ABSTRACTAccording to interest theorists of rights, rights function to protect the right-holder's interests. True. But this leaves a lot unsaid. Most saliently here, it is certainly not the case that every agent who stands to benefit from performance of a duty gets to be a right-holder. For a theory to allow this to be the case—to allow for an explosion of right-holders—would be tantamount to a reductio thereof. So the challenge for interest theorists is to respect the core of the (...) interest theory while delimiting the set of right-holders in a principled manner. The foremost explicit attempt to do this has invoked Bentham's test. Predictably, invocation of this test has come under attack, with the ultimate aim of challenging the interest theory itself. My purpose in this paper is to render Bentham's test as clearly and accurately as possible. Doing so will raise issues of modality—ultimately in rendering Bentham's test's logical form. Ultimately a core attack on Bentham's test falls away, and, to that extent, the interest theory remains standing as a promising theory of rights. (shrink)

Arguably, the original conception of epistemic justification comes from Descartes and Locke, who thought of justification deontologically. Moreover, their deontological conception was especially strict: there are no excuses for unjustified beliefs. Call this the “classical deontologist” conception of justification. As the original conception, we ought to accept it unless proven untenable. Nowadays, however, most have abandoned classical deontologism as precisely that—untenable. It stands accused of requiring doxastic voluntarism and normative transparency. My goal is to rescue classical deontologism from these accusations. (...) I show how, given a specific form of internalism coupled with a plausible theory of epistemic blame, we can be blameworthy for all of our (non-exempt) unjustified beliefs without transparency or voluntarism. The result is that the classical deontological conception of justification should regain its privileged status. (shrink)

Epistemic contradictions are now a well-known and often discussed phenomenon among those who study epistemic modals. These contradictions are expressed by sentences like ‘It is raining and it might not be raining’ whose oddness to the common ear demands an explanation. However, it has turned out to be a rather controversial enterprise to provide such an explanation in a sufficiently precise and general manner. According to pragmatic explanations, epistemic contradictions are semantically consistent but pragmatically defective. According to semantic explanations, one (...) should regard epistemic contradictions as plain semantic inconsistencies. Endorsing such a semantic solution is, however, tantamount to rejecting classical logic, which predicts the consistency of epistemic contradictions. After arguing that all existing solutions to this problem face as yet unmet challenges, I will present a new solution that adequately overcomes these challenges. I will propose to view epistemic contradictions as semantically consistent but epistemically defective sentences. The main thesis emerging will be that we need neither abandon the inference rules of classical logic nor the classical truth-conditional approach to semantics to deal adequately with epistemic contradictions. (shrink)

Various social epistemologists employ what seem to be rather distinct notions of group rationality. In this essay, I offer an account of group rationality that is able to unify the dominant notions present in the literature under a single framework. I argue that if we employ a teleological account of epistemic rationality, and then allow that there are many different epistemic goals that are worth pursuing for various groups and individuals, we can then see how those seemingly divergent understandings of (...) group rationality are all intimately related. I close by showing how the view has the additional benefit of allowing us to generate practical, normative suggestions for groups in the real world. (shrink)

ABSTRACT: In this paper I defend an epistemic value pluralism according to which true belief, justified belief, and knowledge are all fundamental epistemic values. After laying out reasons to reject epistemic value monism in its central forms, I present my pluralist alternative and show how it can adequately explain the greater epistemic value of knowledge over both true belief and justified belief, despite their fundamentality. I conclude with a sketch of how this pluralism might be generalized beyond the epistemic domain (...) to the ethical. (shrink)

Conjoined with the claim that there is a moral right to privacy, each of the major contemporary accounts of privacy implies a duty of ignorance for those against whom the right is held. In this paper I consider and respond to a compelling argument that challenges these accounts (or the claim about a right to privacy) in the light of this implication. A crucial premise of the argument is that we cannot ever be morally obligated to become ignorant of information (...) we currently know. The plausibility of this premise, I suggest, derives from the thought that there are no epistemically ways in which we can cause ourselves to become ignorant of what we already know. Drawing on some recent work in the epistemology and psychology of self-deception and forgetting, I seek to undermine this thought, and thus provide a defense against the challenging argument, by arguing that there are indeed such ways. (shrink)

Many take the possibility of hallucinations to imply that a relationalist account, according to which perceptual experiences are constituted by direct relations to ordinary mind-independent objects, is false. The common reaction among relationalists is to adopt a disjunctivist view that denies that hallucinations have the same nature as perceptual experiences. This paper proposes a non-disjunctivist response to the argument from hallucination by arguing that the alleged empirical and a priori evidence in support of the possibility of hallucinations is inconclusive. A (...) corollary upshot of the article is that whether hallucinations are possible or not is still an open empirical question. (shrink)

If we hold that perceiving is sufficient for knowing, we can raise a powerful objection to dreaming skepticism: Skeptics assume the implausible KK-principle, because they hold that if we don’t know whether we are dreaming or perceiving p, we don’t know whether p. The rejection of the KK-principle thus suggests an anti-skeptical strategy: We can sacrifice some of our self-knowledge—our second-order knowledge—and thereby save our knowledge of the external world. I call this strategy the Self-Knowledge Gambit. I argue that the (...) Self-Knowledge Gambit is not satisfactory, because the dreaming skeptic can avail herself of a normative counterpart to the KK-principle: When we lack second-order knowledge, we should suspend our first-order beliefs and thereby give up any first-order knowledge we might have had. The skeptical challenge is essentially a normative challenge, and one can raise it even if one rejects the KK-Principle. (shrink)

Rejectivism is one of the most influential embodiments of pragmatism within contemporary philosophy of logic, advancing an explanation of the meaning of a logical notion, negation, in terms of the speech act of denial. This paper offers a challenge to rejectivism by proposing that in virtue of explaining negation in terms of denial, the rejectivist ought to be able to explain the concept of contradiction partially in terms of denial. It is argued that any failure to achieve this constitutes an (...) explanatory failure on the part of rejectivism, and reasons are then provided to doubt that the challenge can be successfully met. (shrink)

Intuitions about retractions have been used to motivate truth relativism about certain types of claims. Among these figure epistemic modals, knowledge attributions, or personal taste claims. On MacFarlane’s prominent relativist proposal, sentences like “the ice cream might be in the freezer” or “Pocoyo is funny” are only assigned a truth-value relative to contexts of utterance and contexts of assessment. Retractions play a crucial role in the argument for assessment-relativism. A retraction of a past assertion is supposed to be mandatory whenever (...) the asserted sentence is not true at the context of use and the context of assessment. If retractions were not obligatory in these conditions, there would be no normative difference between assessment-relativism and contextualism. The main goal of this paper is to undermine the claim that retractions reveal this normative difference. To this effect, the paper offers a review of three important objections to the obligatoriness of retractions. Taken together, these objections make a strong case against the alleged support that retractions give to assessment-relativism. The objections are moreover supported by recent experimental results that are also discussed. This will satisfy a further goal, which is to undermine the idea that there is a constitutive retraction rule. The paper also discusses two ways to understand what such a rule would be constitutive of, and concludes with a discussion of how to describe what retractions are. (shrink)

Recent work in the psychology of happiness has led some to conclude that we are unreliable assessors of our lives and that skepticism about whether we are happy is a genuine possibility worth taking very seriously. I argue that such claims, if true, have worrisome implications for procreation. In particular, they show that skepticism about whether many if not most people are well positioned to create persons is a genuine possibility worth taking very seriously. This skeptical worry should not be (...) confused with a related but much stronger version of the argument, which says that all human lives are very bad and not worth starting. I criticize the latter stance, but take seriously the former stance and hope it can be answered in future work. (shrink)

This paper discusses and criticizes Segal’s 1989 argument against singular object-dependent thoughts. His argument aims at showing that object-dependent thoughts are explanatorily redundant. My criticism of Segal’s argument has two parts. First, I appeal to common anti-individualist arguments to the effect that Segal’s type of argument only succeeds in establishing that object-dependent thoughts are explanatorily redundant for those aspects of subjects’ behaviour that do not require reference to external objects. Secondly, Segal’s view on singular thoughts is at odds with his (...) view on the semantics of proper names, which favours the singularity and object-dependency of the truth-conditions of sentences in which they occur. In particular, his views are at odds with a position he holds, that truth-conditional semantics can adequately account for all aspects of speakers’ linguistic competence in the use of proper names. (shrink)

A new definition of lying is gaining traction, according to which you lie only if you say what you know to be false. Drawing inspiration from “New Evil Demon” scenarios, I present a battery of counterexamples against this “Knowledge Account” of lying. Along the way, I comment upon the methodology of conceptual analysis, the moral implications of the Knowledge Account, and its ties with knowledge-first epistemology.

Our interest in understanding belief stems partly from our being creatures who think. However, the term ‘belief’ is used to refer to many states: from the fully conscious rational state that partly constitutes knowledge to the fanciful states of alarm clocks. Which of the many ‘belief’ states must a theory of belief be answerable to? This is the scope question. I begin my answer with a reply to a recent argument that belief is invariably weak, i.e., that the evidential standards (...) that are required for belief are low. Although one state we refer to using the term ‘belief’ fits this profile, other ‘belief’ states do not. Crucially, when ‘belief’ is heard in a weak sense, it attributes a state that only a rational creature can be in. I will use this observation as a starting point for an argument that the study of (our) belief should not be constrained by the requirement that the illuminated state be held in common with any non-rational being. This lends support to the Transformative Theory of Rationality, according to which rationality does not merely add powers or complexity to the animal mind, but transforms it into a different kind of mind altogether. (shrink)

In the First Meditation, the Cartesian meditator temporarily concludes that he cannot know anything, because he cannot discriminate dreaming from waking while he is dreaming. To resist the meditator’s conclusion, one could deploy an asymmetry argument. Following Bernard Williams, one could argue that even if the meditator cannot discriminate dreaming from waking while dreaming, it does not follow that he cannot do it while awake. In general, asymmetry arguments seek to identify an asymmetry between a bad case that is entertained (...) as a ground for doubt and a good case in which one takes oneself to know something. My aim in this paper is to consider how effective asymmetry arguments are as an anti-skeptical strategy. I conclude that although asymmetry arguments provide an effective response to dreaming skepticism, they fail as a response to brains-in-a-vat skepticism. (shrink)

There is a difference between the conditions in which one can felicitously use a ‘must’-claim like and those in which one can use the corresponding claim without the ‘must’, as in 'It must be raining out' versus 'It is raining out. It is difficult to pin down just what this difference amounts to. And it is difficult to account for this difference, since assertions of 'Must p' and assertions of p alone seem to have the same basic goal: namely, communicating (...) that p is true. In this paper I give a new account of the conversational role of ‘must’. I begin by arguing that a ‘must’-claim is felicitous only if there is a shared argument for the proposition it embeds. I then argue that this generalization, which I call Support, can explain the more familiar generalization that ‘must’-claims are felicitous only if the speaker’s evidence for them is in some sense indirect. Finally, I propose a pragmatic derivation of Support as a manner implicature. (shrink)

Mind &Language, Volume 35, Issue 1, Page 115-138, February 2020.

Recent work has argued that belief is weak: the level of rational credence required for belief is relatively low. That literature has contrasted belief with assertion, arguing that the latter requires an epistemic state much stronger than (weak) belief---perhaps knowledge or even certainty. We argue that this is wrong: assertion is just as weak as belief. We first present a variety of new arguments for this, and then show that the standard arguments for stronger norms are not convincing. Finally, we (...) sketch an alternative picture on which the fundamental norm of assertion is to say what you believe, but both belief and assertion are weak. To help make sense of this, we propose that both belief and assertion involve navigating a tradeoff between accuracy and informativity, and so it can makes sense to believe/say something you only have weak evidence for, if it is informative enough. (shrink)

I argue for the view that there are important similarities between knowledge and acting for a normative reason. I interpret acting for a normative reason in terms of Sosa’s notion of an apt performance. Actions that are done for a normative reason are normatively apt actions. They are in accordance with a normative reason because of a competence to act in accordance with normative reasons. I argue that, if Sosa’s account of knowledge as apt belief is correct, this means that (...) acting for a normative reason is in many respects similar to knowledge. In order to strengthen Sosa’s account of knowledge, I propose to supplement it with an appeal to sub-competences. This clarifies how this account can deal with certain Gettier cases, and it helps to understand how exactly acting for a normative reason is similar to apt belief. (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)

Do we insult, offend or slight a speaker when we refuse her testimony? Do we compliment, commend or extol a speaker when we accept her testimony? I argue that the answer to both of these questions is “yes”, but only in some instances, since these respective insults and compliments track the reasons a hearer has for rejecting or accepting testimony. When disbelieving a speaker, a hearer may insult her because she judges the speaker to be either incompetent as a knower (...) or insincere as a teller. However, there are many instances where we reject testimony without making this negative evaluation of the speaker, and as such, without paying her an insult. Testimonial compliments are fewer in number, and are not constitutive of “everyday” testimonial exchanges, since, speakers who are competent as knowers and sincere as tellers are merely behaving correctly in accordance with the norms of testifying. Nevertheless, deferring to an authority on belief can be complimentary to that speaker if by doing so we judge her to have some mastery in a particular domain. Testimonial insults and compliments have important moral implications, particularly with regard to epistemic injustice and therapeutic trust. (shrink)

According to a widely shared generic conception of inferential justification—‘the standard conception’—an agent is inferentially justified in believing that p only if she has antecedently justified beliefs in all the non-redundant premises of a good argument for p. This conception tends to serve as the starting-point in contemporary debates about the nature and scope of inferential justification: as neutral common ground between various competing, more specific, conceptions. But it’s a deeply problematic starting-point. This paper explores three questions that haven’t been (...) given the attention they deserve, that complicate the application of the standard conception to cases, and that reveal it to be underspecified at the core—in ways that aren’t resolved but inherited by more specific (extant) versions of it. The goal isn’t to answer the questions, but to articulate them, explain what turns on them, and invite a critical re-examination of the standard conception. (shrink)

In this paper, I argue against recent modifications of the Knowledge Condition on intentional action that weaken the condition. My contention is that the condition is best understood in the context of Anscombe’s Intention and, when so understood, can be maintained in its strongest form.

We argue against the knowledge rule of assertion, and in favour of integrating the account of assertion more tightly with our best theories of evidence and action. We think that the knowledge rule has an incredible consequence when it comes to practical deliberation, that it can be right for a person to do something that she can't properly assert she can do. We develop some vignettes that show how this is possible, and how odd this consequence is. We then argue (...) that these vignettes point towards alternate rules that tie assertion to sufficient evidence-responsiveness or to proper action. These rules have many of the virtues that are commonly claimed for the knowledge rule, but lack the knowledge rule's problematic consequences when it comes to assertions about what to do. (shrink)

Dutch book and accuracy arguments are used to justify certain rationality constraints on credence functions. Underlying these Dutch book and accuracy arguments are associated theorems, and I show that the interpretation of these theorems can vary along a range of dimensions. Given that the theorems can be interpreted in a variety of different ways, what is the status of the associated arguments? I consider three possibilities: we could aggregate the results of the differently interpreted theorems in some way, and motivate (...) rationality constraints based on this aggregation; we could be permissive, and accept the conclusions of the Dutch book and accuracy arguments under all interpretations of the associated theorems; or we could select one uniquely correct interpretation of the Dutch book or accuracy theorem, and use that to justify certain rationality constraints. I show that each possibility faces problems, and conclude that Dutch book and accuracy theorems cannot be used to justify any principle of rationality. (shrink)

This paper is about the standard Reflection Principle :235–256, 1984) and the Group Reflection Principle :478–502, 2007; Bovens and Rabinowicz in Episteme 8:281–300, 2011; Titelbaum in Quitting certainties: a Bayesian framework modeling degrees of belief, OUP, Oxford, 2012; Hedden in Mind 124:449–491, 2015). I argue that these principles are incomplete as they stand. The key point is that deference is an intensional relation, and so whether you are rationally required to defer to a person at a time can depend on (...) how that person and that time are designated. In this paper I suggest a way of completing the Reflection Principle and Group Reflection Principle, and I argue that so completed these principles are plausible. In particular, they do not fall foul of the Sleeping Beauty case :143–147, 2000), the Cable Guy Paradox :112–119, 2005), Arntzenius’ prisoner cases :356–370, 2003), or the Puzzle of the Hats :281–300, 2011). (shrink)

(No abstract is available for this citation).

Epistemic externalism offers one of the most prominent responses to the sceptical challenge. Externalism has commonly been interpreted as postulating a crucial asymmetry between the actual-world agent and their brain-in-a-vat counterpart: while the actual agent is in a position to know she is not envatted, her biv counterpart is not in a position to know that she is envatted, or in other words, only the former is in a position to know whether or not she is envatted. In this paper, (...) I argue that there is in fact no such asymmetry: assuming epistemic externalism, both the actual world agent and their biv counterpart are in a position to know whether or not they are envatted. After an introduction, I present the main argument. I examine to what extent the argument survives when one accepts additional externalist-friendly commitments: semantic externalism, a sensitivity condition on knowledge, and epistemic contextualism. Finally, I discuss the implications of my conclusion to a variety of debates in epistemology. (shrink)

Emotions seem to be epistemically assessable: fear of an onrushing truck is epistemically justified whereas, mutatis mutandis, fear of a peanut rolling on the floor is not. But there is a difficulty in understanding why emotions are epistemically assessable. It is clear why beliefs, for instance, are epistemically assessable: epistemic assessability is, arguably, assessability with respect to likely truth, and belief is by its nature concerned with truth; truth is, we might say, belief’s “formal object.” Emotions, however, have formal objects (...) different from truth: the formal object of fear is danger, the formal object of indignation is injustice, and so on. Why, then, are emotions epistemically assessable too? Here we make a negative claim and a positive claim. On the negative side, we consider how cognitivist and perceptualist accounts of emotion may respond to this challenge, and argue against those responses. On the positive side, we develop an alternative picture of the domain of the epistemically evaluable, according to which any mental state which is constitutively evidence-responsive is epistemically assessable, regardless of whether its formal object is truth. (shrink)

Analytic epistemologists agree that, whatever else is true of epistemic justification, it is distinct from knowledge. However, if recent work by Jonathan Sutton is correct, this view is deeply mistaken, for according to Sutton justification is knowledge. That is, a subject is justified in believing that p iff he knows that p. Sutton further claims that there is no concept of epistemic justification distinct from knowledge. Since knowledge is factive, a consequence of Sutton’s view is that thereare no false justified (...) beliefs. Following Sutton, I will begin by outlining kinds of beliefs that do not constitute knowledge but that seem to be justified. I will then be in a position to critically evaluate Sutton’s arguments for his position that justification is knowledge, concluding that he fails to establish his bold thesis. In the course of so doing, I will defend the following rule of assertion: (The JBK-rule) One must: assert p only if one has justification to believe that one knows that p. (shrink)

In general, epistemic internalists hold that an individual’s justification for a belief is exhausted by her reflectively accessible reasons for thinking that the contents of her beliefs are true. Applying this to the epistemology of testimony, a hearer’s justification for beliefs acquired through testimony is exhausted by her reflectively accessible reasons to think that the contents of the speaker’s testimony is true. A consequence of internalism is that subjects that are alike with respect to their reflectively accessible reasons are alike (...) with respect to what they have justification to believe. Testimony should be thought no different: hearers that are alike with respect to reflectively accessible reasons to think that a speaker’s testimony is true are alike with respect to their justification for beliefs based upon that testimony. But it has been recently argued that this view faces powerful counterexamples. So the central question is this: assuming that a hearer can acquire justification to believe a proposition through the testimony of a speaker, can epistemic internalism provide the resources to explain how such justification is possible? My aim in this paper is to address these counterexamples, and in so doing, defend epistemic internalist accounts of testimony. (shrink)

In this article I argue that the value of epistemic justification cannot be adequately explained as being instrumental to truth. I intend to show that false belief, which is no means to truth, can nevertheless still be of epistemic value. This in turn will make a good prima facie case that justification is valuable for its own sake. If this is right, we will have also found reason to think that truth value monism is false: assuming that true belief does (...) have value, there is more of final epistemic value than mere true belief. (shrink)

One thing nearly all epistemologists agree upon is that Gettier cases are decisive counterexamples to the tripartite analysis of knowledge; whatever else is true of knowledge, it is not merely belief that is both justified and true. They now agree that knowledge is not justified true belief because this is consistent with there being too much luck present in the cases, and that knowledge excludes such luck. This is to endorse what has become known as the 'anti-luck platitude'. <br /><br (...) />But what if generations of philosophers have been mistaken about this, blinded at least partially by a deeply entrenched professional bias? There has been another, albeit minority, response to Gettier: to deny that the cases are counterexamples at all. <br /><br />Stephen Hetherington, a principal and vocal proponent of this view, advances what he calls the 'Knowing Luckily Proposal'. If Hetherington is correct, this would call for a major re-evaluation and re-orientation of post-Gettier analytic epistemology, since much of it assumes the anti-luck platitude both in elucidating the concept of knowledge, and in the application of such accounts to central philosophical problems. It is therefore imperative that the Knowing Luckily Proposal be considered and evaluated in detail. <br /><br />In this paper I critically assess the Knowing Luckily Proposal. I argue that while it draws our attention to certain important features of knowledge, ultimately it fails, and the anti-luck platitude emerges unscathed. Whatever else is true of knowledge, therefore, it is non-lucky true belief. For a proposition to count as knowledge, we cannot arrive at its truth accidentally or for the wrong reason. (shrink)

Part of the philosophical interest of the topic of organic individuals is that it promises to shed light on a basic and perennial question of philosophical self-understanding, the question what are we? The class of organic individuals seems to be a good place to look for candidates to be the things that we are. However there are, in principle, different ways of locating ourselves within the class of organic individuals; organic individuals occur at both higher and lower mereological levels than (...) the stereotypical bounded and physiologically unified vertebrate organism. The view that we are organic individuals smaller than the physiological organism is one that has recently been endorsed by Derek Parfit. This paper attempts to resolve a dispute between Parfit’s ‘embodied part’ view and a contrary ‘animalist’ view according to which we are whole organisms. It is explained why a problem of multiple thinkers presents a serious obstacle to a straightforward resolution of this dispute. Parfit’s own strategy for dealing with this obstacle is found to be problematic. However his strategy has a certain general shape, which can be instantiated in a different, and better, specific way. I close in the final section, not with a definite resolution of the dispute, but with illustration of how progress on the question of about which organic individuals we are requires engagement with questions about the nature and function of self-awareness. (shrink)

It is widely accepted that knowledge of certain of one’s own mental states is authoritative in being epistemically more secure than knowledge of the mental states of others, and theories of self-knowledge have largely appealed to one or the other of two sources to explain this special epistemic status. The first, ‘detectivist’, position, appeals to an inner perception-like basis, whereas the second, ‘constitutivist’, one, appeals to the view that the special security awarded to certain self-knowledge is a conceptual matter. I (...) argue that there is a fundamental class of cases of authoritative self-knowledge, ones in which subjects are consciously thinking about their current, conscious intentional states, that is best accounted for in terms of a theory that is, broadly speaking, introspectionist and detectivist. The position developed has an intuitive plausibility that has inspired many who work in the Cartesian tradition, and the potential to yield a single treatment of the basis of authoritative self-knowledge for both intentional states and sensation states. (shrink)

There are three different degrees to which we may allow a systematic theory of the world to embrace the idea of relatedness—supposing realism about non-symmetric relations as a background requirement. (First Degree) There are multiple ways in which a non-symmetric relation may apply to the things it relates—for the binary case, aRb ≠ bRa. (Second Degree) Every such relation has a distinct converse—for every R such that aRb there is another relation R* such that bR*a. (Third Degree) Each one of (...) them applies in an order to the things it relates—with regard to the state that results from R's applying to a and b, either R applies to a first and b second, or it applies to b first and a second. Whereas the first degree is near-indubitable, embracing the second or third generates unwholesome consequences. The second degree embodies a commitment to the existence of a superfluity of distinct converses and states to which such relations give rise. The third degree embodies commitment to recherché facts of the matter about how the states that arise from the application of one non-symmetric relation compare to any other. It is argued that accounts that purport to offer an analysis of the first degree generate unwelcome second or third degree consequences. This speaks in favour of our adopting an account of the application of relations that's not an analysis at all, an account that takes the first degree as primitive. (shrink)

Abstract“Absolutely nothing,” say the radical Bayesians. “Simplifying decisions,” say the moderates. “Providing premises in practical reasoning,” say the epistemologists. “Coordinating with others,” say I. It is hard to see how to construct an adequate theory of rational behavior without using a graded notion of belief, such as credence. But once we have credence, what role is left for belief? After surveying some answers to this question, I will explore the idea that belief is in a different line of work altogether. (...) Its job is not to rationalize and explain an agent’s behavior, but to track what the agent would accept as a reason. Although some philosophers have seen the connection between belief and reasons, they have tended to see reasons as part of a theory of rational action. This locates belief in the rationalizing and explaining business, where it must vie with credence. In contrast, I argue that reasons play no essential role in an account of individual rationality; they are important because we need to coordinate with others. Credence and belief thus answer to separate needs. (shrink)

The paper offers a solution to the generality problem for a reliabilist epistemology, by developing an “algorithm and parameters” scheme for type-individuating cognitive processes. Algorithms are detailed procedures for mapping inputs to outputs. Parameters are psychological variables that systematically affect processing. The relevant process type for a given token is given by the complete algorithmic characterization of the token, along with the values of all the causally relevant parameters. The typing that results is far removed from the typings of folk (...) psychology, and from much of the epistemology literature. But it is principled and empirically grounded, and shows good prospects for yielding the desired epistemological verdicts. The paper articulates and elaborates the theory, drawing out some of its consequences. Toward the end, the fleshed-out theory is applied to two important case studies: hallucination and cognitive penetration of perception. (shrink)

According to the principle of Knowledge Counter-Closure , knowledge-yielding single-premise deduction requires a known premise: if S believes q solely on the basis of deduction from p, and S knows q, then S must know p. Although prima facie plausible, widely accepted, and supported by seemingly compelling motivations, KCC has recently been challenged by cases where S arguably knows q solely on the basis of deduction from p, yet p is false or p is true but not known . I (...) explore a view that resolves this tension by abandoning KCC in the light of these challenges, and which acknowledges their force but also their limits. Adopting this view helps identify the epistemic constraints that operate on the premises of knowledge-yielding deduction, clarifies the epistemic role of deduction, and allows us to distil the kernel of truth in the motivations that are standardly taken to support KCC. (shrink)

The principle of Counter-Closure embodies the widespread view that when a proposition is believed solely as the conclusion of single-premise deduction, it can be known only if the premise is also known. I raise a problem for the compatibility of Jason Stanley's Interest-Relative Invariantism (IRI) with Counter-Closure. I explore the landscape of options that might help Stanley resolve this tension and argue that a trilemma confronts Stanley: he must either (i) renounce a key intuition that lies at the foundation of (...) his view; or (ii) admit into his epistemology an IRI-specific novel brand of Gettier case; or (iii) abandon Counter-Closure. (shrink)

Fricker has proposed that a hearer’s knowledge that p acquired through trusting a speaker requires the speaker to know that p, and that therefore testimonial knowledge through trust is necessarily second-hand knowledge. In this paper, I argue that Fricker’s view is problematic for four reasons: firstly, Fricker’s dismissal of a central challenge to the second-handedness of testimonial knowledge is based on a significant misrepresentation of this challenge; secondly, on closer scrutiny an important distinction Fricker wants to draw is compromised by (...) her account of trust; thirdly, Fricker’s conception of trust is at odds with our natural understanding of this notion; fourthly, the reasons Fricker cites in support of her view are not sufficient to single out her view as the correct one, since rival views can also accommodate the relevant data. (shrink)

The goal of this paper is to defend Simple Modest Invariantism (SMI) about knowledge from the threat presented by pragmatic encroachment. Pragmatic encroachment is the view that practical circumstances are relevant in some way to the truth of knowledge ascriptions—and if this is true, it would entail the falsity of SMI. Drawing on Ross and Schroeder’s recent Reasoning Disposition account of belief, I argue that the Reasoning Disposition account, together with Grice’s Maxims, gives us an attractive pragmatic account of the (...) connection between knowledge ascriptions and practical circumstances. This gives us the ability to explain away the data that is supposed to support pragmatic encroachment. Finally, I address three important objections to the view offered by giving a pragmatic account of when it is conversationally appropriate to cancel a conversational implicature, and discussing when sentences with true content can end up sounding false as well as cases where sentences with false content can end up sounding true. (shrink)

In early essays and in more recent work, Fred Dretske argues against the closure of perception, perceptual knowledge, and knowledge itself. In this essay I review his case and suggest that, in a useful sense, perception is closed, and that, while perceptual knowledge is not closed under entailment, perceptually based knowledge is closed, and so is knowledge itself. On my approach, which emphasizes the safe indication account of knowledge, we can both perceive, and know, that sceptical scenarios (such as being (...) a brain in a vat) do not hold. (shrink)

I argue that knowledge can be seen as a quality standard that governs our sharing and storing of information. This standard satisfies certain functional needs, namely it allows us to share and store trustworthy information more easily. I argue that this makes knowledge a social kind, similar in important ways to other social kinds like money. This provides us with a way of talking about knowledge without limiting ourselves to the concept of knowledge. I also outline three ways in which (...) this view of knowledge can shed light on familiar epistemological problems: it can explain why knowledge is the norm of assertion, it can help us carve out the harm associated with testimonial injustice, and it can provide us with a clear analysis of the dangers associated with spreading misinformation. (shrink)

It’s natural to say that when it’s rational for me to φ, I have reasons to φ. That is, there are reasons for φ-ing, and moreover, I have some of them. Mark Schroeder calls this view The Factoring Account of the having reasons relation. He thinks The Factoring Account is false. In this paper, I defend The Factoring Account. Not only do I provide intuitive support for the view, but I also defend it against Schroeder’s criticisms. Moreover, I show that (...) it helps us understand the requirements of substantive rationality, or what we are rationally required to do when responding to reasons. (shrink)

For a long time philosophers have struggled to reach a definition of knowledge that is fully satisfactory from an intuitive standard. However, what could be so fuzzy about the concept of knowledge that it makes our intuitions to not obviously support a single analysis? One particular approach from a naturalistic perspective treats this question from the point of view of the psychology of concepts. According to it, this failure is explained by the structure of our folk concept of knowledge, which (...) organizes its constitutive information in a much looser way than we assume when we rely on intuitive knowledge ascriptions. I will adopt the same starting point here, but argue against the proposed answer and defend the view that this difficulty is explained not by something related to the specific structure of our concept of knowledge but, on the contrary, by its lack of structure. I claim that our folk concept of knowledge should be understood as a primitive mental state concept. (shrink)