The aim of this paper is to sketch a theory of justified belief. What I have in mind is an explanatory theory, one that explains in a general way why certain beliefs are counted as justified and others as unjustified. Unlike some traditional approaches, I do not try to prescribe standards for justification that differ from, or improve upon, our ordinary standards. I merely try to explicate the ordinary standards, which are, I believe, quite different from those of many classical, (...) e. g., ‘Cartesian’, accounts. (shrink)

Reliabilist theories propose to analyse epistemic justification in terms of reliability. This paper argues that if we pay attention to the details of probability theory we find that there is no concept of reliability that can possibly play the role required by reliabilist theories. A distinction is drawn between the general reliability of a process and the single case reliability of an individual belief, And it is argued that neither notion can serve the reliabilist adequately.

It is common in recent epistemology to distinguish different senses, or conceptions, of epistemic justification. The proposed oppositions include the objective/subjective, internalist/externalist, regulative/nonregulative, resource-relative/resource-independent, personal/verific, and deontological/evaluative conceptions of justification. In some of these cases, writers regard both members of the contrasting pair as legitimate; in other cases only one member. In this paper I want to propose another contrasting pair of conceptions of justification, and hold that both are defensible and legitimate. The contrast will then be used to construct (...) a modified version of reliabilism, one which handles certain problem cases more naturally than my previous versions of reliabilism. (shrink)

This paper presents a partial analysis of perceptual knowledge, an analysis that will, I hope, lay a foundation for a general theory of knowing. Like an earlier theory I proposed, the envisaged theory would seek to explicate the concept of knowledge by reference to the causal processes that produce (or sustain) belief. Unlike the earlier theory, however, it would abandon the requirement that a knower's belief that p be causally connected with the fact, or state of affairs, that p.

Since Edmund L. Gettier reminded us recently of a certain important inadequacy of the traditional analysis of "S knows that p," several attempts have been made to correct that analysis. In this paper I shall offer still another analysis (or a sketch of an analysis) of "S knows that p," one which will avert Gettier's problem. My concern will be with knowledge of empirical propositions only, since I think that the traditional analysis is adequate for knowledge of nonempirical truths.

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)

Most of this work is concerned with two theories that underlie cognitive science; theories which I call "the representational theory of intentionality" and "the computational theory of cognition" . While the representational theory of intentionality asserts that mental states are about the world in virtue of a representation relation between the world and the state, the computational theory of cognition asserts that humans and others perform cognitive tasks by computing functions on these representations. CTC draws upon a rich analogy between (...) the mind and digital computers, portraying cognizers as receiving input and generating outputs . ;Since researchers within cognitive science--especially within cognitive psychology, computer science, and philosophy of mind--share a common theoretic background in their adherence to the combination of RTI and CTC, what I call "computationalism" most of the work done in philosophy of mind has been aimed at either refuting or further articulating these two theories. This work is strongly within that tradition. ;RTI and CTC combine to create an explanatory framework for explanation in cognitive science. In this work, I seek to delineate the exact structure of this framework, to determine its components and their overall relationships. In my mind, this involves making implicit aspects of computational explanation explicit, providing an overall rationale for the various components and their relationships, and defending that rationale against criticism. ;In particular, the project of this work is to argue that computationalist explanations of cognition within cognitive science need to make appeals to both representation and knowledge; to distinguish the respective roles of knowledge and of representation in an overall picture of computational explanations, and to develop and argue for definitions of representation and knowledge that would allow those concepts to play their respective roles within computational explanations in cognitive science. ;The first half of this work , therefore, is devoted to theories of representation, especially to the need for, and role of representation in computational explanations. The first half of the work culminates in chapter three with a definition of representation and a picture of the structure of computational explanations. The second half of the project then becomes to generate a definition of knowledge that defines knowledge in non-epistemic language amenable to computationalism and that carries the epistemic burdens placed upon knowledge by its use in computational explanations, as well as to offer a limited defence of that definition within the framework of traditional epistemology. (shrink)