoner in (...) whose shadow Wittgenstein ought to be standing,_ _considered the matter. He pointed out that even if determinism is true, there remains a sense in which you_ _can still do otherwise than you do: you will do otherwise if you so choose. That, on reflection, is consistent_ _with determinism. The doctrine of the compatibility of freedom and determinism is saved. Joseph Keim_ _Campbell, strong philosopher at Washington State University, provides the latest thinking on this seemingly_ _unavoidable dispute. You do not have to agree that either compatibilism or incompatibilism must be true in_ _order to appreciate the carefulness of his reasoning in this piece of ongoing American philosophy. It_ _requires and repays attention._. (shrink)

Contemporary philosophers nearly unanimously endorse knowledge reliabilism, the view that knowledge must be reliably produced. Leading reliabilists have suggested that reliabilism draws support from patterns in ordinary judgments and intuitions about knowledge, luck, reliability, and counterfactuals. That is, they have suggested a proto-reliabilist hypothesis about “commonsense” or “folk” epistemology. This paper reports nine experimental studies (N = 1262) that test the proto-reliabilist hypothesis by testing four of its principal implications. The main findings are that (a) commonsense fully embraces the possibility (...) of unreliable knowledge, (b) knowledge judgments are surprisingly insensitive to information about reliability, (c) “anti-luck” intuitions about knowledge have nothing to do with reliability specifically, and (d) reliabilists have mischaracterized the intuitive counterfactual properties of knowledge and their relation to reliability. When combined with the weakness of existing arguments for reliabilism and the recent emergence of well supported alternative views that predict the widespread existence of unreliable knowledge, the present findings are the final exhibit in a conclusive case for abandoning reliabilism in epistemology. I introduce an alternative theory of knowledge, abilism, which out-performs reliabilism and well explains all the available evidence. (shrink)

This paper offers a novel conversational implicature account of the pragmatic sensitivity of knowledge attributions. Developing an account I first suggested elsewhere and independently proposed by Lutz, this paper explores the idea that the relevant implicatures are generated by a constitutive relationship between believing a proposition and a disposition to treat that proposition as true in practical deliberation. I argue that while this view has a certain advantage over standard implicature accounts of pragmatic sensitivity, it comes with a significant concession (...) to proponents of pragmatic encroachment. On the account offered here, knowledge attributions have locally-pragmatically-sensitive implicatures because they have non-locally-pragmatically-sensitive entailments. The view thus represents a unique and powerful hybrid of these two approaches to the pragmatic sensitivity of knowledge attributions. (shrink)

In recent work on the semantics of ‘knowledge’-attributions, a variety of accounts have been proposed that aim to explain the data about speaker intuitions in familiar cases such as DeRose’s Bank Case or Cohen’s Airport Case by means of pragmatic mechanisms, notably Gricean implicatures. This paper argues that pragmatic explanations of the data regarding ‘knowledge’-attributions are unsuccessful and concludes that in explaining those data we have to resort to accounts that (a) take those data at their semantic face value (Epistemic (...) Contextualism, Subject-Sensitive Invariantism or Epistemic Relativism), or (b) reject them on psychological grounds (Moderate Insensitive Invariantism). To establish this conclusion, the paper relies solely upon widely accepted assumptions about pragmatic theory, broadly construed, and on the Stalnakerian insight that linguistic communication takes place against the backdrop of a set of mutually accepted propositions: a conversation’s common ground. (shrink)

The interest of epistemic comparative conditionals comes from the fact that they represent genuine ‘comparative epistemic relations’ between propositions, situations, evidences, abilities, interests, etc. This paper argues that various types of epistemic comparative conditionals uniformly represent comparative epistemic relations via the comparison of epistemic positions rather than the comparison of epistemic standards. This consequence is considered as a general constraint on a theory of knowledge attribution, and then further used to argue against the contextualist thesis that, in some cases, considering (...) a new counter- possibility can raise the epistemic standard of knowledge attribution. Instead, the paper shows that considering a new counter-possibility can only lower the epistemic position of a putative knower. Moreover, since the comparison, by the nature of conditionals, is free from any commitment to the truth-values of specific knowledge attributions, my conclusion is free from the debate between contextualism and invariantism on whether the truth-value of a knowledge attribution can actually vary with context. (shrink)

It is generally assumed that if it is possible to believe that p without believing that q, then there is some difference between the object of the thought that p and the object of the thought that q. This assumption is challenged in the present paper, opening the way to an account of epistemic opacity that improves on existing accounts, not least because it casts doubt on various arguments that attempt to derive startling ontological conclusions from seemingly innocent epistemic premises.

The epistemological problem of the external world asks: (1) “How is knowledge of the external world possible given certain obstacles which make it look impossible?” This is a “how-possible?” question: it asks how something is possible given certain obstacles which make it look impossible (cf. Cassam 2007; Nozick 1981; Stroud 1984). Now consider the following question, which asks: (2) “How is a philosophically satisfying answer to (1) possible?” Skepticism is the thesis that knowledge of the external world is impossible. It (...) therefore represents a negative answer to the first question. Meta-epistemological skepticism is the thesis that a satisfying philosophical explanation of how our knowledge of the external world is possible is itself impossible. It therefore represents a negative answer to the second question. In this thesis, I explore the prospects of meta-epistemological skepticism. In particular, I structure the thesis around two master arguments from for meta-epistemological skepticism. The first argument is that skepticism represents a kind of paradox which requires dispensing with a plausible principle or belief, or even 'platitude', which means that there's no philosophically satisfying response to the paradox (see, e.g., Stroud 1984), and the second argument is “Stroud’s dilemma” (cf. Cassam 2009), that either we explain how external world knowledge is possible by reference to what external world knowledge we have, thereby failing to answer the philosophical question adequately, or else we don't, but then we succumb to first-order skepticism. I argue that the first argument fails to provide adequate support for meta-epistemological skepticism. However, the second argument, Stroud’s dilemma, is plausible and withstands serious objections (e.g., from Sosa 1994, Williams 1996, and Cassam 2009). In short, while the worry emerging out of the 'skeptical paradox' view fails to adequately support meta-epistemological skepticism, Stroud’s dilemma succeeds. Fortunately, it doesn't show that we lack external world knowledge; we rather just can't explain, philosophically, how it's possible. We may have first-order knowledge without understanding how it's possible. This thesis therefore represents a partial defense of meta-epistemological skepticism. Meta-epistemological skepticism is a live option in epistemology. (shrink)

In Fear of Knowledge, Paul Boghossian presents a series of arguments against epistemic relativism and constructivism, doctrines that he considers to have exerted an overly unjustified influence over the human and social sciences in the past two decades. In the presentation of his arguments, Boghossian charts out a terrain that closely identifies relativism with skepticism. Yet, the relationship between the two does not seem to be a simple matter of entailment or implication. The purpose of this paper is to clarify (...) the landscape surrounding relativism and skepticism and thereby to highlight their difference. The implications of such a clarification will include illustrating that some arguments thought to be against relativism are actually against skepticism, that there are very different ways of understanding the relationship between relativism and skepticism, and that a commitment to either relativism or skepticism does not entail commitment to the other. The overall objective is to show that Boghossian's conception of the terrain is incorrect and to offer an explanation for this pervasive misconception about the connection between relativism and skepticism. (shrink)

What is the proper way to draw the semantics-pragmatics distinction, and is what is said by a speaker ever enriched by pragmatics? An influential but controversial answer to the latter question is that the inputs to semantic interpretation contains representations of every contribution from context that is relevant to determining what is said, and that pragmatics never enriches the output of semantic interpretation. The proposal is bolstered by a controversial argument from syntactic binding designed to detect hidden syntactic structure. The (...) following contains an exposition and consideration of the argument. (shrink)

Knowledge is important for us, human beings, for a variety of reasons, starting with trivial but necessary reasons to live your life. Western man also has a collective project that is constitutive of its culture: science; and the aim of science is to gather knowledge about the world in its broadest meaning: from the origin of a particular disease to the origin of man, life, planet Earth and the universe, from why the orbits move as they do to why a (...) mass of people behaves differently from individuals, from why the sky is blue to why the sea is salty, from why the climate seems to change to why rainbows appear, etc. etc. The quest to understand what knowledge is, is as old as philosophy itself, and the philosophy o. (shrink)

From an indeterminist's perspective, I support and defined the following argument for deontic incompatibilism: If determinism is true, then no one ever can do otherwise than he does. If no one ever can do otherwise than he does, then nothing anyone does is ever right, wrong, or obligatory. Therefore, if determinism is true, then nothing anyone does is ever right, wrong, or obligatory. ;They sense of 'can' I use in this argument is what I call "the power-'can' of ordinary language." (...) The power-'can' has two time indexes; one applies to the power itself, the other to the relevant doing. I argue that the power-'can' is a sense of 'can' with which the "ought implies can" principle holds true. ;I review and respond to various accounts of 'can' proposed by compatibilists Bruce Aune, Keith Lehrer, David Lewis, G. E. Moore and others. Elsewhere I discuss writings by Peter van Inwagen and J. L. Austin. ;To support , I utilize, argue for, and show the advantages of the Temporal Physical Possibility Requirements: If an agent, S, can at time T do A at time T$\sp\prime$, then S's doing A at $T\sp\prime$ is jointly possible with the conjunction of the state of the world at T and the laws of nature. When arguing for these requirements, I focus on how most people use the power-'can' and how they would use it in various situations. I present and respond to objections to my arguments. Most of the objections are based on certain strong forms of contextualism. ;I argue for and defend my premises against various objections. One objection is based on a form of utilitarianism advocated by Fred Feldman. Other objections are based on an example by Harry Frankfurt concerning moral responsibility. ;Two arguments against are presented and I respond. They are developed from a suggestion by John Martin Fischer that people would continue making deontic claims if a consortium of scientists were to find strong evidence of determinism. (shrink)