This paper explores what happens if we construe evidentialism as a thesis about the metaphysical grounds of justification. According to grounding evidentialism, facts about what a subject is justified in believing are grounded in facts about that subject’s evidence. At first blush, grounding evidentialism appears to enjoy advantages over a more traditional construal of evidentialism as a piece of conceptual analysis. However, appearances are deceiving. I argue that grounding evidentialists are unable to provide a satisfactory story about what grounds the (...) evidential facts, and that this provides good reason to reject grounding evidentialism. (shrink)

Inquiry aims at knowledge. Your inquiry into a question succeeds just in case you come to know the answer. However, combined with a common picture on which misleading evidence can lead knowledge to be lost, this view threatens to recommend a novel form of dogmatism. At least in some cases, individuals who know the answer to a question appear required to avoid evidence bearing on it. In this paper, we’ll aim to do two things. First, we’ll present an argument for (...) this novel form of dogmatism and show that it presents a substantive challenge. Second, we’ll consider a way those who take knowledge to be the aim of inquiry can mount a response. In the course of doing so, we’ll try to get clearer on the normative connections between inquiry, knowledge and evidence gathering. (shrink)

Many philosophers hold that if an agent acts intentionally, she must know what she is doing. Although the scholarly consensus for many years was to reject the thesis in light of presumed counterexamples by Donald Davidson, several scholars have recently argued that attention to aspectual distinctions and the practical nature of this knowledge shows that these counterexamples fail. In this paper I defend a new objection against the thesis, one modelled after Timothy Williamson’s anti-luminosity argument. Since this argument relies on (...) general principles about the nature of knowledge rather than on intuitions about fringe cases, the recent responses that have been given to defuse the force of Davidson’s objection are silent against it. Moreover, the argument suggests that even weaker theses connecting practical entities with knowledge are also false. Recent defenders of the thesis that there is a necessary connection between knowledge and intentional action are motivated by the insight that this connection is non-accidental. I close with a positive proposal to account for the non-accidentality of this link without appeal to necessary connections by drawing an extended analogy between practical and perceptual knowledge. (shrink)

I argue against ‘right reason’ style accounts of how we should manage our beliefs in the face of higher-order evidence. I start from the observation that such views seem to have bad practical consequences when we imagine someone acting on them. I then catalogs ways that Williamson, Weatherson, and Lasonen-Aarnio have tried to block objections based on these consequences; I argue all fail. I then move on to offer my own theoretical picture of a rational ‘should believe,’ and show that, (...) if such a picture is right, it can neatly explain why right reason isn't. I close by arguing that the extent to which anti-luminosity arguments motivate right reason has been overstated; the positive picture developed here, despite rejecting right reason, is nonetheless consistent with luminosity failures. (shrink)

Since its appearance over a decade ago, Timothy Williamson's anti-luminosity argument has come under sustained attack. Defenders of the luminous overwhelmingly object to the argument's use of a certain margin-for-error premise. Williamson himself claims that the premise follows easily from a safety condition on knowledge together with his description of the thought experiment. But luminists argue that this is not so: the margin-for-error premise either requires an implausible interpretation of the safety requirement on knowledge, or it requires other equally implausible (...) assumptions. In this paper I bolster the margin-for-error premise against these attacks by recasting Williamson's own two-part defence, the first part intended to work on the assumption that there is no constitutive connection between the phenomenal and the doxastic, and the second intended to work without this assumption. Pace various luminists, I argue that the appeals to safety needed for Williamson's two-part defence are plausible. I also argue that all that is needed to generate the margin-for-error premise from these safety conditions is an empirical assumption about the kinds of creatures we are: that is, creatures whose beliefs are structured by certain dispositions. By recasting the anti-luminosity argument in this way, we can understand what is really at stake in the debate about luminosity: that is, whether we are luminous. (shrink)

A knowledge-based decision theory faces what has been called the prodigality problem : given that many propositions are assigned probability 1, agents will be inclined to risk everything when betting on propositions which are known. In order to undo probability 1 assignments in high risk situations, the paper develops a theory which systematically connects higher level goods with higher-order knowledge.

The current debate about peer disagreement has so far mainly focused on the question of whether peer disagreements provide genuine counterevidence to which we should respond by revising our credences. By contrast, comparatively little attention has been devoted to the question by which process, if any, such revision should be brought about. The standard assumption is that we update our credences by conditionalizing on the evidence that peer disagreements provide. In this paper, we argue that non-dogmatist views have good reasons (...) to reject conditionalization. Instead, peer disagreements should be understood to call for a revision of our prior conditional probabilities: rather than merely adding to our original evidence, they pose a challenge to the thought that we have properly assessed the probative force of our original evidence. (shrink)

This paper is about Susanna Schellenberg's view on the explanatory role of perceptual experience. I raise a basic question about what the argument for her view might be. Then I develop two new problem cases: one involving “seamless transitions” between perception and hallucination and another involving the graded character of perceptual evidence and justification.

In this paper I will present a puzzle about visual appearance. There are certain necessary constraints on how things can visually appear. The puzzle is about how to explain them. I have no satisfying solution. My main thesis is simply that the puzzle is a puzzle. I will develop the puzzle as it arises for representationalism about experience because it is currently the most popular theory of experience and I think it is along the right lines. However, everyone faces a (...) form of the puzzle, including the naïve realist. In §1 I explain representationalism about experience. In §§2-3 I develop the puzzle and criticize a response due to Ned Block and Jeff Speaks and another response based on a novel form of representationalism (“sensa representationalism”). In §4 I argue that defenders of “perceptual confidence” (Morrison, Munton, my earlier self) face an instance of the puzzle. In §5 I suggest that everyone faces a form of the puzzle. (shrink)

Develops an empirical argument against naive realism-disjunctivism: if naive realists accept "internal dependence", then they cannot explain the evolution of perceptual success. Also presents a puzzle about our knowledge of universals.

The idea that knowledge is conceptually related to practical reasoning is becoming increasingly popular. In defending this idea, philosophers have been relying on a conception of practical reasoning that drastically deviates from one which has been more traditionally advocated in analytic philosophy and which assigns no special role to knowledge. This paper argues that these philosophers have failed to give good reasons for thinking that the conception of practical reasoning they have been assuming is the right one, and that hence (...) they have been rash to conclude that there is a conceptual relation between knowledge and practical reasoning. (shrink)