Knowledge and its Limits presents a systematic new conception of knowledge as a kind of mental stage sensitive to the knower's environment. It makes a major contribution to the debate between externalist and internalist philosophies of mind, and breaks radically with the epistemological tradition of analyzing knowledge in terms of true belief. The theory casts new light on such philosophical problems as scepticism, evidence, probability and assertion, realism and anti-realism, and the limits of what can be known. The arguments are (...) illustrated by rigorous models based on epistemic logic and probability theory. The result is a new way of doing epistemology and a notable contribution to the philosophy of mind. (shrink)

If people believe that one activity is a kind of another, they also tend to believe that the second activity is a part of the first. For example, they assert that deciding is a kind of thinking and that thinking is a part of deciding. C. Fellbaum and G. A. Miller's (see record 1991-03356-001) explanation for this phenomenon is based on the idea that people interpret part of in the domain of verbs as a type of logical entailment. Their explanation, (...) however, suffers from at least 2 deficiencies. First, it fails to account for parallel effects with nouns (e.g., a contest is a kind of an activity, and an activity is a part of a contest). Second, it contains a flaw that incorrectly predicts many activities to be parts of each other (e.g., coming is part of going and going part of coming). However, a hypothesis L. J. Rips and F. G. Conrad (see record 1989-24843-001) originally proposed for the kind–part reciprocal effect avoids both of these difficulties. (shrink)

A central aspect of people's beliefs about the mind is that mental activities—for example, thinking, reasoning, and problem solving—are interrelated, with some activities being kinds or parts of others. In common-sense psychology, reasoning is a kind of thinking and reasoning is part of problem solving. People's conceptions of these mental kinds and parts can furnish clues to the ordinary meaning of these terms and to the differences between folk and scientific psychology. In this article, we use a new technique for (...) deriving partial orders to analyze subjects' decisions about whether one mental activity is a kind or part of another. The resulting taxonomies and partonomies differ from those of common object categories in exhibiting a converse relation in this domain: One mental activity is a part of another if the second is a kind of the first. The derived taxonomies and partonomies also allow us to predict results from further experiments that examine subjects' memory for these activities, their ratings of the activities' importance, and their judgments about whether there could be "possible minds" that possess some of the activities but not others. (shrink)

This chapter considers the present account to be a sufficient response to the generality problem as an objection that specifically targets reliabilism. It identifies the main challenge for reliabilism in relation to the typing of belief‐forming processes. The chapter focuses on insights in cognitive science in a way that should make this response attractive to practitioners of naturalized epistemology, including Goldman himself. The most stimulating part of Conee and Feldman's attack can charitably be viewed as targeting the notion that the (...) reliabilist concepts of knowledge and justification are sufficiently similar to their folk counterparts. The chapter focuses for simplicity on the reliabilist theory of justification (RJ) and on Conee and Feldman's criticism as targeting the faithfulness of RJ with regard to everyday concept of justification. For the purposes of neutralizing Conee and Feldman's central challenge it was sufficient to give a purely descriptive account of how people type belief‐forming processes. (shrink)

Reliabilism holds that knowledge is true belief reliably caused. Reliabilists should say something about individuating processes; critics deny that the right degree of generality can be specified without arbitrariness. It is argued that this criticism applies as well to processes mentioned in scientific explanations. The gratuitous puzzles created thereby show that the “generality problem” is illusory.

Process-reliabilist analyses of justification and knowledge face the generality problem. Recent discussion of this problem turns on certain untested empirical assumptions that this paper investigates. Three experiments are reported: two are free-naming studies that support the existence of a basic level in the previously unexplored domain of names for belief-forming processes; the third demonstrates that reliability judgments for the basic-level belief-forming process types are very strongly correlated with the corresponding justification and knowledge judgments. I argue that these results lend support (...) to process-reliabilism; I then go on to explore several different ways to make use of them in solutions to the generality problem. (shrink)

Guided by the work of William Alston, Jonathan Adler and Michael Levin propose a solution to the generality problem for reliabilism. In some respects their proposal improves on those we have discussed. We argue that the problem remains unsolved.

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)

A comprehensive introduction to current research on the psychology of concept formation and use.