14 found
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  1. Ignorance and awareness.Paul Silva & Robert Weston Siscoe - 2024 - Noûs 58 (1):225-243.
    Knowledge implies the presence of a positive relation between a person and a fact. Factual ignorance, on the other hand, implies the absence of some positive relation between a person and a fact. The two most influential views of ignorance hold that what is lacking in cases of factual ignorance is knowledge or true belief, but these accounts fail to explain a number of basic facts about ignorance. In their place, we propose a novel and systematic defense of the view (...)
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  2. Rational supererogation and epistemic permissivism.Robert Weston Siscoe - 2021 - Philosophical Studies 179 (2):571-591.
    A number of authors have defended permissivism by appealing to rational supererogation, the thought that some doxastic states might be rationally permissible even though there are other, more rational beliefs available. If this is correct, then there are situations that allow for multiple rational doxastic responses, even if some of those responses are rationally suboptimal. In this paper, I will argue that this is the wrong approach to defending permissivism—there are no doxastic states that are rationally supererogatory. By the lights (...)
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  3. Awareness By Degree.Paul Silva Jr & Robert Weston Siscoe - forthcoming - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research.
    Do factive mental states come in degrees? If so, what is their underlying structure, and what is their theoretical significance? Many have observed that ‘knows that’ is not a gradable verb and have taken this to be strong evidence that propositional knowledge does not come in degrees. This paper demonstrates that the adjective ‘aware that’ passes all the standard tests of gradability, and thus strongly motivates the idea that it refers to a factive mental state that comes in degrees. We (...)
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  4. Real and ideal rationality.Robert Weston Siscoe - 2021 - Philosophical Studies 179 (3):879-910.
    Formal epistemologists often claim that our credences should be representable by a probability function. Complete probabilistic coherence, however, is only possible for ideal agents, raising the question of how this requirement relates to our everyday judgments concerning rationality. One possible answer is that being rational is a contextual matter, that the standards for rationality change along with the situation. Just like who counts as tall changes depending on whether we are considering toddlers or basketball players, perhaps what counts as rational (...)
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  5. Does Being Rational Require Being Ideally Rational? ‘Rational’ as a Relative and an Absolute Term.Robert Weston Siscoe - 2021 - Philosophical Topics 49 (2):245-265.
    A number of formal epistemologists have argued that perfect rationality requires probabilistic coherence, a requirement that they often claim applies only to ideal agents. However, in “Rationality as an Absolute Concept,” Roy Sorensen contends that ‘rational’ is an absolute term. Just as Peter Unger argued that being flat requires that a surface be completely free of bumps and blemishes, Sorensen claims that being rational requires being perfectly rational. When we combine these two views, though, they lead to counterintuitive results. If (...)
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  6. Justification as a dimension of rationality.Robert Weston Siscoe - 2024 - Philosophical Studies 181 (6):1523-1546.
    How are justified belief and rational belief related? Some philosophers think that justified belief and rational belief come to the same thing. Others take it that justification is a matter of how well a particular belief is supported by the evidence, while rational belief is a matter of how well a belief coheres with a person’s other beliefs. In this paper, I defend the view that justification is a dimension of rationality, a view that can make sense of both of (...)
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  7. No work for a theory of epistemic dispositions.Robert Weston Siscoe - 2021 - Synthese 198 (4):3477-3498.
    Externalists about epistemic justification have long emphasized the connection between truth and justification, with this coupling finding explicit expression in process reliabilism. Process reliabilism, however, faces a number of severe difficulties, leading disenchanted process reliabilists to find a new theoretical home. The conceptual flag under which such epistemologists have preferred to gather is that of dispositions. Just as reliabilism is determined by the frequency of a particular outcome, making it possible to characterize justification in terms of a particular relationship to (...)
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  8. Knowledge, true belief, and the gradability of ignorance.Robert Weston Siscoe - 2024 - Philosophical Studies 181 (4):893-916.
    Given the significant exculpatory power that ignorance has when it comes to moral, legal, and epistemic transgressions, it is important to have an accurate understanding of the concept of ignorance. According to the Standard View of factual ignorance, a person is ignorant that p whenever they do not know that p, while on the New View, a person is ignorant that p whenever they do not truly believe that p. On their own though, neither of these accounts explains how ignorance (...)
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  9. Accuracy Across Doxastic Attitudes: Recent Work on the Accuracy of Belief.Robert Weston Siscoe - 2022 - American Philosophical Quarterly 59 (2):201-217.
    James Joyce's article “A Nonpragmatic Vindication of Probabilism” introduced an approach to arguing for credal norms by appealing to the epistemic value of accuracy. The central thought was that credences ought to accurately represent the world, a guiding thought that has gone on to generate an entire research paradigm on the rationality of credences. Recently, a number of epistemologists have begun to apply this same thought to full beliefs, attempting to explain and argue for norms of belief in terms of (...)
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  10. The Epistemic Aims of Democracy.Robert Weston Siscoe - 2023 - Philosophy Compass 18 (11):e12941.
    Many political philosophers have held that democracy has epistemic benefits. Most commonly, this case is made by arguing that democracies are better able to track the truth than other political arrangements. Truth, however, is not the only epistemic good that is politically valuable. A number of other epistemic goods – goods including evidence, intellectual virtue, epistemic justice, and empathetic understanding – can also have political value, and in ways that go beyond the value of truth. In this paper, I will (...)
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  11. Philosophical Dialogue for Beginners.Zachary Odermatt & Robert Weston Siscoe - 2023 - American Association of Philosophy Teachers Studies in Pedagogy 8:6-29.
    Inspired by the practice of dialogue in ancient philosophical schools, the Philosophy as a Way of Life (PWOL) Project at the University of Notre Dame has sought to put dialogue back at the center of philosophical pedagogy. Impromptu philosophical dialogue, however, can be challenging for students who are new to philosophy. Anticipating this challenge, the Project has created a series of manuals to help instructors conduct dialogue groups with novice philosophy students. Using these guidelines, we incorporated PWOL-style dialogue groups into (...)
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  12. Teaching & Learning Guide for: The Epistemic Aims of Democracy.Robert Weston Siscoe - 2023 - Philosophy Compass 18 (11):e12954.
    In order to serve their citizens well, democracies must secure a number of epistemic goods. Take the truth, for example. If a democratic government wants to help its impoverished citizens improve their financial position, then elected officials will need to know what policies truly help those living in poverty. Because truth has such an important role in political decision-making, many defenders of democracy have highlighted the ways in which democratic procedures can lead to the truth. But there are also a (...)
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  13. The Demandingness of Virtue.Robert Weston Siscoe - 2020 - Journal of Ethics and Social Philosophy 18 (1):1-22.
    How demanding is the virtuous life? Can virtue exist alongside hints of vice? Is it possible to be virtuous within a vicious society? A line of thinking running through Diogenes and the Stoics is that even a hint of corruption is inimical to virtue, that participating in a vicious society makes it impossible for a person to be virtuous. One response to this difficulty is to claim that virtue is a threshold concept, that context sets a threshold for what is (...)
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  14. Thomas Reid, the Internalist.Robert Weston Siscoe - 2022 - Journal of Modern Philosophy 4 (1):10.
    Philosophical orthodoxy holds that Thomas Reid is an externalist concerning epistemic justification, characterizing Reid as holding the key to an externalist response to internalism. These externalist accounts of Reid, however, have neglected his work on prejudice, a heretofore unexamined aspect of his epistemology. Reid’s work on prejudice reveals that he is far from an externalist. Despite the views Reid may have inspired, he exemplifies internalism in opting for an accessibility account of justification. For Reid, there are two normative statuses that (...)
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