This book symposium comprises a précis of Nuno Venturinha’s Description of Situations: An Essay in Contextualist Epistemology together with four critical commentaries on different aspects of the book by Marcelo Carvalho, João Vergílio Gallerani Cuter, Marcos Silva and Darlei Dall’Agnol, and the author’s replies.

This article has two main aims. First, it will defend an ‘attitudinal’ account of pleasure, that is, an account of what it is that makes an experience pleasurable for a subject that explains it in terms of a certain kind of de re desire that the subject has towards that experience. Second, in doing so, the article aims to further our understanding of unconscious desires, and of what the subjects of such desires can be. The article begins by introducing two (...) existing accounts of what makes an experience pleasurable. It then offers a diagnosis of a recent objection to attitudinal accounts from Bramble and existing responses from attitudinal theorists, arguing that the two positions are currently at a stalemate. After this, I argue for the possible existence of unknowable and unconscious de re desires, and show how such desires provide the best defence of such ‘attitudinal’ accounts. (shrink)

Several subjects are fully convinced that they are brains in vats whose experiences are hallucinatory. They confront a ‘skeptic’ who raises the possibility that they are not brains in vats who lack and hallucinate hands but ‘brains in skulls’ who have hands and see them. Familiar responses to skepticism are offered in support of the claim that the subjects know they do not have hands. The philosophical significance of this looking-glass approach to skepticism is also discussed. It is suggested that (...) these familiar responses to skepticism do not achieve anything because, if we begin from the assumption that we are brains in vats, we can employ those same responses to skepticism to support the claim that we know we do not have hands. One interlocutor argues that things are not so dismal. The main conversation is framed by a discussion among night watchmen at some sort of skepticism laboratory. (shrink)

Sextus Empiricus offers an underappreciated and under-discussed version of dream-based skepticism. Most philosophers interested in dreams and skepticism focus on the question of how you know you are not currently dreaming. Sextus points out that our waking experiences and dreams often conflict. And, the challenge goes, what reason do you have to trust the one over the other? This question presupposes that dreams and waking experiences are distinguishable. Thus the kinds of responses typically offered against dream-based skepticism do not apply. (...) And if we accept an idea upheld by one camp in the contemporary debate over the epistemology of disagreement, Sextus’ challenge is difficult to answer. A G.E. Moore-inspired response to the problem is also proposed and explored. It is argued that Sextus’ version of the problem reveals a certain limitation in that sort of approach to skeptical problems. (shrink)

Checking is one of the most common compulsive actions performed by patients with Obsessive- compulsive disorder (OCD) (APA, 2013; Abramowitz, McKay, Taylor, 2008). Incessant checking is undeniably problematic from a practical point of view. But what is epistemically wrong with checking again (and again)? The starting assumption for this paper is that establishing what goes wrong when individuals check their stove ten times in a row requires understanding the nature of the doxastic attitude that compulsive re-checkers are in, as they (...) go back to perform another check. Does the re-checker know that the stove is off, and is thus looking for more of what she already has? Or is she an inquirer who repeatedly loses her knowledge and finds herself inquiring again and again into the same question? In this paper I present and discuss what I see as the three main hypotheses currently available on the market, and I suggest a refinement. (shrink)

The aim of this collection is to show how work in the analytic philosophical tradition can shed light on the nature, value, and experience of anxiety. Contrary to widespread assumptions, anxiety is not best understood as a mental disorder, or an intrinsically debilitating state, but rather as an often valuable affective state which heightens our sensitivity to potential threats and challenges. As the contributions in this volume demonstrate, learning about anxiety can be relevant for debates, not only in the philosophy (...) of emotion, but also in epistemology, value theory, and the philosophy of psychopathology. In this introductory article, we also show that there is still much to discover about the relevance that anxiety may have for moral action, self-understanding, and mental health. (shrink)

The DSM‐5 highlights two essential psychological features of anorexia nervosa (AN): recalcitrant fear of gaining weight and body image disturbance. Prominent accounts grant false beliefs about body weight and shape a central role in the explanation of AN behavior. In this article, we propose a stronger emphasis on recalcitrant fear. We show that such fear can explain AN behavior without the intermediary of a false belief, and thus without the associated explanatory burdens and conceptual difficulties. We illustrate how shifting the (...) emphasis from false belief to recalcitrant fear can supplement a number of different non‐doxastic models of AN. (shrink)

I argue that no successful version of Williamson's anti‐luminosity‐argument has yet been presented, even if Srinivasan's further elaboration and defence is taken into account. There is a version invoking a coarse‐grained safety condition and one invoking a fine‐grained safety condition. A crucial step in the former version implicitly relies on the false premise that sufficient similarity is transitive. I show that some natural attempts to resolve this issue fail. Similar problems arise for the fine‐grained version. Moreover, I argue that Srinivasan's (...) defence of the more contentious fine‐grained safety condition is also unsuccessful, again for similar reasons. (shrink)

In this paper I investigate the epistemic implications of a recent theory of religious cognition that draws on predictive coding. The theory argues that certain experiences are heavily shaped by a subject’s prior (religious) beliefs and thereby makes religious believers prone to detect invisible agents. The theory is an update of older theories of religious cognition but departs from them in crucial ways. I will assess the epistemic implications by reformulating existing arguments based on other (older) theories of religious cognition.

Speakers offer testimony. They also hedge. This essay offers an account of how hedging makes a difference to testimony. Two components of testimony are considered: how testimony warrants a hearer's attitude, and how testimony changes a speaker's responsibilities. Starting with a norm-based approach to testimony where hearer's beliefs are prima facie warranted because of social norms and speakers acquire responsibility from these same norms, I argue that hedging alters both components simultaneously. It changes which attitudes a hearer is prima facie (...) warranted in forming in response to testimony, and reduces how much responsibility a speaker undertakes in testifying. A consequence of this account is that speakers who hedge for strategic purposes deprive their hearers of warrant for stronger doxastic attitudes. (shrink)

Epistemology and epistemic logic At first sight, the modern agenda of epistemology has little to do with logic. Topics include different definitions of knowledge, its basic formal properties, debates between externalist and internalist positions, and above all: perennial encounters with sceptics lurking behind every street corner, especially in the US. The entry 'Epistemology' in the Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Klein 1993) and the anthology (Kim and Sosa 2000) give an up-to-date impression of the field. Now, epistemic logic started as a (...) contribution to epistemology, or at least a tool in its modus operandi, with the seminal book Knowledge and Belief (Hintikka's 1962, 2005). Formulas like Ki for "the agent i knows that " Bi for "the agent i believes that " provided logical forms for stating and analyzing philosophical propositions and arguments. And more than that, their model-theoretic semantics in terms of ranges of alternatives provided an appealing extensional way of thinking about what agents know or believe in a given situation. In particular, on Hintikka's view, an agent knows those propositions which are true in all situations compatible with what she knows about the actual world; i.e., her current range of uncertainty. (shrink)

Recent epistemology has seen a striking rise in interest in the notion of normality, including in the analysis of justified belief, defeasible reasoning, and knowledge. In the analysis of knowledge in particular, normality has been used to support modal analyses of knowledge, according to which knowledge is safely true belief. In this paper, I sound a note of caution regarding this proposal. As I will argue, the counterexamples that originally seemed to threaten the safety analysis of knowledge in its more (...) traditional formulations have natural counterparts that continue to threaten the newer, normality-based formulations. Moreover, these reformulated counterexamples seem to exploit structural features of the notion of normality itself, rather than one or another particular conception of normality. (shrink)

Conceptual analysis as traditionally understood can be improved by allowing the use of a certain kind of empirical investigation. The conceptual analysis in which the kind of empirical investigation in question is used can be called “empirical conceptual analysis”. In the present inquiry, I provide a systematic exposition of empirical conceptual analysis, so understood, considering what exactly empirical conceptual analysis is, the different kinds of empirical conceptual analysis, and the main application of the method within philosophy. It can be defined (...) as a method that consists in drawing a conclusion about the semantic application conditions of a predicate on the basis of observation of the manifestations of semantic intuitions. The different kinds of empirical conceptual analysis are distinguished according to the way the manifestations of semantic intuitions are observed. The main application of the method is solving conceptual disputes – situations in which different competent speakers of a language disagree about the semantic application conditions of a predicate from that language, and their disagreement is caused by the fact that they have different semantic intuitions about that predicate. (shrink)

According to a recent view, known as the 'pragmatic encroachment' thesis, an agent’s non-truth-related factors are relevant to the epistemic status of her beliefs. In particular, in addition to truth-related factors, practical factors are said to be relevant to the question whether or not true belief amounts to knowledge. Despite the intuitive appeal of the thesis, however, it is puzzling how practical factors can impact the truth-related factors that ground the epistemic status of one's beliefs. In this paper, I will (...) distinguish between a strong and a weak sense of the way in which practical factors are said to be thus relevant. Their differences are explicated in terms of the nature and the extent to which practical factors are said to impact the epistemic status of one's beliefs. I begin by considering a strong version of the thesis that suggests principles according to which the practical rationality of one's actions is a necessary condition on knowledge and justification. Having noted an inadequacy in the formulation of such principles, the arguments in their support are subsequently stated and criticized. Finally, I identify two modest versions of the thesis of pragmatic encroachment and argue that they, too, fail to explain how practical factors can bear on the epistemic status of one's beliefs. (shrink)

Epistemic reasons are meant to provide justification for beliefs. In this paper, I will be concerned with the requirements that have to be met if reasons are to discharge this function. It is widely recognized, however, that only possessed reasons can justify beliefs and actions. But what are the conditions that have to be satisfied in order for one to possess reasons? I shall begin by motivating a particular condition, namely, the ‘treating’ requirement that has been deemed to be necessary (...) for possessing reasons. In Sect. 1, I explain and criticize some of the existing accounts of the treating requirement for reason-possession. In Sect. 2, I will suggest a dispositional account of reason-possession in which the treating condition features prominently. Section 3 will deal with the some of the consequences of this account for such issues as the structure of epistemic defeat, the immediacy of perceptual justification and logical knowledge. (shrink)

I raise some questions about differentiations between methods, checking methods, and appropriate methods in terms of their modal profiles. Melchior argues that there can be sensitive checking methods which are not safe. I try to show that such methods are epistemically deficient. I introduce restricted sensitivity (RS) and investigate its checking profile. RS with respect to a proposition _p_ requires that we consider more non-p worlds (not just the closest ones) but not those which are irrelevant (outside a sphere of (...) seriously possible worlds). Restrictedly sensitive methods (vacuously sensitive and strongly safe) based on the appropriate type of Bayesian reasoning might be sufficient for some kind of “modest” checking. Melchior defends a uniform account of checking based on insensitivity even in the case of necessary true propositions and he introduces the apparatus of impossible worlds. I argue that an unsatisfactory method for checking a necessary true proposition is a way of reaching a belief in the target proposition (different from the original one) which might easily not have delivered a true one. I also indicate some limitations of the idea that checking (and knowing) is essentially modal in character. (shrink)

I will be concerned with the following question: are there compelling arguments for postulating a distinction between the truth of a statement and the recognition of its truth, when truth is conceived along the lines of a suitable generalization of the intuitionistic idea that it should be characterized as the existence of a proof? I will argue that the distinction is not necessary within the conceptual framework of intuitionism by replying to two arguments to the contrary, one based on the (...) paradox of inference, the other on considerations concerning the content of a statement. (shrink)

In his paper “Explaining Deductive Inference” Prawitz states what he calls «a fundamental problem of logic and the philosophy of logic»: the problem of explaining «Why do certain inferences have the epistemic power to confer evidence on the conclusion when applied to premisses for which there is evidence already?». In this paper I suggest a way of articulating, and partly modifying, the intuitionistic answer to this problem in such a way as to both answer Prawitz’s problem and satisfy a requirement (...) I argue to be crucial for any epistemic theory of the meaning of the logical constants: the requirement that evidence is epistemically transparent. (shrink)

Two proofs are given which show that if some set of truths fall under finitely many concepts (so-called Collectivity), then they all fall under at least one of them even if we do not know which one. Examples are given in which the result seems paradoxical. The first proof crucially involves Moorean propositions while the second is a reconstruction and generalization of a proof due to Humberstone free from any reference to such propositions. We survey a few solution routes including (...) Tennant-style restriction strategies. It is concluded that accepting Collectivity for some set of truths while also denying that any of the involved concepts in isolation capture all of them requires that one of these concepts cannot be closed under conjunction elimination. This is surprising since the paper surveys several applications in which Collectivity and the latter closure condition seemed jointly satisfiable for concepts of actual philosophical interest. (shrink)

I accomplish two things in this paper. First I expose some important limitations of the contemporary literature on the norms of assertion and in the process illuminate a host of new directions and forms that an account of assertional norms might take. Second I leverage those insights to suggest a new account of the relationship between knowledge and assertion, which arguably outperforms the standard knowledge account.

Reliabilism says that knowledge must be produced by reliable abilities. Abilism disagrees and allows that knowledge is produced by unreliable abilities. Previous research strongly supports the conclusion that abilism better describes how knowledge is actually defined in commonsense and science. In this paper, I provide a novel argument that abilism is ethically superior to reliabilism. Whereas reliabilism unethically discriminates against agents by excluding them from knowing, abilism virtuously includes them.

When discussing knowledge, two relations are of interest: justified doxastic accessibility \ , she is in \ ) and justification equivalence \ exactly the same justified beliefs that she has in \ ). Speaking of compatibility with the agent’s justified beliefs is potentially ambiguous: either of the two relations \ or \ can be meant. I discuss the possibility of identifying the relation of epistemic accessibility \ , she is in \ ) with the union of \ and \ . (...) Neither Gettier’s examples nor the ‘fake barn’ cases contradict this identification. However, the proposal leads to justification equivalent scenarios being symmetric with respect to knowledge: we cannot know a true proposition in a scenario if it is false in a justification equivalent scenario. This analysis may appear to render non-trivial knowledge impossible. This conclusion follows if the extra premise is granted that for all relevant true propositions there is a justification equivalent scenario in which the proposition is false. I provide a meaning-theoretic argument against this premise. I conclude by pointing out problems that would ensue from giving up the proposed connection between \ , \ and \ and allowing asymmetry of justification equivalent scenarios relative to knowledge. (shrink)

Keith DeRose defends contextualism: the view that the truth-conditions of knowledge ascriptions vary with the context of the ascriber. Mark Richard has criticised contextualism for being unable to vindicate intuitions about disagreement. To account for these intuitions, DeRose has proposed truth-conditions for “knows” called the Gap view. According to this view, knowledge ascriptions are true iff the epistemic standards of each conversational participant are met, false iff each participant's standards aren't met, and truth-valueless otherwise. An implication of the Gap view (...) is that people with divergent standards can enter conversations and thereby render knowledge claims gappy. We characterise this as a form of trolling. We argue that trolling results in unacceptably counterintuitive implications and that this constitutes a reductio against the Gap view. We also briefly explore the implications of trolling for other contextualist views about “knows,” as well as a broader class of context sensitive expressions. (shrink)

We commonly say that some evidence supports a hypothesis or that some premise evidentially supports a conclusion. Both internalists and externalists attempt to analyze this notion of evidential support, and the primary purpose of this paper is to argue that reliabilist and proper functionalist accounts of this relation fail. Since evidential support is one component of inferential justification, the upshot of this failure is that their accounts of inferential justification also fail. In Sect. 2, I clarify the evidential support relation. (...) In Sects. 3–5, I subject reliabilist and proper functionalist accounts of evidential support to various counterexamples. In Sect. 6, I show that the most promising ways to address these counterexamples aren’t very promising. (shrink)

Perceptual dogmatism holds that if it perceptually seems to S that P, then S thereby has prima facie perceptual justification for P. But suppose Wishful Willy's desire for gold cognitively penetrates his perceptual experience and makes it seem to him that the yellow object is a gold nugget. Intuitively, his desire-penetrated seeming can't provide him with prima facie justification for thinking that the object is gold. If this intuitive response is correct, dogmatists have a problem. But if dogmatists have a (...) problem, you do too (well, most of you anyway). Reliabilists have denounced dogmatism's cognitive penetration problems, but they have problems with cognitive penetration that are even worse. (shrink)

This paper discusses a set of observations, many of which are novel, concerning differences between the adjectival modals _certain_ and _possible_ and their adverbial counterparts _certainly_ and _possibly_. It argues that the observations can be derived from a standard interpretation of _certain_/_certainly_ as universal and _possible_/_possibly_ as existential quantifiers over possible worlds, in conjunction with the hypothesis that the adjectives quantify over knowledge and the adverbs quantify over belief. The claims on which the argument relies include the following: (i) knowledge (...) implies belief, (ii) agents have epistemic access to their belief, (iii) relevance is closed under speakers’ belief, and (iv) commitment is pragmatically inconsistent with explicit denial of belief. (shrink)

Much scientific research is characterized by a high degree of multidisciplinarity and interdependence between the experts. In these cases research may be described as a group activity, and as such analysed in terms of the intentions of the participants. In this paper I apply Bratman's notion of shared intentionality to explain the relations between social and epistemic elements in groups with a truth-oriented common goal. I argue that in truth-oriented activities the disposition to help – which is a constitutive part (...) of Bratman's notion of shared intentionality – takes the form of a commitment not to lie, and that mutual knowledge of this commitment gives the members an entitlement to rely on other members' testimonies. Thus, in truth-oriented group activities, common knowledge of the disposition toward mutual support gives epistemic relevance to cooperation. Scientific research is shaped by the coexistence of social and epistemic elements: social relations influence knowledge attributions, and the epistemic goal of the activity confers a particular character to these relations. (shrink)

Will it rain tomorrow? Will there be a sea battle tomorrow? Will my death be painful? Wondering about the future plays a central role in our cognitive lives. It is integral to our inquiries, our planning, our hopes, and our fears. The aim of this paper is to consider various accounts of future contingents and the implications that they have for wondering about the future. I argue that reflecting on the nature of wondering about the future supports an Ockhamist account (...) of future contingents according to which many of them are true. Alternative accounts which maintain that no future contingents are true, either by claiming that they are all false or by claiming that they are neither true nor false, face difficulties concerning why it is appropriate to wonder about them. Reflecting on wondering in general, and wondering about the future in particular, suggests that in wondering how the future will go, we implicitly assume that there is a determinate fact of the matter. After presenting an attractive account of interrogative attitudes that has been recently proposed by Jane Friedman and outlining some norms governing wondering, I argue that all accounts of future contingents except Ockhamism face difficulties concerning why it is appropriate to wonder about them. (shrink)

It has recently been argued that beliefs formed on the basis of implicit biases pose a challenge for accessibilism, since implicit biases are consciously inaccessible, yet they seem to be relevant to epistemic justification. Recent empirical evidence suggests, however, that while we may typically lack conscious access to the source of implicit attitudes and their impact on our beliefs and behaviour, we do have access to their content. In this paper, I discuss the notion of accessibility required for this argument (...) to work vis-à-vis these empirical results and offer two ways in which the accessibilist could meet the challenge posed by implicit biases. Ultimately both strategies fail, but the way in which they do, I conclude, reveals something general and important about our epistemic obligations and about the intuitions that inform the role of implicit biases in accessibilist justification. (shrink)

A Benacerraf–Field challenge is an argument intended to show that common realist theories of a given domain are untenable: such theories make it impossible to explain how we’ve arrived at the truth in that domain, and insofar as a theory makes our reliability in a domain inexplicable, we must either reject that theory or give up the relevant beliefs. But there’s no consensus about what would count here as a satisfactory explanation of our reliability. It’s sometimes suggested that giving such (...) an explanation would involve showing that our beliefs meet some modal condition, but realists have claimed that this sort of modal interpretation of the challenge deprives it of any force: since the facts in question are metaphysically necessary and so obtain in all possible worlds, it’s trivially easy, even given realism, to show that our beliefs have the relevant modal features. Here I show that this claim is mistaken—what motivates a modal interpretation of the challenge in the first place also motivates an understanding of the relevant features in terms of epistemic possibilities rather than metaphysical possibilities, and there are indeed epistemically possible worlds where the facts in question don’t obtain. (shrink)

Sensitivity has sometimes been thought to be a highly epistemologically significant property, serving as a proxy for a kind of responsiveness to the facts that ensure that the truth of our beliefs isn’t just a lucky coincidence. But it's an imperfect proxy: there are various well-known cases in which sensitivity-based anti-luck conditions return the wrong verdicts. And as a result of these failures, contemporary theorists often dismiss such conditions out of hand. I show here, though, that a sensitivity-based understanding of (...) epistemic luck can be developed that respects what was attractive about sensitivity-based approaches in the first place but that's immune to these failures. (shrink)

Self‐ascriptions of desire seem to differ in their epistemic security. There are easy cases in which a sincere self‐ascription immediately counts as knowledgeable, and there are hard cases in which it is an open question whether an agent actually knows that they have the desire that they take themselves to have. In this paper, I suggest an explanation according to which whether a self‐ascription of desire is easy or hard depends on whether one is familiar with the content of the (...) self‐ascribed desire. (shrink)

The generality problem is commonly seen as one of the most pressing issues for process reliabilism. The generality problem starts with the following question: of all the process types exemplified by a given process token, which type is the relevant one for measuring reliability? Defenders of the generality problem claim that process reliabilists have a burden to produce an informative account of process type relevance. As they argue, without such a successful account, the reasonability of process reliabilism is significantly undermined. (...) One way for the reliabilist to respond is to attempt to construct such a theory of type relevance. But another way of responding is to argue that, if finding an account of type relevance is a burden for the reliabilist, then it is also a burden for everyone else. Thus, the generality problem doesn’t present some unique reason to reject process reliabilism. I call this latter strategy a parrying response. In this essay, I examine the contemporary parrying responses of Michael Bishop and Juan Comesaña, which have both faced recent criticism. I respond to these critics, and argue that parrying responses are far stronger than defenders of the generality problem have appreciated. (shrink)

Responding to Cappelen and Dever’s claim that there is no distinctive role for perspectivality in epistemology, I argue that facts about the outcomes of one’s own reasoning processes may have a different evidential significance than facts about the outcomes of others’.

What goes wrong, from a rational point of view, when an agent’s beliefs change while her evidence remains constant? I canvass a number of answers to this question suggested by recent literature, then identify some desiderata I would like any potential answer to meet. Finally, I suggest that the rational problem results from the undermining of reasoning processes that are necessarily extended in time.

Some philosophers have defended the idea that in cases of all-things-considered misleading higher-order evidence it is rational to take divergent doxastic attitudes to p and E supports p. In a recent paper, Sophie Horowitz has argued that such “Level-Splitting views” are implausible since they violate a rational requirement she calls the Non-Akrasia Constraint. In this paper, I argue that Horowitz’s objection is misguided since it conflates two distinct notions of epistemic rationality.

In this paper I do three things. First, I argue that Stephen Yablo’s influential account of mental causation is susceptible to counterexamples involving what I call disproportional mental causation. Second, I argue that similar counterexamples can be generated for any alternative account of mental causation that is like Yablo’s in that it takes mental states and their physical realizers to causally compete. Third, I show that there are alternative nonreductive approaches to mental causation which reject the idea of causal competition, (...) and which thus are able to allow for disproportional mental causation. This, I argue, is a significant advantage for such noncompetitive accounts. (shrink)

Epistemic nihilism for inquiry is the claim that there are no epistemic norms of inquiry. Epistemic nihilism was once the received stance towards inquiry, and I argue that it should be taken seriously again. My argument is that the same considerations which led us away from epistemic nihilism in the case of belief not only cannot refute epistemic nihilism for inquiry, but in fact may well support it. These include the argument from non-existence that there are no non-epistemic reasons for (...) belief; the linguistic argument that epistemic norms of belief are needed to capture the semantics of ordinary epistemic talk; and the argument from theoretical roles that epistemic norms are needed to play key theoretical roles for rational belief. I conclude by sketching an alternative Gibbardian picture on which norms of inquiry are all-things-considered norms governing action. (shrink)

Putnam’s vat argument is intended to show that I am not a permanently envatted brain. The argument holds promise as a response to vat scepticism, which depends on the claim that I do not know that I am not a permanently envatted brain. However, there is a widespread idea that the vat argument cannot fulfil this promise, because to employ the argument as a response to vat scepticism I would have to make assumptions about the content of the premises and/or (...) conclusion of the argument that beg the question against the sceptic. In this paper, I show that this idea is mistaken. (shrink)

John McDowell has recently changed his line of response to philosophical scepticism about the external world. He now claims to be in a position to use the strategy of transcendental argumentation in order to show the falsity of the sceptic’s misrepresentation of our ordinary epistemic standpoint. Since this transcendental argument begins from a weak and widely shared assumption shared with the sceptic herself the falsity of external world scepticism is now demonstrable even to her. Building on the account of perceptual (...) intentionality defended in the Woodbridge lectures, McDowell argues that the idea of narrow perceptual content is unavailable to anyone, including the sceptic. This argument is assessed by drawing out an analogy with parallel responses to error theories in ethics. (shrink)

A general trend in recent philosophical and empirical work aims to undermine various traditional claims regarding the distinctive nature of self-knowledge. So far, however, this work has not seriously threatened the Cartesian claim that (at least some) self-knowledge is immune to the sort of sceptical problem that seems to afflict our knowledge of the external world. In this paper I carry this trend further by arguing that the Cartesian claim is false. This is done by showing that a familiar sceptical (...) argument that targets my knowledge of the external world can be adapted to target my belief that I exist, along with any of my self-knowledge that I know entails my own existence. Thus, my self-knowledge and my knowledge of the external world are subject to the same sort of sceptical problem. (shrink)

If it works, I can use Putnam’s vat argument to show that I have not always been a brain-in-a-vat. It is widely thought that the vat argument is of no use against closure scepticism – that is, scepticism motivated by arguments that appeal to a closure principle. This is because, even if I can use the vat argument to show that I have not always been a BIV, I cannot use it to show that I was not recently envatted, and (...) it is thought that the claim that I am not justified in thinking that I was not recently envatted is all that the closure sceptic requires. In this paper I first argue that scenarios in which I have been recently envatted are inadequate for the sceptic’s purposes, and so the standard argument that the vat argument is of no use against closure scepticism fails. I then argue that it is not possible to revise the standard argument to meet my objection. I conclude that, if it works, I can use the vat argument as a defence against closure scepticism. (shrink)

Event concepts are unstructured atomic concepts that apply to event types. A paradigm example of such an event type would be that of diaper changing, and so a putative example of an atomic event concept would be DADDY'S-CHANGING-MY-DIAPER.1 I will defend two claims about such concepts. First, the conceptual claim that it is in principle possible to possess a concept such as DADDY'S-CHANGING-MY-DIAPER without possessing the concept DIAPER. Second, the empirical claim that we actually possess such concepts and that they (...) play an important role in our cognitive lives. The argument for the empirical claim has the form of an inference to the best explanation and is aimed at those who are already willing to attribute concepts and beliefs to infants and nonhuman animals. Many animals and prelinguistic infants seem capable of re-identifying event-types in the world, and they seem to store information about things happening at particular times and places. My account offers a plausible model of how such organisms are able to do this without attributing linguistically structured mental states to them. And although language allows adults to form linguistically structured mental representations of the world, there is no good reason to think that such structured representations necessarily replace the unstructured ones. There is also no good reason for a philosopher who is willing to explain the behavior of an organism by appealing to atomic concepts of individuals or kinds to not use a similar form of explanation when explaining the organism's capacity to recognize events. -/- We can form empirical concepts of individuals, kinds, properties, event-types, and states of affairs, among other things, and I assume that such concepts function like what François Recanati calls ‘mental files’ or what Ruth Millikan calls ‘substance concepts’ (Recanati 2012; Millikan 1999, 2000, 2017). To possess such a concept one must have a reliable capacity to re-identify the object in question, but this capacity of re-identification does not fix the reference of the concept. Such concepts allow us to collect and utilize useful information about things that we re-encounter in our environment. We can distinguish between a perception-action system and a perception-belief system, and I will argue that empirical concepts, including atomic event concepts, can play a role in both systems. The perception-action system involves the application of concepts in the service of (often skilled) action. We can think of the concept as a mental file containing motor-plans that can be activated once the individual recognizes that they are in a certain situation. In this way, recognizing something (whether an object or an event) as a token of a type, plays a role in guiding immediate action. The perception-belief system, in contrast, allows for the formation of beliefs that can play a role in deliberation and planning and in the formation of expectations. I distinguish between two particular types of belief which I call where-beliefs and when-beliefs, and I argue that we can model the formation of such perceptual beliefs in nonlinguistic animals and human infants in terms of the formation of a link between an empirical concept and a position on a cognitive map. According to the account offered, seemingly complex beliefs, such as a baby's belief that Daddy changed her diaper in the kitchen earlier, will not be linguistically structured. If we think that prelinguistic infants possess such concepts and are able to form such beliefs, it is likely that adults do too. The ability to form such beliefs does not require the capacity for public language, and we can model them in nonlinguistic terms; thus, we have no good reason to think of such beliefs as propositional attitudes. Of course, we can use sentences to refer to such beliefs, and thus it is possible to think of such beliefs as somehow relations to propositions. But it is not clear to me what is gained by this as we have a perfectly good way to think about the structure of such beliefs that does not involve any appeal to language. (shrink)

Facts about moral disagreement and human evolution have both been said to exclude the possibility of moral knowledge, but the question of how these challenges interact has largely gone unaddressed. The paper aims to present and defend a novel version of the evolutionary “debunking” argument for moral skepticism that appeals to both types of considerations. This argument has several advantages compared to more familiar versions. The standard debunking strategy is to argue that evolutionary accounts of moral beliefs generate skeptical implications (...) because they attribute those beliefs to factors that are unrelated to their truth. That strategy is vulnerable to “third-factor” responses, which invoke first-order moral claims to challenge the assumption that Darwinian factors and the moral truths are really unrelated in that way. In contrast, our version is immune to those responses, as it does not proceed via assumptions about how Darwinian factors relate to the moral facts. Instead, it focuses on what evolutionary accounts of moral beliefs have to say about the fact that people often reach divergent moral beliefs. The argument thereby illustrates how the debunking strategy can join forces with the argument from moral disagreement. The combination of those strategies presents, we think, a challenge that is more formidable than when they are considered separately. (shrink)

This article discusses a puzzle arising from the phenomenon of insight in obsessive–compulsive disorder. “Insight” refers to an awareness or understanding of obsessive thoughts as false or irrational. I argue that a natural and plausible way of characterizing insight in OCD conflicts with several different possible explanations of the epistemic attitude underlying insight‐directed obsessive thought. After laying out the puzzle for five proposed explanations of obsessive thought and then discussing several possible ways that the puzzle might be avoided, I close (...) the article by arguing that we can avoid the puzzle by adopting a new positive view of insight‐directed obsessive thought. (shrink)

There is a long-standing view in epistemology that perception is a way of knowing. There is a less long-standing but increasingly popular view that knowledge attributions have a relativist semantics. I discuss three things here. First, I show that it is a consequence of the logic of RKA that WOK and RKA are incompatible. Second, I argue that, even if WOK is incompatible with the main rivals to RKA, this is not a consequence of the logics of these views. RKA (...) comes with a hitherto unobserved philosophical consequence that its main rivals do not come with. Third, I consider some responses to the effect that it does not matter that RKA comes with this consequence, and argue that they are all unsatisfactory as they stand. I conclude that, at the very least, the onus is placed on relativists to engage with more epistemology than they currently do to show that we do not need to worry about the incompatibility of WOK and RKA. I conclude with some suggestions about the broader relevance and implications of this paper. (shrink)