According to a simple version of the reliability theory of epistemic justification, a belief is justified if and only if the process leading to that belief is reliable. The idea behind this theory is simple and attractive. There are a variety of mental or cognitive processes that result in beliefs. Some of these processes are reliable—they generally yield true beliefs—and the beliefs they produce are justified. Other processes are unreliable and the beliefs they produce are unjustified. So, for example, reliable (...) processes such as perception and memory yield justified beliefs while an unreliable process such as wishful thinking—believing something as a result of wishing that it is true—yields unjustified beliefs. (shrink)

The chapter begins with some general remarks about closure and counter-closure, and is followed with a discussion of the following: I (a) review some (alleged) counterexamples to counter-closure, I then continue by (b) discussing a popular strategy for responding to such counterexamples to counter-closure, and finally I (c) pose a dilemma for this popular strategy. Once I have discussed these three points I conclude the chapter by proposing that we reject counter-closure, but at the same time that we accept an (...) epistemological package that includes closure and another intuitively plausible principle with regards to the psychology and epistemology of deductive inference. (shrink)

Philosophers have debated whether it is possible to knowledgeably infer a conclusion from a false premise. For example, if a fan believes that the actress’s dress is blue, but the dress is actually green, can the fan knowledgeably infer “the dress is not red” from “the dress is blue”? One aspect of this debate concerns what the intuitively correct verdict is about specific cases such as this. Here I report a simple behavioral experiment that helps answer this question. The main (...) finding is that people attribute knowledge in cases where a true conclusion is inferred from a false premise. People did this despite judging that the premise was false and unknown. People also viewed the agent as inferring the conclusion from the premise. In closely matched conditions where the conclusion was false, people did not attribute knowledge of the conclusion. These results support the view that the ordinary knowledge concept includes in its extension cases of knowledge inferred from false premises. (shrink)

A growing number of authors defend putative examples of knowledge from falsehood (KFF), inferential knowledge based in a critical or essential way on false premises, and they argue that KFF has important implications for many areas of epistemology (whether evidence can be false, the Gettier debate, defeasibility theories of knowledge, etc.). I argue, however, that there is no KFF, because in any supposed example either the falsehood does not contribute to the knowledge or the subject lacks knowledge. In particular, I (...) show that if the subject actually has knowledge in putative KFF cases, then there is always a veridical evidential path meeting the basing conditions that accounts for her knowledge; if there is no such path, then the subject is in a type of Gettier case. All the recent arguments that rely on KFF are therefore based on a mistake. (shrink)

Contemporary epistemologists typically define a priori justification as justification that is independent of sense experience. However, sense experience plays at least some role in the production of many paradigm cases of a priori justified belief. This raises the question of when experience is epistemically relevant to the justificatory status of the belief that is based on it. In this paper, I will outline the answers that can be given by the two currently dominant accounts of justification, i.e. evidentialism and reliabilism. (...) While for the evidentialist, experience is epistemically relevant only if it is used as evidence, the reliabilist requires that the reliability of the relevant process depends on the reliability of experiential processes. I will argue that the reliabilist account accommodates our pre-theoretic classifications much better. In the final part of my paper I will use the reliabilist criterion to defend the a priori—a posteriori distinction against recent challenges by Hawthorne and Williamson. (shrink)

This critical study of Sanford Goldberg's Relying on Others focuses on the book's central claim, the extendedness hypothesis, according to which the processes relevant for assessing the reliability of a hearer's testimonial belief include the cognitive processes involved in the production of the testimony.Send article to KindleTo send this article to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon (...) account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about sending to your Kindle. Find out more about sending to your Kindle. Note you can select to send to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be sent to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply. Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.CRITICAL STUDY OF GOLDBERG'S RELYING ON OTHERSVolume 9, Issue 1Mikkel GerkenDOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/epi.2011.6Your Kindle email address Please provide your Kindle [email protected]@kindle.com Available formats PDF Please select a format to send. By using this service, you agree that you will only keep articles for personal use, and will not openly distribute them via Dropbox, Google Drive or other file sharing services. Please confirm that you accept the terms of use. Cancel Send ×Send article to Dropbox To send this article to your Dropbox account, please select one or more formats and confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about sending content to Dropbox. CRITICAL STUDY OF GOLDBERG'S RELYING ON OTHERSVolume 9, Issue 1Mikkel GerkenDOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/epi.2011.6Available formats PDF Please select a format to send. By using this service, you agree that you will only keep articles for personal use, and will not openly distribute them via Dropbox, Google Drive or other file sharing services. Please confirm that you accept the terms of use. Cancel Send ×Send article to Google Drive To send this article to your Google Drive account, please select one or more formats and confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about sending content to Google Drive. CRITICAL STUDY OF GOLDBERG'S RELYING ON OTHERSVolume 9, Issue 1Mikkel GerkenDOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/epi.2011.6Available formats PDF Please select a format to send. By using this service, you agree that you will only keep articles for personal use, and will not openly distribute them via Dropbox, Google Drive or other file sharing services. Please confirm that you accept the terms of use. Cancel Send ×Export citation Request permission. (shrink)

This paper provides a novel argument for granting memory the status of a generative source of justification and knowledge. Memory can produce justified output beliefs and knowledge on the basis of unjustified input beliefs alone. The key to understanding how memory can generate justification and knowledge, memory generativism, is to bear in mind that memory frequently omits part of the stored information. The proposed argument depends on a broadly reliabilist approach to justification.

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)

Does memory only preserve epistemic justification over time, or can memory also generate it? I argue that memory can generate justification based on a certain conception of mnemonic content. According to it, our memories represent themselves as originating on past perceptions of objective facts. If this conception of mnemonic content is correct, what we may believe on the basis of memory always includes something that we were not in a position to believe before we utilised that capacity. For that reason, (...) memory can produce justification for belief through the process of remembering. This is why a subject may be justified in believing a proposition on the basis of memory even if, in the past, she was not justified in believing it through any other source. The resulting picture of memory is a picture wherein the epistemically generative role of memory turns out to be grounded on its intentionally generative role. (shrink)

I examine the claim, made by some authors, that we sometimes acquire knowledge from falsehood. I focus on two representative cases in which a subject S infers a proposition q from a false proposition p. If S knows that q, I argue, S's false belief that p is not essential to S's cognition. S's knowledge is instead due to S's belief that p′, a proposition in the neighbourhood of p that S believes . S thus knows despite her false belief. (...) The widely accepted and plausible principle that inferential knowledge requires known premises is unscathed. (shrink)

Does memory only preserve epistemic justification over time, or can memory also generate it? I argue that memory can generate justification based on a certain conception of mnemonic content. According to it, our memories represent themselves as originating on past perceptions of objective facts. If this conception of mnemonic content is correct, what we may believe on the basis of memory always includes something that we were not in a position to believe before we utilised that capacity. For that reason, (...) memory can produce justification for belief through the process of remembering. This is why a subject may be justified in believing a proposition on the basis of memory even if, in the past, she was not justified in believing it through any other source. The resulting picture of memory is a picture wherein the epistemically generative role of memory turns out to be grounded on its intentionally generative role. (shrink)