Pragmatism in semantics is hampered by its proponents' tendency to tie understanding too closely to our mastery of epistemic practice. Both Brandom's inferentialist semantics and the anti-realist semantics championed by Dummett and Tennant amply illustrate this tendency. As a consequence, neither theory can successfully handle cases of the innocuously unknowable in which two sentences, though mutually consistent, nonetheless cannot be known to be true together. On Brandom's account, such sentences are treated as being mutually inconsistent after all. According to both (...) Dummett's and Tennant's version of anti-realist semantics, we cannot know that there are any true sentences of this kind. Neither result is the least acceptable, whence either theory fails. The lesson to be learnt from this failure is that understanding should not be identified with the ability to reach warranted verdicts, but with the ability to think, where thinking is constitutively involved in, but nonetheless distinct from judging. (shrink)

In this précis, I give an overview of the theses advanced and defended in my book Justification as Ignorance.

The knowledge account of assertion construes assertion as subject to constitutive norms. In its standard version, it combines a wide scope obligation not to assert p without knowing p, with narrow scope principles specifying conditions under which it is permissible to assert p, where the notions of obligation and permission are duals and behave uniformly for variable p. It is argued that, given natural assumptions about the logic of ‘ought’, the account proves incoherent. The argument generalizes to accounts that substitute (...) other factive notions for knowledge. A recent non‐standard version of the knowledge account employs proposition‐relative norms and circumvents the problem. However, it still leads to intolerable combinations of verdicts. Again, the problem arises because knowledge is factive, and it generalizes to other factive notions. It is shown that non‐factive accounts face none of the diagnosed difficulties and can do much of the explanatory work that the knowledge account is alleged to do. (shrink)

In a series of recent papers, Crispin Wright has developed and defended an epistemic account of borderline cases which he calls ‘Liberalism’. If Verdict Exclusion is the claim that no polar verdict on borderline cases is knowledgeable, then Liberalism implies the view that Verdict Exclusion is itself nothing we are in a position to know. It is a matter of ongoing discussion what more Liberalism implies. In any case, Wright argues that Liberalism affords the means to account for the intuition (...) that polar verdicts on borderline cases are equally permissible. Here I argue that Liberalism fails to deliver and that an account of borderline cases based on Verdict Exclusion fares much better when it comes to showing that our ordinary practice of reaching verdicts on borderline cases is fully legitimate: all it needs is a reassessment of the nature of the claims such verdicts express. (shrink)

According to Ole Hjortland, Timothy Williamson, Graham Priest, and others, anti-exceptionalism about logic is the view that logic “isn’t special”, but is continuous with the sciences. Logic is revisable, and its truths are neither analytic nor a priori. And logical theories are revised on the same grounds as scientific theories are. What isn’t special, we argue, is anti-exceptionalism about logic. Anti-exceptionalists disagree with one another regarding what logic and, indeed, anti-exceptionalism are, and they are at odds with naturalist philosophers of (...) logic, who may have seemed like natural allies. Moreover, those internal battles concern well-trodden philosophical issues, and there is no hint as to how they are to be resolved on broadly scientific grounds. We close by looking at three of the founders of logic who may have seemed like obvious enemies of anti-exceptionalism—Aristotle, Frege, and Carnap—and conclude that none of their positions is clearly at odds with at least some of the main themes of anti-exceptionalism. We submit that, at least at present, anti-exceptionalism is too vague or underspecified to characterize a coherent conception of logic, one that stands opposed to more traditional approaches. (shrink)

This article raises problems both for the view that safe belief is necessary for knowledge and for the view that it is sufficient. Focusing on ‘meta‐epistemic beliefs,’ or beliefs about the epistemic status of one's own beliefs, it is shown that the necessity claim has counterintuitive implications and that the sufficiency claim implies a contradiction. It is then shown that meta‐epistemic beliefs raise similar problems for a wide range of accounts of knowledge, and hence that they provide a powerful test (...) for theories of knowledge. (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)

Daniel Waxman (2022a) argues that the thesis, recently advanced in Rosenkranz 2021, that one has propositional justification for φ, if and only if one is in no position to rule out that one is in a position to know φ, has clear counter examples. However, Waxman makes controversial assumptions about the notion of being in a position to know that I should and coherently can reject. On the alternative construal of the notion open to me, Waxman’s strategy to produce counterexamples (...) founders. However, this line of response has repercussions for two further theses I defend, viz. that propositional justification and its absence each are luminous. It is shown what more needs to be argued in order to avert a corresponding threat to the latter. (shrink)

Many of our sources of knowledge only afford us knowledge that is inexact. When trying to see how tall something is, or to hear how far away something is, or to remember how long something lasted, we may come to know some facts about the approximate size, distance or duration of the thing in question but we don’t come to know exactly what its size, distance or duration is. In some such situations we also have some pointed knowledge of how (...) inexact our knowledge is. That is, we can knowledgeably pinpoint some exact claims that we do not know. We show that standard models of inexact knowledge leave little or no room for such pointed knowledge. We devise alternative models that are not afflicted by this shortcoming. (shrink)

Why should we avoid incoherence? An influential view tells us that incoherent combinations of attitudes are such that it is impossible for all of those attitudes to be simultaneously vindicated by the evidence. But it is not clear whether this view successfully explains what is wrong with certain akratic doxastic states. In this paper I flesh out an alternative response to that question, one according to which the problem with incoherent combinations of attitudes is that it is impossible for all (...) of those attitudes to be simultaneously knowledgeable. This alternative response explains what is wrong with akratic combinations of attitudes using commonly accepted epistemological theses. The paper still shows how this proposal is able to explain the badness of incoherent combinations involving the absence of attitudes, suspended judgment and credence. These explanations deploy the notions of knowledge and being in a position to know, instead of the notion of responding properly to the evidence. Finally, I suggest that this picture can be generalized to the realm of practical rationality as well. (shrink)

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)

Philip Kitcher has argued against the apriority of mathematical knowledge in a number of places. His arguments rely on a conception of mathematical knowledge as embedded in a historical tradition and the claim that this sort of embedding compromises apriority. In this paper, I argue that tradition dependence of mathematical knowledge does not compromise its apriority. I further identify the factors which appear to lead Kitcher to argue as he does.

Gareth Evans famously affirmed an explanatory connection between answering the question whether p and knowing whether one believes that p. This is commonly interpreted in terms of the idea that judging that p constitutes an adequate basis for the belief that one believes that p. This paper formulates and defends an alternative, more modest interpretation, which develops from the suggestion that one can know that one believes that p in judging that p.

On a widely held view, the canonical way to make sense of intentional actions is to invoke the agent's ‘motivating reasons’, where the claim that X did A for some ‘motivating reason’ is taken to be neutral on whether X had a normative reason to do A. In this paper, I explore a challenge to this view, drawing on Anscombe's ‘second-personal’ approach to the nature of action explanation.

First-person present-tense self-ascriptions of belief are often used to tell others what one believes. But they are also naturally taken to express the belief they ostensibly report. I argue that this second aspect of self-ascriptions of belief holds the key to making the speaker's knowledge of her belief, and so the authority of her act of telling, intelligible. For a basic way to know one's beliefs is to be aware of what one is doing in expressing them. This account suggests (...) that we need to reconsider the terms of the standard alternative between “epistemic” and “non-epistemic” explanations of first-person authority. In particular, the natural view that the authority we accord to self-ascriptions reflects a distinctive way we have of knowing our own beliefs should not be conflated with the traditional epistemological thesis that such knowledge reflects a private “mode of access”. (shrink)

There is converging evidence that over the course of the second year children become good at various fairly sophisticated forms of pro-social activities, such as helping, informing and comforting. Not only are toddlers able to do these things, they appear to do them routinely and almost reliably. A striking feature of these interventions, emphasized in the recent literature, is that they show precocious abilities in two different domains: they reflect complex ‘ theory of mind’ abilities as well as ‘altruistic motivation’. (...) Our aim in this paper is to present a theoretical hypothesis that bears on both kinds of developments. The suggestion is that children’s ‘instrumental helping’ reflects their budding understanding of practical reasons. We can put the basic idea in the familiar terminology of common coding : toddlers conceive of the goals of others’ actions in the same format as the goals of their own actions: in terms of features of their situation that provide us with reasons to act. (shrink)

Commonsense epistemology regards perceptual experience as a distinctive source of knowledge of the world around us, unavailable in ‘blindsight’. This is often interpreted in terms of the idea that perceptual experience, through its representational content, provides us with justifying reasons for beliefs about the world around us. I argue that this analysis distorts the explanatory link between perceptual experience and knowledge, as we ordinarily conceive it. I propose an alternative analysis, on which representational content plays no explanatory role: we make (...) perceptual knowledge intelligible by appeal to experienced objects and features. I also present an account of how the commonsense scheme, thus interpreted, is to be defended: not by tracing the role of experience to its contribution in meeting some general condition on propositional knowledge (such as justification), but by subverting the assumption that it has to be possible to make the role of experience intelligible in terms of some such contribution. (shrink)

According to David Velleman, it is part of the ‘commonsense psychology’ of intentional agency that an agent can know what she will do without relying on evidence, in virtue of intending to do it. My question is how this claim is to be interpreted and defended. I argue that the answer turns on the commonsense conception of calculative practical reasoning, and the link between such reasoning and warranted claims to knowledge. I also consider the implications of this argument for Velleman's (...) project of vindicating the commonsense view by showing it to be consistent with an ‘evidentialist’ epistemology. (shrink)

Is knowledge consistent with literally any credence in the relevant proposition, including credence 0? Of course not. But is credence 0 the only credence in p that entails that you don’t know that p? Knowledge entails belief (most epistemologists think), and it’s impossible to believe that p while having credence 0 in p. Is it true that, for every value of ‘x,’ if it’s impossible to know that p while having credence x in p, this is simply because it’s impossible (...) to believe that p while having credence x in p? If so, is it possible to believe that p while having (say) credence 0.4 in p? These questions aren’t standard epistemological fare, at least in part because many epistemologists think their answers are obvious, but they have unanticipated consequences for epistemology. Let ‘improbabilism’ name the thesis that it’s possible to know that p while having a credence in p below 0.5. Improbabilism will strike many epistemologists as absurd, but careful reflection on these questions reveals that, if improbabilism is false, then all of the most plausible theories of knowledge are also false. Or so I argue in this paper. Since improbabilism is widely rejected by epistemologists (at least implicitly), this paper reveals a tension between all of the most plausible theories of knowledge and a widespread assumption in epistemology. (shrink)

Doxastic involuntarists have paid insufficient attention to two debates in contemporary epistemology: the permissivism debate and the debate over norms of assertion and belief. In combination, these debates highlight a conception of belief on which, if you find yourself in what I will call an ‘equipollent case’ with respect to some proposition p, there will be no reason why you can’t believe p at will. While doxastic involuntarism is virtually epistemological orthodoxy, nothing in the entire stock of objections to belief (...) at will blocks this route to doxastic voluntarism. Against the backdrop of the permissivism debate and the literature on norms of belief and assertion, doxastic involuntarism emerges as an article of faith, not the obvious truth it’s usually purported to be. (shrink)

I argue that coherence is truth-conducive in that coherence implies an increase in the probability of truth. Central to my argument is a certain principle for transitivity in probabilistic support. I then address a question concerning the truth-conduciveness of coherence as it relates to (something else I argue for) the truth-conduciveness of consistency, and consider how the truth-conduciveness of coherence bears on coherentist theories of justification.

An important question in the current debate on the epistemic significance of peer disagreement is whether evidence of evidence is evidence. Fitelson argues that, at least on some renderings of the thesis that evidence of evidence is evidence, there are cases where evidence of evidence is not evidence. I introduce a condition and show that under this condition evidence of evidence is evidence.

The epistemological debate about radical skepticism has focused on whether our beliefs in apparently obvious claims, such as the claim that we have hands, amount to knowledge. Arguably, however, our concept of knowledge is only one of many knowledge-like concepts that there are. If this is correct, it follows that even if our beliefs satisfy our concept of knowledge, there are many other relevantly similar concepts that they fail to satisfy. And this might give us pause. After all, we might (...) wonder: What is so great about the concept of knowledge that we happen to have? Might it be more important, epistemically speaking, to investigate whether our beliefs satisfy some other relevantly similar concept instead? And how should questions such as these even be understood? This paper discusses the epistemological significance of these issues. In particular, a novel skeptical stance called ‘meta-skepticism’ is introduced, which is a kind of skepticism about the idea that some knowledge-like concepts are epistemically more important than others. It suggested that it is unclear whether this form of skepticism can be avoided. (shrink)

Moral disagreement is sometimes thought to pose problems for moral realism because it shows that we cannot achieve knowledge of the moral facts the realists posit. In particular, it is "fundamental" moral disagreement—that is, disagreement that is not due to distorting factors such as ignorance of relevant nonmoral facts, bad reasoning skills, or the like—that is supposed to generate skeptical implications. In this paper, we show that this version of the disagreement challenge is flawed as it stands. The reason is (...) that the epistemic assumptions it requires are incompatible with the possibility of fundamental disagreement. However, we also present an alternative reconstruction of the challenge that avoids the problem. The challenge we present crucially invokes the principle that knowledge requires "adherence". While that requirement is usually not discussed in this context, we argue that it provides a promising explanation of why disagreement sometimes leads to skepticism. (shrink)

Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, Volume 104, Issue 2, Page 434-453, March 2022.

This paper defends a principle I call Equal Treatment, according to which the rationality of a belief is determined in precisely the same way as the rationality of any other state. For example, if wearing a raincoat is rational just in case doing so maximizes expected value, then believing some proposition P is rational just in case doing so maximizes expected value. This contrasts with the popular view that the rationality of belief is determined by evidential support. It also contrasts (...) with the common idea that in the case of belief, there are two different incommensurable senses of rationality, one of which is distinctively epistemic. I present considerations that favor Equal Treatment over these two alternatives, reply to objections, and criticize some arguments for Evidentialism. I also show how Equal Treatment opens the door to a distinctive kind of response to skepticism. (shrink)

A dispositional theory of skill, such as that defended by Stanley and Williamson, might seem promising. Such a theory looks to provide a unified intellectualist account of skill reflecting insights from cognitive science and philosophy. I argue that any theory of the kind fails given that skill is broadly answerable to the will. A person may be characteristically disposed both against the exercise of her skill and against any associated intentional forming of knowledge. Clearly she does not cease thereby to (...) be skilled. I consider four replies, none of which vindicate this kind of theory. (shrink)

La epistemología de la virtud es una de las posiciones más influyentes en la epistemología contemporánea. Según esta, el agente, con sus virtudes o vicios epistémicos, juega un papel central en la evaluación epistémica. El libro Performance Epistemology: Foundations and Applications, de Miguel Ángel Fernández Vargas, ofrece una entrada al corazón de la “epistemología basada en el desempeño”, una de las corrientes más importantes dentro de la epistemología de la virtud. En esta reseña discuto la noción de agencia epistémica y (...) exploro la posibilidad de iluminarla a partir de la noción de reflexión. En la primera sección, a propósito de la propuesta de Reed incluida en el libro, muestro cómo una noción no específica de agencia epistémica resulta teóricamente inconveniente. En la segunda sección muestro, en contra de las objeciones presentadas por Kornblith y Grimm, cómo una noción específica de agencia epistémica en términos de reflexión prueba ser teóricamente valiosa. Estas reflexiones son tan solo algunas de las múltiples discusiones que pueden tener lugar a partir de los textos incluidos en esta extraordinaria compilación. Además de presentar una visión actualizada de la epistemología de la virtud, este libro constituye una contribución sustancial al avance de este programa de investigación dentro de la epistemología. (shrink)

A number of papers have argued in favour of the material account of indicative conditionals, but typically they either concentrate on defending the account from the charge that it has counterintuitive consequences, or else focus on some particular positive argument in favour of the theory. In this paper, I survey the various positive arguments that can be given, presenting simple versions where possible and showing the connections between them. I conclude with some methodological considerations.

Sarah Moss’ thesis that we have probabilistic knowledge is from some perspectives unsurprising and from other perspectives hard to make sense of. The thesis is potentially transformative, but not yet elaborated in sufficient detail for epistemologists. This paper interprets Mossean probabilistic knowledge in a suitably-modified Kripke framework, thus filling in key details. It argues that probabilistic knowledge looks natural and plausible when so interpreted, and shows how the most pressing challenges to the thesis can be overcome. Most importantly, probabilistic knowledge (...) can satisfy factivity in the framework, though we are not forced to accept a specific account of probabilistic “facts”. The framework also reflects Moss’ claim that old-fashioned propositional knowledge is just a limiting case of probabilistic knowledge, and all knowledge is fundamentally probabilistic. Finally, Moss endorses a failure of contraposition: for example, p implies probably p, but not probably p does not imply not p. The framework makes clear the sense in which the valid inferences regarding probably p are as Moss claims. (shrink)

During the past several decades, many epistemologists have argued for and contributed to a paradigm shift according to which knowledge is central to assertion, action, and interaction. This general position stands in sharp contrast to several recently developed accounts regarding specific epistemic contexts. These specific accounts resist applying traditional epistemic norms, including strong knowledge norms, to real-world situations of interest. In particular, I consider recent arguments about the epistemic standards for scientific pronouncements, expert testimony in a political context, and interactive (...) reasoning. I argue, firstly, that knowledge does have a crucial role to play in each case, contrary to appearances. Clarifying the role of knowledge fills gaps in our understanding left open by the existing accounts. Secondly, I show that combining the insights from the knowledge-centric approach and from the more specific accounts provides a new perspective on the open problem of developing an account of knowledge-based decisions. Specifically, I argue that the biggest open problem regarding knowledge-based decisions is not how we respond to uncertainty, but rather how we assess the relevance of our many disparate pieces of knowledge, choosing which to integrate, and how. A strong case emerges for a procedural solution to this part of the problem of how to make knowledge-based decisions. (shrink)

Many philosophers think that we can identify, e.g., a weather expert by checking if she has a track record of making accurate weather predictions but that there isn’t an analogous way for laypeople to verify the judgement of a putative moral expert. The weather is an independent check for weather expertise but there is no independent check for moral expertise, and the only way for laypeople to identify moral experts is to engage in first-order moral reasoning of one’s own. But (...) if one can do that, one would not need to rely on a moral expert in the first place. This paper provides an account of Feedback as an independent check for moral expertise in the form of certain positive and negative changes in the lives of advisees after they started acting in accordance with an advisor’s advice whilst nothing else of significance changed in their lives in that period. Given our folk background theories, and some specific information about the advisee’s situation, Feedback suggests that the advisor’s advice was correct. Laypeople would identify moral experts by inferring that the best explanation of the correctness of the advisor’s advice in a high proportion of cases in which she dispensed advice is that the advisor had moral knowledge. Identifying moral experts in this way involves the use of some moral reasoning of one’s own but it is too elementary to make moral experts redundant. (shrink)

Control of our own beliefs is allegedly required for the truth of epistemic evaluations, such as S ought to believe that p , or S ought to suspend judgment (and so refrain from any belief) whether p . However, we cannot usually believe or refrain from believing at will. I agree with a number of recent authors in thinking that this apparent conflict is to be resolved by distinguishing reasons for believing that give evidence that p from reasons that make (...) it desirable to believe that p whether or not p is true. I argue however that there is a different problem, one that becomes clearer in light of this solution to the first problem. Someone’s approval of our beliefs is at least often a non-evidential reason to believe, and as such cannot change our beliefs. Ought judgments aim to change the world. But ‘ought to believe’ judgments can’t do that by changing the belief, if they don’t give evidence. So I argue that we should instead regard epistemic ought judgments as aimed mainly at influencing assertions that express the belief and other actions based on the belief, in accord with recent philosophical claims that we have epistemic norms for assertion and action. (shrink)

In recent years, many philosophers of religion have turned their attention to the topic of faith. Given the ubiquity of the word “faith” both in and out of religious contexts, many of them have chosen to begin their forays by offering an analysis of faith. But it seems that there are many kinds of faith: religious faith, non‐religious faith, interpersonal faith, and propositional faith, to name a few. In this article, I discuss analyses of faith that have been offered and (...) point out the dimensions along which they differ. (shrink)

Conditionalization governs how to reallocate credence in light of new evidence. One prominent argument in favor of Conditionalization holds that an agent who violates it is vulnerable to a diachronic Dutch book: a series of acceptable bets offered at multiple times that inflict a sure loss. van Fraassen argues that an agent who violates the Principle of Reflection is likewise vulnerable to a diachronic Dutch book. He concludes that agents should conform to both Conditionalization and Reflection. Some authors reply that (...) Reflection is implausible and hence that there must be something wrong with diachronic Dutch book arguments. Other authors try to isolate a principled difference between the Dutch book argument for Conditionalization and the Dutch book argument for Reflection, such that the former argument may succeed even though the latter fails. I pursue a version of this strategy. I contend that, once we properly elucidate the notion of sure loss, non‐reflectors are not vulnerable to a sure loss. An agent who violates Reflection is not thereby subject to a diachronic Dutch book. Appearances to the contrary result from an unmotivated focus upon an overly narrow set of gambling scenarios. (shrink)

Dialectical egalitarianism holds that every asserted proposition requires defence when challenged by an interlocutor. This view apparently generates a vicious 'regress of justifications', since an interlocutor can challenge the premises through which a speaker defends her original assertion, and so on ad infinitum . To halt the regress, dialectical foundationalists such as Adler, Brandom, Leite, and Williams propose that some propositions require no defence in the light of mere requests for justification. I argue that the putative regress is not worrisome (...) and that egalitarianism can handle it quite satisfactorily. I also defend a positive view that combines an anti-foundationalist conception of dialectical interaction with a foundationalist conception of epistemic justification. (shrink)

Lewis proved a Dutch book theorem for Conditionalization. The theorem shows that an agent who follows any credal update rule other than Conditionalization is vulnerable to bets that inflict a sure loss. Lewis’s theorem is tailored to factive formulations of Conditionalization, i.e. formulations on which the conditioning proposition is true. Yet many scientific and philosophical applications of Bayesian decision theory require a non-factive formulation, i.e. a formulation on which the conditioning proposition may be false. I prove a Dutch book theorem (...) tailored to non-factive Conditionalization. I also discuss the theorem’s significance. (shrink)

Alston, Searle, and Williamson advocate the restrictive model of assertion , according to which certain constitutive assertoric norms restrict which propositions one may assert. Sellars and Brandom advocate the dialectical model of assertion , which treats assertion as constituted by its role in the game of giving and asking for reasons. Sellars and Brandom develop a restrictive version of the dialectical model. I explore a non-restrictive version of the dialectical model. On such a view, constitutive assertoric norms constrain how one (...) must react if an interlocutor challenges one's assertion, but they do not constrain what one should assert in the first place. I argue that the non-restrictive dialectical perspective can accommodate various linguistic phenomena commonly taken to support the restrictive model. 1. (shrink)

In this paper it is argued that the buck-passing analysis (BPA) of final value is not a plausible analysis of value and should be abandoned. While considering the influential wrong kind of reason problem and other more recent technical objections, this paper contends that there are broader reasons for giving up on buck-passing. It is argued that the BPA, even if it can respond to the various technical objections, is not an attractive analysis of final value. It is not attractive (...) for two reasons: the first being that the BPA lacks the features typical of successful conceptual analyses and the second being that it is unable to deliver on the advantages that its proponents claim for it. While not offering a knock-down technical refutation of the BPA, this paper aims to show that there is little reason to think that the BPA is correct, and that it should therefore be given up as an analysis of final value. (shrink)

Although recent epistemology has been marked by several prominent disagreements – e.g., between foundationalists and coherentists, internalists and externalists – there has been widespread agreement that some form of fallibilism must be correct. According to a rough formulation of this view, it is possible for a subject to have knowledge even in cases where the justification or grounding for the knowledge is compatible with the subject’s being mistaken. In this paper, I examine the motivation for fallibilism before providing a fully (...) general account of the view. I conclude by looking at the two major difficulties for fallibilism: the Gettier problem and the lottery paradox. (shrink)

The traditional argument for skepticism relies on a comparison between a normal subject and a subject in a skeptical scenario: because there is no relevant difference between them, neither has knowledge. Externalists respond by arguing that there is in fact a relevant difference—the normal subject is properly situated in her environment. I argue, however, that there is another sort of comparison available—one between a normal subject and a subject with a belief that is accidentally true—that makes possible a new argument (...) for skepticism. Unlike the traditional form of skeptical argument, this new argument applies equally well to both internalist and externalist theories of knowledge. (shrink)

Expertise, authority, and testimony refer to aspects of one of the most important elements of communication and cognition. Argumentation theory recognises various forms of what we call the argumentum ad alia pattern, in which speakers appeal to what others have said, including Position to Know scheme, Witness Testimony scheme, Expert Opinion scheme and the classical ad verecundiam. In this paper we show that ad alia involves more than merely an inferential step from what others (a person in position to know, (...) a witness, an expert) have said, and that studying this type of argumentation requires going beyond the argument structure of propositional contents to account for different speech activities. We also demonstrate that using the words of others, attacking what has been said, and reasoning from how others reason constitute a rich repertoire of communication strategies which we need to model in order to be able to analyse them manually and to process them computationally. (shrink)

We present a novel model of individual people, online posts, and media platforms to explain the online spread of epistemically toxic content such as fake news and suggest possible responses. We argue that a combination of technical features, such as the algorithmically curated feed structure, and social features, such as the absence of stable social-epistemic norms of posting and sharing in social media, is largely responsible for the unchecked spread of epistemically toxic content online. Sharing constitutes a distinctive communicative act, (...) governed by a dedicated norm and motivated to a large extent by social identity maintenance. But confusion about this norm and its lack of inherent epistemic checks lead readers to misunderstand posts, attribute excess or insufficient credibility to posts, and allow posters to evade epistemic accountability—all contributing to the spread of epistemically toxic content online. This spread can be effectively addressed if people and platforms add significantly more context to shared posts and platforms nudge people to develop and follow recognized epistemic norms of posting and sharing. (shrink)