One prominent argument for pragmatic encroachment (PE) is that PE is entailed by a combination of a principle that states that knowledge warrants proper practical reasoning, and judgments that it is more difficult to reason well when the stakes go up. I argue here that this argument is unsuccessful. One problem is that empirical tests concerning knowledge judgments in high-stakes situations only sometimes exhibit the result predicted by PE. I argue here that those judgments that appear to support PE are (...) better interpreted not as judgments that the epistemic demands for knowing increase as one’s practical situation becomes more demanding, but instead as judgments reflecting a different kind of normative epistemic evaluation, namely whether one is acting in an epistemically responsible way. The general idea is that when someone treats a proposition as a reason for acting we can evaluate them epistemically both in terms of whether they know that proposition, as well as in terms of whether they are acting on their knowledge in the right kind of way. My charge against the PE proponent, then, is that she is interpreting judgments that are indicative of whether we are adhering to certain normative epistemic requirements generally as being indicative of whether we have knowledge specifically. There are, however, normative epistemic requirements that make demands of us that are indicative of something other than our possession of knowledge. (shrink)

Lately, there has been an explosion of literature exploring the the relationship between one’s practical situation and one’s knowledge. Some involved in this discussion have suggested that facts about a person’s practical situation might affect whether or not a person knows in that situation, holding fixed all the things standardly associated with knowledge (like evidence, the reliability of one’s cognitive faculties, and so on). According to these “pragmatic encroachment” views, then, one’s practical situation encroaches on one’s knowledge. Though we won’t (...) endorse pragmatic encroachment here, we find the view intriguing, and it’s popularity warrants carefully considering it’s implications. One potential avenue of exploration concerns religious epistemology, in particular, whether pragmatic encroachment has consequences concerning the epistemic requirements of atheism. We begin the journey down that avenue by connecting Pascal’s Wager to pragmatic encroachment in order to defend this conditional: If there is pragmatic encroachment, then it is ceteris paribus more difficult to know that atheism is true (if it is) than it is to know that God exists (if God does exist). (shrink)

I consider but reject one broad strategy for answering the threshold problem for fallibilist accounts of knowledge, namely what fixes the degree of probability required for one to know? According to the impurist strategy to be considered, the required degree of probability is fixed by one's practical reasoning situation. I distinguish two different ways to implement the suggested impurist strategy. According to the Relevance Approach, the threshold for a subject to know a proposition at a time is determined by the (...) practical reasoning situations she is then in to which that particular proposition is relevant. According to the Unity Approach, the threshold for a subject to know any proposition whatsoever at a time is determined by a privileged practical reasoning situation she then faces, most plausibly the highest stakes practical reasoning situation she is then in. I argue that neither way of implementing the impurist strategy succeeds and so impurism does not offer a satisfactory response to the threshold problem. (shrink)

This paper argues that just as full beliefs can constitute knowledge, so can properties of your credence distribution. The resulting notion of probabilistic knowledge helps us give a natural account of knowledge ascriptions embedding language of subjective uncertainty, and a simple diagnosis of probabilistic analogs of Gettier cases. Just like propositional knowledge, probabilistic knowledge is factive, safe, and sensitive. And it helps us build knowledge-based norms of action without accepting implausible semantic assumptions or endorsing the claim that knowledge is interest-relative.

Traditional procedures for rational updating fail when it comes to self-locating opinions, such as your credences about where you are and what time it is. This paper develops an updating procedure for rational agents with self-locating beliefs. In short, I argue that rational updating can be factored into two steps. The first step uses information you recall from your previous self to form a hypothetical credence distribution, and the second step changes this hypothetical distribution to reflect information you have genuinely (...) learned as time has passed. While the second step resembles traditional procedures of updating by conditionalization, the first is best understood by analogy to traditional models of how agents transmit self-locating opinions through ordinary interpersonal communication. (shrink)

This paper defends a version of epistemic contextualism that accounts for the ordinary judgements and theoretical principles that motivate pragmatic encroachment. Adopting this contextualist view, we can avoid the counterintuitive consequences of pragmatic encroachment, while still preserving its attractive applications.

This book takes purism about knowledge as the default position and defends it from the challenges of pragmatic encroachment. The book is divided into two parts, a negative and a positive one. The negative part critically examines existing purist strategies in response to pragmatic encroachment. The positive part provides a new theory of how practical factors can systematically influence our confidence and explores some implications of such influence.

In Probabilistic Knowledge Sarah Moss proposes that our credences and subjective probability judgments (SPJs) can constitute knowledge. Mossean probabilistic knowledge is grounded in probabilistic beliefs that are justified, true, and unGettiered. In this paper I aim to address and solve two challenges that arise in the vicinity of the factivity condition for probabilistic knowledge: the factivity challenge and the challenge from probabilistic arguments from ignorance (probabilistic AIs). I argue that while Moss's deflationary solution to the factivity challenge formally works, it (...) leaves us ill-equipped to handle probabilistic AIs. An account of probabilistic knowledge that cannot overcome probabilistic AIs makes knowledge of thoroughly probabilistic contents a rare and unstable phenomenon, at best, or, at worst, impossible. I hold that establishing a metaphysically enriched account of probabilistic truth is therefore mandatory. I go on to develop a truth-conditional approach on probabilistic factivity that is relativistic in its nature and centers on objective chances. I show that while the approach is still compatible with Moss's overall semantics for probabilistic knowledge, it provides us with a simple but forceful answer to probabilistic AIs. (shrink)

This paper contributes to the recent explosion of literature on the epistemological role of emotions and other affective states by defending two claims. First, affective states might do more than position us to receive evidence or function as evidence. Affective states might be thought to appraise evidence, in the sense that affective states influence what doxastic state is rational for someone given a body of evidence. The second claim is that affective evidentialism, the view that affective states function rationally in (...) this way, is not just possible but plausible and fruitful. We offer two arguments in favor of affective evidentialism. (shrink)

There are two central kinds of epistemological mistakes: believing things you shouldn’t, and failing to believe things that you should. The knowledge-first program offers a canonical explanation for the former: if you believe something without knowing it, you violate the norm to believe only that which you know. But the explanation does not extend in any plausible way to a story about what’s wrong with suspending judgment when one ought to believe. In this paper I explore prospects for a knowledge-centering (...) account of positive epistemic norms that describe epistemic duties to believe. (shrink)

You reach for the bowl with ‘sugar’ written on it only to discover, from the bad taste of your coffee, that it contained salt. Mundane experiences like these show that epistemic justification does not necessarily hold stable across possible changes of information. One can be justified in believing a proposition at a certain time (that the bowl contains sugar) and cease to be justified at a later time, as one enlarges one’s epistemic perspective (as one drinks a salty coffee). When (...) this happens, one’s justification has been defeated. An epistemic defeater, broadly speaking, is that in terms of which the defeat of justification proceeds. The notion of an epistemic defeater is mostly associated with J. Pollock’s work on reasoning and inference. Pollock has provided the canonical definition of an epistemic defeater and proposed an influential taxonomy in terms of the way different types of defeaters induce their characteristic effects. The notion of an epistemic defeater has acquired a broader meaning in current epistemology, and several distinctions have been introduced that have contributed to a more nuanced understanding of the phenomenon of defeat as well as to complement Pollock’s original taxonomy. The correlated notion of a propositional defeater, defined in terms of would-be defeat of justification, is appealed to by the proponents of the defeasibility theory in the parallel debate about knowledge to explain what prevents a justified true belief from constituting knowledge in Gettier cases. (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 notion of relevance plays a role in many accounts of knowledge and knowledge ascription. Although use of the notion is well-motivated, theorists struggle to codify relevance. A reasonable person standard of relevance addresses this codification problem, and provides an objective and flexible standard of relevance; however, treating relevance as reasonableness seems to allow practical factors to determine whether one has knowledge or not—so-called “pragmatic encroachment.” I argue that a fuller understanding of reasonableness and of the role of practical factors (...) in the acquisition of knowledge lets us avoid pragmatic encroachment. (shrink)

This paper defends an account of full belief, including an account of its relationship to credence. Along the way, I address several familiar and difficult questions about belief. Does fully believing a proposition require having maximal confidence in it? Are rational beliefs closed under entailment, or does the preface paradox show that rational agents can believe inconsistent propositions? Does whether you believe a proposition depend partly on your practical interests? My account of belief resolves the tension between conflicting answers to (...) these questions that have been defended in the literature. In addition, my account complements fruitful probabilistic theories of assertion and knowledge. (shrink)

This paper develops a precise understanding of the thesis of moral encroachment, which states that the epistemic status of an opinion can depend on its moral features. In addition, I raise objections to existing accounts of moral encroachment. For instance, many accounts fail to give sufficient attention to moral encroachment on credences. Also, many accounts focus on moral features that fail to support standard analogies between pragmatic and moral encroachment. Throughout the paper, I discuss racial profiling as a case study, (...) arguing that moral encroachment can help us identify one respect in which racial profiling is epistemically problematic. (shrink)

I provide an opinionated overview of the literature on the relationship of contextualism to knowledge norms for action, assertion, and belief. I point out that contextualists about ‘knows’ are precluded from accepting the simplest versions of knowledge norms; they must, if they are to accept knowledge norms at all, accept “relativized” versions of them. I survey arguments from knowledge norms both for and against contextualism, tentatively concluding that commitment to knowledge norms does not conclusively win the day either for contextualism (...) or for its rivals. But I also suggest that an antecedent commitment to contextualism about normative terms may provide grounds for suspicion about knowledge norms, and a debunking explanation of some of the data offered in favor of such norms. (shrink)

Epistemology orthodoxy is a purist one in the sense that it separates out the epistemic from the practical. What counts as evidence is independent of what we care about. Which beliefs count as justified and which count as knowledge are independent of our practical concerns. In recent years, many epistemologists have abandoned such purist views and embraced varying degrees of pragmatic encroachment on the epistemic. I survey a variety of these views and explore the main arguments that proponents of pragmatic (...) encroachment have offered in addition to the main criticisms of the pragmatic approach. (shrink)

This paper argues that several leading theories of subjunctive conditionals are incompatible with ordinary intuitions about what credences we ought to have in subjunctive conditionals. In short, our theory of subjunctives should intuitively display semantic humility, i.e. our semantic theory should deliver the truth conditions of sentences without pronouncing on whether those conditions actually obtain. In addition to describing intuitions about subjunctive conditionals, I argue that we can derive these ordinary intuitions from justified premises, and I answer a possible worry (...) for my derivation by refuting a subjunctive triviality result modeled on (Lewis 1976). I conclude that the debate over the correct theory of subjunctive conditionals requires settling meta-philosophical questions about the relative value of various virtues of first-order theories of subjunctive conditionals. (shrink)

In this paper I survey some recent developments in experimental philosophy and discuss their bearing on two leading theories in epistemology: Contextualism and Interest Relative Invariantism. In the first part of the paper, I survey some general issues of how experimental philosophy may be relevant to assessing contextualism and IRI. In the second part, I discuss and critique some of the recent experimental work.

In discussions of whether and how pragmatic considerations can make a difference to what one ought to believe, two sets of cases feature. The first set, which dominates the debate about pragmatic reasons for belief, is exemplified by cases of being financially bribed to believe (or withhold from believing) something. The second set, which dominates the debate about pragmatic encroachment on epistemic justification, is exemplified by cases where acting on a belief rashly risks some disastrous outcome if the belief turns (...) out to be false. Call those who think that pragmatic considerations make a difference to what one ought to believe in the second kind of case, but not in the first, ‘moderate pragmatists’. Many philosophers – in particular, most advocates of pragmatic and moral encroachment – are moderate pragmatists. But moderate pragmatists owe us an explanation of exactly why the second kind of pragmatic consideration makes a difference, but the first kind doesn’t. I argue that the most promising of these explanations all fail: they are either theoretically undermotivated, or get key cases wrong, or both. Moderate pragmatism may be an unstable stopping point between a more extreme pragmatism, on one hand, and an uncompromising anti-pragmatism on the other. (shrink)

This paper examines the prospects of a prima facie attractive response to Fantl and McGrath’s argument for pragmatic encroachment. The response concedes that if one knows a proposition to be true then that proposition is warranted enough for one to have it as a reason for action. But it denies pragmatic encroachment, insofar as it denies that whether one knows a proposition to be true can vary with the practical stakes, holding fixed strength of warrant. This paper explores two ways (...) to allow knowledge-reason links without pragmatic encroachment, both of which appeal to defeat. The first appeals to defeaters of reasons. If you know the bank is open tomorrow, what you know is available as a reason, but it may be defeated by considerations concerning the stakes. The second appeals to defeaters which do not defeat reasons but which nonetheless do something similar: they make the action recommended by those reasons vicious. In a high stakes case performing the “risky” action would be vicious even if it is justified in the sense of being supported by undefeated reasons. What is defeated is a virtue-based epistemic status rather than reasons or justification. I argue that neither proposal halts the march from a knowledge-reason link to pragmatic encroachment. (shrink)

In this paper, I criticise one main strategy for supporting anti-intellectualism, the view that whether a subject knows may depend on the stakes. This strategy appeals to difficulties with developing contextualist and pragmatic treatments of the shiftiness of our talk about knowledge to motivate anti-intellectualism. I criticise this strategy by drawing an analogy between debates about causation and knowledge. In each case, talk about a phenomenon is shifty and contextualist and pragmatic explanations of the shifty talk face the same objections. (...) However, in the case of causation it would be implausible to argue that difficulties with the relevant contextualist and pragmatic accounts motivate a revisionary metaphysics of causation. I conclude that the defender of anti-intellectualism needs to employ a different strategy to defend her view. (shrink)

This paper uses some modest claims about knowledge to identify a significant problem for contemporary American trial procedure. First, suppose that legal proof requires knowledge. In particular, suppose that the defendant in a jury trial is proven guilty only if the jury knows that the defendant is guilty. Second, suppose that knowledge is subject to pragmatic encroachment. In particular, whether the jury knows the defendant is guilty depends on what’s at stake in their decision to convict, including the consequences that (...) the defendant may face if convicted. Then in order to know whether a defendant has been proven guilty, jurors may need to know something about the potential consequences of conviction. But in nearly every American criminal trial, this information is withheld from jurors. -/- In §1, I lay out the philosophical premises of my argument. In §2, I say more about why these premises present a problem for American trial procedure, and I identify social and political structures that exacerbate the problem. I describe the reasoning that has led courts to withhold sentencing information from jurors, and I diagnose the flaw in this reasoning. In §3, I expand my initial argument, strengthening its conclusions and offering alternative sets of premises that still entail them. I argue that the legal ramifications of pragmatic encroachment depend on highly controversial questions in epistemology, questions about the precise nature of practical stakes. In §4, I propose strategies for legal reform. (shrink)

I consider but reject one broad strategy for answering the threshold problem for fallibilist accounts of knowledge, namely what fixes the degree of probability required for one to know? According to the impurist strategy to be considered, the required degree of probability is fixed by one's practical reasoning situation. I distinguish two different ways to implement the suggested impurist strategy. According to the Relevance Approach, the threshold for a subject to know a proposition at a time is determined by the (...) practical reasoning situations she is then in to which that particular proposition is relevant. According to the Unity Approach, the threshold for a subject to know any proposition whatsoever at a time is determined by a privileged practical reasoning situation she then faces, most plausibly the highest stakes practical reasoning situation she is then in. I argue that neither way of implementing the impurist strategy succeeds and so impurism does not offer a satisfactory response to the threshold problem. (shrink)

I distinguish two different kinds of practical stakes associated with propositions. The W-stakes track what is at stake with respect to whether the proposition is true or false. The A-stakes track what is at stake with respect to whether an agent believes the proposition. This poses a dilemma for those who claim that whether a proposition is known can depend on the stakes associated with it. Only the W-stakes reading of this view preserves intuitions about knowledge-attributions, but only the A-stakes (...) reading preserves the putative link between knowledge and practical reasoning that has motivated it. (shrink)