J. Adam Carter
University of Glasgow, Philosophy, Faculty Member
- Epistemology, Axiology, Value Theory, Philosophy, Social Epistemology, Knowledge, and 28 moreRelativism, Virtue Epistemology, Epistemic Value, Epistemology of Disagreement, Contextualism and relativism, Cognitive Ability, Epistemic Virtue, Intellectual Virtue, Assertion, Swamping Problem, Knowledge How, Knowledge-How, Gettier Problem, Understanding, Epistemic Luck, Internalism/Externalism, Extended Mind, Extended Cognition, Epistemic Norms, Epistemic Normativity, Testimony, Philosophy Of Language, Philosophical Scepticism, Distributed Cognition, Metaphilosophy, Skepticism, Normative Epistemology, and Epistemology of Testimonyedit
- Website: http://www.jadamcarter.comedit
Research Interests:
Is knowledge relative? Many academics across the humanities are happy to say that it is. However, those who work in mainstream epistemology, the philosophical theory of knowledge, generally take for granted that it is not.... more
Is knowledge relative? Many academics across the humanities are happy to say that it is. However, those who work in mainstream epistemology, the philosophical theory of knowledge, generally take for granted that it is not. Metaepistemology and Relativism questions whether the kind of anti-relativistic background that underlies most typical projects in mainstream epistemology can on closer inspection be vindicated. To this end, prominent and diverse argument strategies for epistemic relativism are considered and criticised. It is shown that a common weakness of more traditional argument strategies for epistemic relativism is that they fail to decisively motivate relativism over scepticism. Interestingly, though, this style of objection cannot be effectively redeployed against the new (semantic) variety of epistemic relativism—itself introduced only in the past decade. Although new (semantic) epistemic relativism constitutes an entirely different kind of challenge to mainstream epistemology than traditional forms, the new variety itself faces a dilemma. Once the dilemma is appreciated, it will be shown that the threat to mainstream epistemology that epistemic relativism is best understood as posing is in fact a very different one than we’d be originally inclined to think.
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Moore and Russell thought that perceptual knowledge of the external world is based on abductive inference from information about our experience. Sosa maintains that this 'indirect realist' strategy has no prospects of working. 1 Vogel... more
Moore and Russell thought that perceptual knowledge of the external world is based on abductive inference from information about our experience. Sosa maintains that this 'indirect realist' strategy has no prospects of working. 1 Vogel disagrees and thinks it can and does work perfectly well, and his reasoning (and variations on that reasoning) seem initially promising, moreso than other approaches. 2 My aim, however, will be to adjudicate this dispute in favor of Sosa's pessimistic answer, and in doing so, to better uncover the important role abductive inference does have in a wider theory of perceptual knowledge, even if it doesn't feature in any promising vindication of (anti-skeptical) indirect realism.
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A common objection to Sosa’s epistemology is that it countenances, in an objectionable way, unsafe knowledge. This objection, under closer inspection, turns out to be in far worse shape than Sosa’s critics have realised. Sosa and his... more
A common objection to Sosa’s epistemology is that it countenances, in an objectionable way, unsafe knowledge. This objection, under closer inspection, turns out to be in far worse shape than Sosa’s critics have realised. Sosa and his defenders have offered two central response types to the idea that allowing unsafe knowledge is problematic: one response type adverts to the animal/reflective knowledge distinction that is characteristic of bi-level virtue epistemology. The other less-discussed response type appeals to the threat of dream scepticism, and in particular, to the idea that many of our everyday perceptual beliefs are unsafe through the nearness of the dream possibility. The latter dreaming response to the safety objection to Sosa’s virtue epistemology has largely flown under the radar in contemporary discussions of safety and knowledge. We think that, suitably articulated in view of research in the philosophy and science of dreaming, it has much more going for it than has been appreciated. This paper further develops, beyond what Sosa does himself, the dreaming argument in response to those who think safety (as traditionally understood) is a condition on knowledge and who object to Sosa’s account on the grounds that it fails this condition. The payoffs of further developing this argument will be not only a better understanding of the importance of insights about dreaming against safety as a condition on knowledge, but also some reason to think a weaker safety condition, one that is relativised to SSS (i.e., skill/shape/situation) conditions for competence exercise, gets better results all things considered as an anti-luck codicil on knowledge.
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Abstract: We explore new connections between the epistemologies of mental rehearsal and suppositional reasoning to offer a novel perspective on skilled behavior and its relationship to practical knowledge. We argue that practical... more
Abstract: We explore new connections between the epistemologies of mental rehearsal and suppositional reasoning to offer a novel perspective on skilled behavior and its relationship to practical knowledge. We argue that practical knowledge is "easy" in the sense that, by manifesting one's skills, one has a priori propositional justification for certain beliefs about what one is doing as one does it. This proposal has wider consequences for debates about intentional action and knowledge: first, because agents sometimes act intentionally in epistemically hazardous environments, these justified beliefs do not always rise to the level of (practical) knowledge. Second, practical knowledge is more intimately related to basic knowledge than has been appreciated. Third, an attractive "middle way" opens between the Anscombian tradition of defending a necessary connection between intentional action and practical knowledge and the more recent tradition of explaining away substantive epistemic conditions on intentional action.
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A widespread assumption in debates about trust and trustworthiness is that the evaluative norms of principal interest on the trustor’s side of a cooperative exchange regulate trusting attitudes and performances whereas those on the... more
A widespread assumption in debates about trust and trustworthiness is that the evaluative norms of principal interest on the trustor’s side of a cooperative exchange regulate trusting attitudes and performances whereas those on the trustee’s side regulate dispositions to respond to trust. The aim here will be to highlight some unnoticed problems with this asymmetrical picture – and in particular, how it elides certain key evaluative norms on both the trustor’s and trustee’s side the satisfaction of which are critical to successful cooperative exchanges – and to show that a symmetrical, ‘achievement-first’ approach to theorising about trust and trustworthienss (and their relation to each other) has important advantages by comparison. The view I develop is guided by a structural analogy with practical reasoning. Just as practical reasoning is working as it should only when there is realisation (knowledge and action) of states (belief and intention) with reverse directions of fits (mind-to-world and world-to-mind), likewise, cooperation between trustor and trustee is functioning as it should only when there is an analogous kind of realisation on both sides of the cooperative exchange – viz., when the trustor ‘matches’ her achievement in trusting (an achievement in fitting reliance to reciprocity) with the trustee’s achievement in responding to trust (an achievement in fitting reciprocity to reliance). An upshot of viewing cooperation between trustor and trustee as exhibiting achievement-theoretic structure is that we will be better positioned to subsume trustworthiness (and its cognates on the trustee’s side), like trust, under a wider suite of evaluative norms that regulate attempts, dispositions, and achievements symmetrically on both sides of a cooperative exchange, with ‘matching achievements’ as the gold standard.
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Whereas epistemology is (broadly speaking) the philosophical theory of knowledge, its nature and scope, metaepistemology takes a step back from particular substantive debates in epistemology in order to inquire into the assumptions and... more
Whereas epistemology is (broadly speaking) the philosophical theory of knowledge, its nature and scope, metaepistemology takes a step back from particular substantive debates in epistemology in order to inquire into the assumptions and commitments made by those who engage in these debates. This entry will focus on a selection of these assumptions and commitments, including (§1) whether (or not) there are objective epistemic facts; and how to characterize (§2) the subject matter and (§3) the methodology of epistemology.
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Structural analogies connect Williamson's (2000; 2017) epistemology and action theory: for example, action is the direction-of-fit mirror image of knowledge, and knowledge stands to belief as action stands to intention. These structural... more
Structural analogies connect Williamson's (2000; 2017) epistemology and action theory: for example, action is the direction-of-fit mirror image of knowledge, and knowledge stands to belief as action stands to intention. These structural analogies, for Williamson, are meant to illuminate more generally how 'mirrors' reversing direction of fit should be understood as connecting the spectrum of our cognitive and practically oriented mental states. This paper has two central aims, one negative and the other positive. The negative aim is to highlight some intractable problems with Williamson's preferred analogical picture, which links the cognitive and the practical through the nexus of direction-of-fit mirroring. The positive aim of the paper is to propose a better alternative. In particular, we show that an achievement-theoretic proposal captures what is in common across the range of attitudes that exhibit the kind of structure that knowledge-belief, action-desire/intention do, while at the same time avoiding the problems shown to face Williamson's proposed picture. Moreover, we draw attention to several key theoretical benefits of embracing our proposed achievement-theoretic picture, including some of the key benefits of the knowledge-first programme that Williamson's own analogies were designed to secure.
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We argue that any strong version of a knowledge condition on intentional action, the practical knowledge principle, on which knowledge of what I am doing (under some description: call it A-ing) is necessary for that A-ing to qualify as an... more
We argue that any strong version of a knowledge condition on intentional action, the practical knowledge principle, on which knowledge of what I am doing (under some description: call it A-ing) is necessary for that A-ing to qualify as an intentional action, is false. Our argument involves a new kind of case, one that centers the agent's control appropriately and thus improves upon Davidson's well-known carbon copier case. After discussing this case, offering an initial argument against the knowledge condition, and discussing recent treatments that cover nearby ground, we consider several objections. One we consider at some length maintains that although contemplative knowledge may be disconnected from intentional action, specifically practical knowledge of the sort Anscombe elucidated escapes our argument. We demonstrate that this is not so. Our argument illuminates an important truth, often overlooked in discussions of the knowledge-intentional action relationship: intentional action and knowledge have different levels of permissiveness regarding failure in similar circumstances.
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It is argued that trust is a performative kind and that the evaluative normativity of trust is a special case of the evaluative normativity of performances generally. The view is shown to have advantages over competitor views, e.g.,... more
It is argued that trust is a performative kind and that the evaluative normativity of trust is a special case of the evaluative normativity of performances generally. The view is shown to have advantages over competitor views, e.g., according to which good trusting is principally a matter of good believing (e.g.. Moreover, the view can be easily extended to explain good (and bad) distrust , where the latter is understood as aimed (narrow-scoped) forbear-ance from trusting. The overarching framework-which assimilates the evaluative norms of trusting (and distrusting) to performance-theoretic norms-supplies us with an entirely new lens to view traditional philosophical problems about what is involved in trusting and distrusting well and badly, and thus, places our capacity to make progress on problems in this area on a new footing
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This paper focuses on a specific kind of (epistemic) normative conflict, collateral normative conflict-viz., where cognition's working badly at the global level of general dispositions to believe is the price to be paid for its working... more
This paper focuses on a specific kind of (epistemic) normative conflict, collateral normative conflict-viz., where cognition's working badly at the global level of general dispositions to believe is the price to be paid for its working well locally. I argue that such normative conflicts are much rarer than Williamson (2021) and Lasonen-Aarnio (2010) take them to be, even though, and contra proponents of revisionary defeat (e.g., Brown 2018), knowers can, as Williamson and Lasonen-Aarnio rightly maintain, at least sometimes disregard misleading evidence from reliable sources. My rationale for the rarity of collateral epistemic conflicts draws from recent insights by Sosa (2021) on the appropriateness of aiming, in certain domains of inquiry, not just at knowledge, but at knowledge firsthand. A consequence of the rationale offered, however, is that an entirely different kind of normative conflict-what I call cross-modal normative conflict-turns out to be much more common than appreciated.
Research Interests:
Trust is a topic of longstanding philosophical interest. It is indispensable to every kind of coordinated human activity, from sport to scientific research. Even more, trust is necessary for the successful dissemination of knowledge, and... more
Trust is a topic of longstanding philosophical interest. It is indispensable to every kind of coordinated human activity, from sport to scientific research. Even more, trust is necessary for the successful dissemination of knowledge, and by extension, for nearly any form of practical deliberation and planning. Without trust, we could achieve few of our goals and would know very little. Despite trust’s fundamental importance in human life, there is substantial philosophical disagreement about what trust is, and further, how trusting is normatively constrained and best theorized about in relation to other things we value. This entry is divided into three sections, which explore key (and sometimes interconnected) ethical and epistemological themes in the philosophy of trust: (1) The Nature of Trust; (2) The Normativity of Trust, and (3) The Value of Trust.
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Disagreement is among the most thriving topics in mainstream and social epistemology. The research question responsible for initially launching the epistemology of disagreement as its own subfield in the early 2000s can be put very... more
Disagreement is among the most thriving topics in mainstream and social epistemology. The research question responsible for initially launching the epistemology of disagreement as its own subfield in the early 2000s can be put very simply: suppose you believe some proposition, p, is true. You come to find out that an individual whom you thought was equally likely as you are to be right about whether p is true, believes not-p. What should you do? Are you rationally required, given this new evidence, to revise your initial belief that p, or is it rationally permissible to simply ‘hold steadfast’ to your belief that p with the same degree of confidence that you did before you found out your believed-to-be epistemic peer disagreed with you? Call this the peer disagreement question. How we go about answering this question has obvious practical ramifications: we disagree with people we think are our peers often; knowing what we should do, epistemically, would be valuable guidance. But the peer disagreement question is also important for epistemologists to understand, theoretically speaking, given that it has direct ramifications for how we should understand disagreement itself as a form of evidence.
Unsurprisingly, responses to the peer disagreement question have fallen into two broadly opposing categories: those who think that discovering that an epistemic peer disagrees with you rationality requires you to some substantial kind of conciliation —perhaps even agnosticism —and those who think that it does not. Interestingly, the past ten years or so have shown that--in the close orbit of the peer disagreement question--are a range of related and interesting epistemological questions, questions that are perhaps just as epistemologically as well as practically significant.
Just consider that the peer disagreement question is individualistically framed. It is a question about what rationality requires of an individual when they disagree with another individual about some contested proposition. Gaining an answer tells us, at most, and in short, what individuals should do in the face of epistemic adversity. But we also want to know what groups should do in the face of epistemic adversity. For example: what should a group---say, a scientific committee--do if it turns out that one of the members on the committee holds a view that runs contrary to the consensus? It would be convenient if answering questions about how individuals should respond to epistemic adversity implied answers to the interesting questions about how groups should do the same. Unfortunately, though, things are not so simple. This is because, to a first approximation, the epistemic properties of groups are not, as recent collective epistemology has suggested, always simply reducible to an aggregation of the epistemic properties of its members. If we want to understand what groups should do, rationally speaking, when there is internal disagreement among members, or when there is disagreement between a group and individuals or groups external to the group, we cannot and should not expect to find the answers we need simply by looking to the results social epistemology has given us to questions individualistically framed.The topic of this volume---the epistemology of group disagreement---aims to face the complex topic of group disagreement head on; it represents the first-ever volume of papers dedicated exclusively to group disagreement and to the epistemological puzzles such disagreements raise. The volume consists of twelve new essays by leading epistemologists working in the area, and it spans a range of different key themes related to group disagreement, some established themes and others entirely new. In what follows, we offer brief summaries of these twelve chapters, drawing some connections between them where appropriate.
Unsurprisingly, responses to the peer disagreement question have fallen into two broadly opposing categories: those who think that discovering that an epistemic peer disagrees with you rationality requires you to some substantial kind of conciliation —perhaps even agnosticism —and those who think that it does not. Interestingly, the past ten years or so have shown that--in the close orbit of the peer disagreement question--are a range of related and interesting epistemological questions, questions that are perhaps just as epistemologically as well as practically significant.
Just consider that the peer disagreement question is individualistically framed. It is a question about what rationality requires of an individual when they disagree with another individual about some contested proposition. Gaining an answer tells us, at most, and in short, what individuals should do in the face of epistemic adversity. But we also want to know what groups should do in the face of epistemic adversity. For example: what should a group---say, a scientific committee--do if it turns out that one of the members on the committee holds a view that runs contrary to the consensus? It would be convenient if answering questions about how individuals should respond to epistemic adversity implied answers to the interesting questions about how groups should do the same. Unfortunately, though, things are not so simple. This is because, to a first approximation, the epistemic properties of groups are not, as recent collective epistemology has suggested, always simply reducible to an aggregation of the epistemic properties of its members. If we want to understand what groups should do, rationally speaking, when there is internal disagreement among members, or when there is disagreement between a group and individuals or groups external to the group, we cannot and should not expect to find the answers we need simply by looking to the results social epistemology has given us to questions individualistically framed.The topic of this volume---the epistemology of group disagreement---aims to face the complex topic of group disagreement head on; it represents the first-ever volume of papers dedicated exclusively to group disagreement and to the epistemological puzzles such disagreements raise. The volume consists of twelve new essays by leading epistemologists working in the area, and it spans a range of different key themes related to group disagreement, some established themes and others entirely new. In what follows, we offer brief summaries of these twelve chapters, drawing some connections between them where appropriate.
Research Interests:
YouTube has been implicated in the transformation of users into extremists and conspiracy theorists. The alleged mechanism for this radicalizing process is YouTube's recommender system, which is optimized to amplify and promote clips that... more
YouTube has been implicated in the transformation of users into extremists and conspiracy theorists. The alleged mechanism for this radicalizing process is YouTube's recommender system, which is optimized to amplify and promote clips that users are likely to watch through to the end. YouTube optimizes for watch-through for economic reasons: people who watch a video through to the end are likely to then watch the next recommended video as well, which means that more advertisements can be served to them. This is a seemingly innocuous design choice, but it has a troubling side-effect. Critics of YouTube have alleged that the recommender system tends to recommend extremist content and conspiracy theories, as such videos are especially likely to capture and keep users' attention. To date, the problem of radicalization via the YouTube recommender system has been a matter of speculation. The current study represents the first systematic, pre-registered attempt to establish whether and to what extent the recommender system tends to promote such content. We begin by contextualizing our study in the framework of technological seduction. Next, we explain our methodology. After that, we present our results, which are consistent with the radicalization hypothesis. Finally, we discuss our findings, as well as directions for future research and recommendations for users, industry, and policy-makers.
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Full aptness is the most important concept in performance-based virtue epistemology. The structure of full aptness, in epistemology and elsewhere, is bi-levelled. At the first level, we evaluate beliefs, like performances, on the basis of... more
Full aptness is the most important concept in performance-based virtue epistemology. The structure of full aptness, in epistemology and elsewhere, is bi-levelled. At the first level, we evaluate beliefs, like performances, on the basis of whether they are successful, competent, and apt – viz., successful because competent. But the fact that aptness itself can be fragile – as it is when an apt performance could easily have been inapt – points to a higher zone of quality beyond mere aptness. To break in to this zone, one must not merely perform aptly but also in doing so safeguard in skilled ways against certain risks to inaptness. But how must this be done, exactly? This paper has two central aims. First, I challenge the credentials of mainstream thinking about full-aptness by raising some new and serious problems for the view. I then propose a novel account of full aptness – what I call de minimis normativism – which keeps all the advantages of the canonical view, avoids its problems entirely, and offers some additional payoffs.
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Recent work on the epistemology of moral deference suggests that moral knowledge must derive from a knower's own ability in a way that knowledge acquired easily through testimony need not. This paper transposes this idea to the collective... more
Recent work on the epistemology of moral deference suggests that moral knowledge must derive from a knower's own ability in a way that knowledge acquired easily through testimony need not. This paper transposes this idea to the collective level, and in doing so, shows how two leading accounts of collective knowledge, the joint acceptance account and the distributed account, would be best positioned to countenance group-level moral knowledge as knowledge creditable to group-level ability. The upshot is that we uncover some hitherto unnoticed puzzles to do with defeat in collective moral epistemology, puzzles which reveal collective moral knowledge to be surprisingly fragile vis-à-vis higher-order defeat compared to individual-level moral knowledge. A consequence of this disanalogy is that more work needs done if non-skeptical collective moral epistemology is to hold water.
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A bi-level account of trust is developed and defended, one with relevance in ethics as well as epistemology. The proposed account of trust-on which trusting is modelled within a virtue-theoretic framework as a performance-type with an... more
A bi-level account of trust is developed and defended, one with relevance in ethics as well as epistemology. The proposed account of trust-on which trusting is modelled within a virtue-theoretic framework as a performance-type with an aim-distinguishes between two distinct levels of trust, apt and convictive, that take us beyond previous assessments of its nature, value, and relationship to risk assessment. While Ernest Sosa (2009; 2015; 2017), in particular, has shown how a performance normativity model may be fruitfully applied to belief, my objective is to apply this kind of model in a novel and principled way to trust. I conclude by outlining some of the key advantages of the performance-theoretic bi-level account of trust defended over more traditional univocal proposals.
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This paper is about two topics: metaepistemological absolutism and the epistemic principles governing perceptual warrant. Our aim is to highlight – by taking the debate between dogmatists and conservativists about perceptual warrant as a... more
This paper is about two topics: metaepistemological absolutism and the epistemic principles governing perceptual warrant. Our aim is to highlight – by taking the debate between dogmatists and conservativists about perceptual warrant as a case study – a surprising and hitherto unnoticed problem with metaepistemological absolutism, at least as it has been influentially defended by Paul Boghossian (2006a) as the principal metaepistemological contrast point to relativism. What we find is that the metaepistemological commitments at play on both sides of this dogmatism/conservativism debate do not line up with epistemic relativism nor do they line up with absolutism, at least as Boghossian articulates this position. What this case study reveals is the need in metaepistemological option space for the recognition of a weaker and less tendentious form of absolutism, what we call “environment relativism”. On this view, epistemic principles are knowable, objective, and they can serve as the basis of particular epistemic evaluations, but their validity is relative to the wider global environment in which they are applied.
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According to one prominent view of exercising abilities (e.g., Millar 2009), a subject, S, counts as exercising an ability to ϕ if and only if S successfully ϕs. Such an 'exercise-success' thesis looks initially very plausible for... more
According to one prominent view of exercising abilities (e.g., Millar 2009), a subject, S, counts as exercising an ability to ϕ if and only if S successfully ϕs. Such an 'exercise-success' thesis looks initially very plausible for abilities, perhaps even obviously or analytically true. In this paper, however, I will be defending the position that one can in fact exercise an ability to do one thing by doing some entirely distinct thing, and in doing so I'll highlight various reasons (epistemological, metaphysical and linguistic) that favor the alternative approach I develop over views that hold that the exercise of an ability is a success notion in the sense Millar maintains.
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Extended cognition theorists argue that cognitive processes constitutively depend on resources that are neither organically composed, nor located inside the bodily boundaries of the agent, provided certain conditions on the integration of... more
Extended cognition theorists argue that cognitive processes constitutively depend on resources that are neither organically composed, nor located inside the bodily boundaries of the agent, provided certain conditions on the integration of those processes into the agent's cognitive architecture are met. Epistemologists, however, worry that in so far as such cognitively integrated processes are epistemically relevant, agents could thus come to enjoy an untoward explosion of knowledge. This paper develops and defends an approach to cognitive integration-cluster-model functionalism-which finds application in both domains of inquiry, and which meets the challenge posed by putative cases of cognitive or epistemic bloat.
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Recent literature suggests that intellectual humility is valuable to its possessor not only morally, but also epistemically—viz., from a point of view where (put roughly) epistemic aims such as true belief, knowledge and understanding are... more
Recent literature suggests that intellectual humility is valuable to its possessor not only morally, but also epistemically—viz., from a point of view where (put roughly) epistemic aims such as true belief, knowledge and understanding are what matters. Perhaps unsurprisingly, epistemologists working on intellectual humility have focused almost exclusively on its ramifications for how we go about forming, maintaining and evaluating our own beliefs, and by extension, ourselves as inquirers. Less explored by contrast is how intellectual humility might have implications for how we should conduct our practice of asserting. The present entry aims to rectify this oversight by connecting these two topics in a way that sharpens how it is that intellectual humility places several distinctive kinds of demands on assertion, and more generally, on how we communicate what we believe and know.
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A novel solution is offered for how emotional experiences can function as sources of immediate prima facie justification for evaluative beliefs, and in such a way that suffices to halt a justificatory regress. Key to this solution is the... more
A novel solution is offered for how emotional experiences can function as sources of immediate prima facie justification for evaluative beliefs, and in such a way that suffices to halt a justificatory regress. Key to this solution is the recognition of two distinct kinds of emotional skill (what I call generative emotional skill and doxastic emotional skill) and how these must be working in tandem when emotional experience plays such a justificatory role. The paper has two main parts, the first negative and the second positive. The negative part criticises the epistemic credentials of Epistemic Perceptualism (e.g., Tappolet 2012, 2016; Doring 2003, 2007; Elgin 2008; Roberts 2003), the view that emotional experience alone suffices to prima facie justify evaluative beliefs in a way that is analogous to how perceptual experience justifies our beliefs about the external world. The second part of the paper develops an account of emotional skill and uses this account to frame a revisionary form of Epistemic Perceptualism that succeeds where the traditional views could not. I conclude by considering some objections and replies.
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Reductive intellectualists about knowledge-how (e.g., Stanley & Williamson 2001; Stanley 2011a, 2011b; Brogaard 2008a, 2008b, 2009, 2011) hold, contra Ryle (1946, 1949), that knowing how to do something is just a kind of propositional... more
Reductive intellectualists about knowledge-how (e.g., Stanley & Williamson 2001; Stanley 2011a, 2011b; Brogaard 2008a, 2008b, 2009, 2011) hold, contra Ryle (1946, 1949), that knowing how to do something is just a kind of propositional knowledge. In a similar vein, traditional reductivists about understanding-why (e.g., Salmon 1984; Lipton 2004; Woodward 2003; Grimm 2006; Greco 2009; Kelp 2014) insist, in accordance with a tradition beginning with Aristotle, that the epistemic standing one attains when one understands why something is so is itself just a kind of propositional knowledge—viz., propositional knowledge of causes. A point that has been granted on both sides of these debates is that if these reductive proposals are right, then knowledge-how and understanding-why should be susceptible to the same extent as knowledge-that is to being undermined by epistemic luck. This paper reports experimental results that test these luck-based predictions. Interestingly, these results suggest a striking (albeit, imperfect) positive correlation between self-reported philosophical expertise and attributions of knowledge-how, understanding-why and knowledge-that which run contrary to reductive proposals. We contextualize these results by showing how they align very well with a particular kind of overarching non-reductive proposal, one that two of the authors have defended elsewhere (e.g., Carter and Pritchard 2015a; 2015b; Pritchard 2010) according to which knowledge-how and understanding-why, but not knowledge-that, essentially involve cognitive achievement (i.e., cognitive success that is primarily creditable to cognitive ability). We conclude by situating the interpretive narrative advanced within contemporary discussions about the role of expertise in philosophical judgment.
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What cognitive goods do children plausibly have a right to in an education? In attempting to answer this question, I begin with a puzzle centred around Feinberg's (2007) observation that a denial of certain cognitive goods can violate a... more
What cognitive goods do children plausibly have a right to in an education? In attempting to answer this question, I begin with a puzzle centred around Feinberg's (2007) observation that a denial of certain cognitive goods can violate a child's right to an open future. I show that propositionalist, dispositionalist and objectualist characterisations of the kinds of cognitive goods children have a right to run in to problems. A promising alternative is then proposed and defended, one that is inspired in the main by Wittgenstein's (1969) 'hinge' epistemology as developed in his posthumous On Certainty. cognitive goods and epistemic rights What cognitive goods should an education provide? There are a number of ways to approach this question, and one useful place to begin is from a rights-based perspective: an education should afford at least those cognitive goods children plausibly have a right to. What cognitive goods are these? On a first pass, it seems reasonable to say that there are certain facts children have a right to know—and accordingly, that what children have a right to is some (propo-sitional) knowledge, leaving it open exactly which specific knowledge. Extrapolating from this answer, we can call a more general position vis-à-vis the cognitive goods children plausibly have a right to 'propositionalism' , where propositionalism is the claim that the kind of cognitive goods to which children have a right in education are propositional goods.
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One notable line of argument for epistemic relativism appeals to considerations to do with non-neutrality: in certain dialectical contexts—take for instance the famous dispute between Galileo and Cardinal Bellarmine concerning... more
One notable line of argument for epistemic relativism appeals to considerations to do with non-neutrality: in certain dialectical contexts—take for instance the famous dispute between Galileo and Cardinal Bellarmine concerning geocentrism—it seems as though a lack of suitably neutral epistemic standards that either side could appeal to in order to (non-question-beggingly) resolve their first-order dispute is itself—as Rorty (1979) influentially thought—evidence for epistemic relativism. In this essay, my aim is first to present a more charitable reformulation of this line of reasoning, one that is framed not merely in terms of the availability of epistemic norms that are suitably neutral between interlocutors, but in terms of the availability of what I call Archimedean metanorms. Once this more charitable line of argument is developed, I show how, even though it avoids problems that face 'non-neutrality' versions of the argument, it nonetheless runs into various other problems that appear ultimately intractable and, further, that the strategy in question gives us no decisive reason to draw the relativist's conclusion rather than the Pyrrhonian sceptic's.
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If we want our intellectual lives to go as well as possible, should we be 'delegating' as many information-gobbling tasks to our gadgets as we can? If not, then how much cognitive outsourcing is too much, and relatedly, what kinds of... more
If we want our intellectual lives to go as well as possible, should we be 'delegating' as many information-gobbling tasks to our gadgets as we can? If not, then how much cognitive outsourcing is too much, and relatedly, what kinds of considerations are relevant to determining this? I submit that one particular dimension of intellectual flourishing that will be helpful for the purpose of exploring such questions is that of intellectual autonomy, and in particular, what I'll describe as the value of one's freedom to achieve. Several related conclusions are drawn and then applied to recent discussions in the philosophy of education concerning education's epistemic aims.
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Controversial view agnosticism (CVA) is the thesis that we are rationally obligated to withhold judgment about a large portion of our beliefs in controversial subject areas, such as philosophy, religion , morality and politics. Given that... more
Controversial view agnosticism (CVA) is the thesis that we are rationally obligated to withhold judgment about a large portion of our beliefs in controversial subject areas, such as philosophy, religion , morality and politics. Given that one's social identity is in no small part a function of one's positive commitments in controversial areas, CVA has unsurprisingly been regarded as objectionably 'spineless.' That said, CVA seems like an unavoidable consequence of a prominent view in the epistemology of disagreement—conformism—according to which the rational response to discovering that someone you identify as an epistemic peer or expert about p disagrees with you vis-à-vis p is to withhold judgment. This paper proposes a novel way to maintain the core conciliatory insight without devolving into an agnosticism that is objectionably spineless. The approach offered takes as a starting point the observation that–for reasons that will be made clear—the contemporary debate has bypassed the issue of the reasonableness of maintaining, rather than giving up, represen-tational states weaker than belief in controversial areas. The new position developed and defended here explores this overlooked space; what results is a kind of controversial view agnosticism that is compatible with the kinds of commitments that are integral to social identity.
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The value of knowledge has always been a central topic within epistemology. Going all the way back to Plato’s Meno, philosophers have asked, why is knowledge more valuable than mere true belief? Interest in this question has grown in... more
The value of knowledge has always been a central topic within epistemology. Going all the way back to Plato’s Meno, philosophers have asked, why is knowledge more valuable than mere true belief? Interest in this question has grown in recent years, with theorists proposing a range of answers. But some reject the premise of the question and claim that the value of knowledge is ‘swamped’ by the value of true belief. And others argue that statuses other than knowledge, such as justification or understanding, are distinctively valuable. We will call the general question of why knowledge is valuable the value problem.
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Contemporary debates about epistemic luck and its relation to knowledge have traditionally proceeded against a tacit background commitment to cognitive internalism, the thesis that cognitive processes play out inside the head. In... more
Contemporary debates about epistemic luck and its relation to knowledge have traditionally proceeded against a tacit background commitment to cognitive internalism, the thesis that cognitive processes play out inside the head. In particular, safety-based approaches (e.g., reveal this commitment by taking for granted a traditional internalist construal of what I call the cognitive fixedness thesis—viz., the thesis that the cognitive process that is being employed in the actual world is always 'held fixed' when we go out to nearby possible worlds to assess whether the target belief is lucky in a way that is incompatible with knowledge. However, for those inclined to replace cognitive internalism with the extended mind thesis (e.g., Clark and Chalmers 1998), a very different, 'active externalist' version of the cognitive fixedness thesis becomes the relevant one for the purposes of assessing a belief's safety. The aim here will be to develop this point in a way that draws out some of the important ramifications it has for how we think about safety, luck and knowledge.
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Note: This is a general-audience-level textbook chapter, to appear in _Philosophy, Science and Religion for Everyone_, (eds.) M. Harris & D. H. Pritchard, (Routledge, forthcoming).
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Anti-intellectualists about knowledge-how insist that, when an agent S knows how to φ, it is in virtue of some ability, rather than in virtue of any propositional attitudes, S has. Recently, a popular strategy for attacking the... more
Anti-intellectualists about knowledge-how insist that, when an agent S knows how to φ, it is in virtue of some ability, rather than in virtue of any propositional attitudes, S has. Recently, a popular strategy for attacking the anti-intellectualist position proceeds by appealing to cases where an agent is claimed to possess a reliable ability to φ while nonetheless intuitively lacking knowledge-how to φ. John Bengson & Marc Moffett (2009; 2011a; 2011b) and Carlotta Pavese (2015a; 2015b) have embraced precisely this strategy and have thus claimed, for different reasons, that anti-intellectualism is defective on the grounds that possessing the ability to φ is not sufficient for knowing how to φ. We investigate this strategy of argument-by-counterexample to the anti-intellectualist's sufficiency thesis and show that, at the end of the day, anti-intellectualism remains unscathed.
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Addressing the 'virtue conflation' problem requires the preservation of intuitive distinctions between virtue types, i.e., between intellectual and moral virtues. According to one influential attempt to avoid this problem proposed by... more
Addressing the 'virtue conflation' problem requires the preservation of intuitive distinctions between virtue types, i.e., between intellectual and moral virtues. According to one influential attempt to avoid this problem proposed by Julia Driver (2003), moral virtues produce benefits to others—in particular, they promote the well-being of others—while the intellectual virtues, as such, produce epistemic good for the agent. We show that Driver's demarcation of intellectual virtue, by adverting to the self/other distinction, leads to a reductio, and ultimately, that the prospects for resolving the virtue conflation problem look dim within an epistemic consequentialist approach to the epistemic right and the epistemic good.
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Insight often strikes us blind; when we aren't expecting it, we suddenly see a connection that previously eluded us—a kind of 'Aha!' experience. People with a propensity to such experiences are regarded as insightful, and insightfulness... more
Insight often strikes us blind; when we aren't expecting it, we suddenly see a connection that previously eluded us—a kind of 'Aha!' experience. People with a propensity to such experiences are regarded as insightful, and insightfulness is a paradigmatic intellectual virtue. What's not clear, however, is just what it is in virtue of which being such that these experiences tend to happen to one renders one intellectually virtuous. This paper draws from both virtue epistemology as well as empirical work on the psychology of problem solving and creativity to make some inroads in accounting for insightfulness as an intellectual virtue. Important to the view advanced is that virtuously insightful individuals manifest certain skills which both cultivate insight experiences (even if not by directly bringing them about) and enable such individuals to move in an epistemically responsible way from insight experience to epistemic endorsement.
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November 2021. Draft version. For Contemporary Debates in Epistemology, 3rd Edition, (eds.) E. Sosa, M. Steup, J. Turri, & B. Roeber, (Wiley-Blackwell, forthcoming).
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Research questions in mainstream epistemology often take for granted a cognitive internalist picture of the mind. Perhaps this is unsurprising, given the seemingly safe presumptions that (i) knowledge entails belief (viz., the entailment... more
Research questions in mainstream epistemology often take for granted a cognitive internalist picture of the mind. Perhaps this is unsurprising, given the seemingly safe presumptions that (i) knowledge entails belief (viz., the entailment thesis); and that (ii) the kind of belief that knowledge entails supervenes exclusively on brainbound cognition. It will be argued here that (contra orthodoxy) the most plausible version of the entailment thesis holds just that knowledge entails dispositional belief. However, regardless of whether occurrent belief supervenes only as the cognitive internalist permits, we should reject the idea that dispositional belief supervenes only in cognitive internalist-friendly ways. These observations, taken together, reveal two things: first, that a cognitive internalist picture of the mind is much more dispensable in epistemology than has been assumed; and second, that pursuing questions in extended epistemology needn't involve any radical departure from the commitments of more traditional epistemological projects.
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Moore and Russell thought that perceptual knowledge of the external world is based on abductive inference from information about our experience. Sosa maintains that this 'indirect realist' strategy has no prospects of working. Vogel... more
Moore and Russell thought that perceptual knowledge of the external world is based on abductive inference from information about our experience. Sosa maintains that this 'indirect realist' strategy has no prospects of working. Vogel disagrees and thinks it can and does work perfectly well, and his reasoning (and variations on that reasoning) seem initially promising, moreso than other approaches. My aim, however, will be to adjudicate this dispute in favor of Sosa's pessimistic answer, and in doing so, to better uncover the important role abductive inference does have in a wider theory of perceptual knowledge, even if it doesn't feature in any promising vindication of (anti-skeptical) indirect realism.
Research Interests: Philosophy, Epistemology, Philosophy of Science, Scepticism, Epistemic Justification, and 10 moreExplanation, Virtue Epistemology, Inference, Internalism/Externalism, Skepticism, Foundationalism & Antifoundationalism, Abduction, Ernest Sosa, Inference to the Best Explanation, and Perceptual Knowledge
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This chapter critically discusses the significance of trust and its theoretical cognates-distrust , trustworthiness and distrustworthiness-in social epistemology. Special focus is given to the following issues: (i) knowledge on trust;... more
This chapter critically discusses the significance of trust and its theoretical cognates-distrust , trustworthiness and distrustworthiness-in social epistemology. Special focus is given to the following issues: (i) knowledge on trust; (ii) the entitlement to expect to be presumed trustworthy; (iii) the normativity of trusting; and the role of defective trust and distrust in cases of (iv) epistemic injustice; and (v) the uptake and spread of conspiracy theories.
Research Interests: Philosophy, Applied Philosophy, Epistemology, Testimony, Social Philosophy, and 12 moreTrust, Conspiracy Theories, Epistemic Justification, Social Epistemology, Virtue Epistemology, Social Trust, Knowledge, Epistemology of Testimony, Epistemic Trust, Ernest Sosa, Trust and Trustworthiness, and Epistemic Injustice
A new way to transpose the virtue epistemologist's 'knowledge = apt belief ' template to the collective level, as a thesis about group knowledge, is developed. In particular, it is shown how specifically judgmental belief can be realised... more
A new way to transpose the virtue epistemologist's 'knowledge = apt belief ' template to the collective level, as a thesis about group knowledge, is developed. In particular, it is shown how specifically judgmental belief can be realised at the collective level in a way that is structurally analogous, on a telic theory of epistemic normativity (e.g., Sosa 2020), to how it is realised at the individual level-viz., through a (collective) intentional attempt to get it right aptly (whether p) by alethically affirming that p. An advantage of the proposal developed is that it is shown to be compatible with competing views-viz., joint acceptance accounts and social-distributive accounts-of how group members must interact in order to materially realise a group belief. I conclude by showing how the proposed judgment-focused collective (telic) virtue epistemology has important advantages over a rival version of collective virtue epistemology defended in recent work by Jesper Kallestrup (2016).
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Our understanding of what exactly needs protected against in order to safeguard a plausible construal of our 'freedom of thought' is changing. And this is because the recent influx of cogni-tive offloading and outsourcing-and the... more
Our understanding of what exactly needs protected against in order to safeguard a plausible construal of our 'freedom of thought' is changing. And this is because the recent influx of cogni-tive offloading and outsourcing-and the fast-evolving technologies that enable this-generate radical new possibilities for freedom-of-thought violating thought manipulation. This paper does three main things. First, I briefly overview how recent thinking in the philosophy of mind and cogni-tive science recognises-contrary to traditional Cartesian 'internalist' assumptions-ways in which our cognitive faculties, and even our beliefs, can be materially realised by as well as stored non-biologically and extracranially. Second, and taking brain-computer interface technologies (BCIs) and the associated possibility of 'extended' beliefs as a reference point, I propose and defend a sufficient condition on freedom-of-thought violating (extended) thought manipulation. On the view proposed, the right not to have one's thoughts or opinions manipulated is violated if one is (i) caused to acquire non-autonomous propositional attitudes (acquisition manipulation) or (ii) caused to have otherwise autonomous propositional attitudes non-autonomously eradicated (eradication manipulation). The implications of this view are then illustrated through four thought experiments, which map on to four distinct ways-what I call Type 1-Type 4 manipulation-in which, and with reference to the view defended, one's freedom of thought is plausibly violated.
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This paper develops and defends a new account of therapeutic trust, its nature and its constitutive norms. Central to the view advanced is a distinction between two kinds of therapeutic trust-default therapeutic trust and overriding... more
This paper develops and defends a new account of therapeutic trust, its nature and its constitutive norms. Central to the view advanced is a distinction between two kinds of therapeutic trust-default therapeutic trust and overriding therapeutic trust-each which derives from a distinct kind of trusting competence. The new view is shown to have advantages over extant accounts of therapeutic trust, and its relation to standard (non-therapeutic) trust, as defended
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The philosophical significance of attitudinal autonomy -- viz., the autonomy of attitudes such as beliefs -- is widely discussed in the literature on moral responsibility and free will. Within this literature, a key debate centres around... more
The philosophical significance of attitudinal autonomy -- viz., the autonomy of attitudes such as beliefs -- is widely discussed in the literature on moral responsibility and free will. Within this literature, a key debate centres around the following question: is the kind of attitudinal autonomy that's relevant to moral responsibility at a given time determined entirely by a sub-ject's present mental structure at that time? Internalists say 'yes', externalists say 'no'. In this essay, I motivate a kind of distinctly epistemic attitudinal autonomy, attitudinal autonomy that is relevant to knowledge. I argue that regardless of whether we are externalists or internalists about the kind of attitudinal autonomy that is relevant for moral responsibility, we should be externalists about the kind of autonomy that a belief must have to qualify as knowledge.
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This is a draft of a book about epistemic autonomy and radical cognitive enhancement.
Research Interests: Philosophy, Philosophy of Mind, Epistemology, Philosophy of Technology, Bioethics, and 14 moreAxiology, Medical Ethics, Value Theory, Social Epistemology, Autonomy, Virtue Epistemology, Human Enhancement, Free Will and Moral Responsibility, Knowledge-How, Knowledge, Reliabilism, Ernest Sosa, Cognitive Enhancement, and Cognitive Ability
This chapter critically discusses the relationship between political disagreements and political relativism, roughly, the idea that both parties to (at least some) political disagreements are right relative to their own perspective. Two... more
This chapter critically discusses the relationship between political disagreements and political relativism, roughly, the idea that both parties to (at least some) political disagreements are right relative to their own perspective. Two key strands of argument that take a substantive stand on this relationship are considered. The first -- which is the primary focus of the chapter -- reasons from political disagreement to political relativism through premises about epistemic circularity. The second kind of argument diagnoses some political disagreements as 'faultless' on the basis of semantic considerations. As we'll see, considerations in favour of accepting or rejecting either variety of political relativism do not carry over as considerations for accepting or rejecting the other, and so these forms of political relativism -- despite some superficial similarities -- do not stand or fall together.
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This paper offers a novel account of how know-how improves to expertise in a way that is structurally analogous to how propositional knowledge improves to understanding. A payoff of developing this analogy is a better grip not only of how... more
This paper offers a novel account of how know-how improves to expertise in a way that is structurally analogous to how propositional knowledge improves to understanding. A payoff of developing this analogy is a better grip not only of how know-how and expertise differ, but also of why it is that this difference is important.
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The lack of knowledge—as Timothy Williamson (2000) famously maintains—is ignorance. Radical sceptical arguments, at least in the tradition of Descartes, threaten universal ignorance. They do so by attempting to establish that we lack any... more
The lack of knowledge—as Timothy Williamson (2000) famously maintains—is ignorance. Radical sceptical arguments, at least in the tradition of Descartes, threaten universal ignorance. They do so by attempting to establish that we lack any knowledge, even if we can retain other kinds of epistemic standings, like epistemically justified belief. If understanding is a species of knowledge, then radical sceptical arguments threaten to rob us categorically of knowledge and understanding in one fell swoop by implying universal ignorance. If, however, understanding is not a species of knowledge, then three questions arise: (i) is ignorance the lack of understanding, even if understanding
is not a species of knowledge? (ii) If not, what kind of state of intellectual impoverishment
best describes a lack of understanding? (iii) What would a radical sceptical argument look like that threatened that kind of intellectual impoverishment, even if not threatening ignorance? This paper answers each of these questions in turn. I conclude by showing how the answers developed to (i-iii) interface in an interesting way with Virtue Perspectivism as an anti-sceptical strategy.
is not a species of knowledge? (ii) If not, what kind of state of intellectual impoverishment
best describes a lack of understanding? (iii) What would a radical sceptical argument look like that threatened that kind of intellectual impoverishment, even if not threatening ignorance? This paper answers each of these questions in turn. I conclude by showing how the answers developed to (i-iii) interface in an interesting way with Virtue Perspectivism as an anti-sceptical strategy.
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Internalists in epistemology think that whether one possesses epistemic statuses such as knowledge or justification depends on factors that are internal to one; externalists think that whether one possesses these statuses can depend on... more
Internalists in epistemology think that whether one possesses epistemic statuses such as knowledge or justification depends on factors that are internal to one; externalists think that whether one possesses these statuses can depend on factors that are external to one. In this chapter we focus on the relationship between externalism and epistemic relativism. It is clear that, by itself, the question of whether we should be internalists or externalists has no immediate consequences for the debate around epistemic relativism. But, as we'll see, it is very common to hold that key externalist insights block or undermine some standard arguments for epistemic relativism. Our aim in this chapter is to give a broad overview of why externalism poses a problem for standard arguments for relativism. But we also want to discuss some-admittedly less developed-ways in which some externalist ideas might actually provide support for certain forms of epistemic relativism.
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Virtue perspectivism (e.g., Sosa 2007, 2009) is a bi-level epistemology according to which there are two grades of knowledge, animal and reflective. The exercise of reliable competences suffices to give us animal knowledge; but we can... more
Virtue perspectivism (e.g., Sosa 2007, 2009) is a bi-level epistemology according to
which there are two grades of knowledge, animal and reflective. The exercise of reliable
competences suffices to give us animal knowledge; but we can then use these
same competences to gain a second-order assuring perspective, one through which we
may appreciate those faculties as reliable and in doing so place our first-order (animal)
knowledge in a competent second-order perspective. Virtue perspectivism has
considerable theoretical power, especially when it comes to vindicating our external
world knowledge against threats of scepticism and regress. Prominent criticisms,
however, doubt whether the view ultimately hangs together without succumbing to
vicious circularity. In this paper, I am going to focus on circularity-based criticisms
of virtue perspectivism raised in various places by Barry Stroud (2004), Baron Reed
(2012) and Richard Fumerton (2004), and I will argue that virtue perspectivism can
ultimately withstand each of them.
which there are two grades of knowledge, animal and reflective. The exercise of reliable
competences suffices to give us animal knowledge; but we can then use these
same competences to gain a second-order assuring perspective, one through which we
may appreciate those faculties as reliable and in doing so place our first-order (animal)
knowledge in a competent second-order perspective. Virtue perspectivism has
considerable theoretical power, especially when it comes to vindicating our external
world knowledge against threats of scepticism and regress. Prominent criticisms,
however, doubt whether the view ultimately hangs together without succumbing to
vicious circularity. In this paper, I am going to focus on circularity-based criticisms
of virtue perspectivism raised in various places by Barry Stroud (2004), Baron Reed
(2012) and Richard Fumerton (2004), and I will argue that virtue perspectivism can
ultimately withstand each of them.
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A vexing problem in contemporary epistemology—one with origins in Plato's Meno—concerns the value of knowledge, and in particular, whether and how the value of knowledge exceeds the value of mere (unknown) true opinion. The recent... more
A vexing problem in contemporary epistemology—one with origins in Plato's Meno—concerns the value of knowledge, and in particular, whether and how the value of knowledge exceeds the value of mere (unknown) true opinion. The recent literature is deeply divided on the matter of how best to address the problem. One point, however, remains unquestioned: that if a solution is to be found, it will be at the personal level, the level at which states of whole persons, as such, appear. We take exception to this orthodoxy, or at least to its unquestioned status. We argue that subpersonal states play a significant – arguably, primary – role in much epistemically relevant cognition and thus constitute a domain in which we might reasonably expect to locate the " missing source " of epistemic value, beyond the value attached to mere true belief. Building upon this idea, various subpersonal approaches to the value problem are canvassed and shown to have unappreciated advantages over competing personal-level accounts. The emerging picture suggests that the solution to the problem of epistemic value may well lie a level below the surface traditionally explored and opens up a range of possibilities hitherto underexplored.
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An interesting aspect of Ernest Sosa's (2017) recent thinking is that enhanced performances (e.g., the performance of an athlete under the influence of a performance-enhancing drug) fall short of aptness, and this is because such enhanced... more
An interesting aspect of Ernest Sosa's (2017) recent thinking is that enhanced performances (e.g., the performance of an athlete under the influence of a performance-enhancing drug) fall short of aptness, and this is because such enhanced performances do not issue from genuine competences on the part of the agent. In this paper, I explore in some detail the implications of such thinking in Sosa's wider virtue epistemology, with a focus on cases of cognitive enhancement. A certain puzzle is then highlighted, and the solution proposed draws from both the recent moral responsibility literature on guidance control (e.g., Fischer and Ravizza 2000; Fischer 2012) as well as from work on cognitive integration in the philosophy of mind and cognitive science (e.g., Clark and Chalmers 1998; Clark 2008; Pritchard 2010; Palermos 2014; Carter 2017).
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Note: This is draft of a review of Ernest Sosa's 2017 book _Epistemology_ for Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews. Comments welcome.
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According to Paul Boghossian (2006, 73) a core tenet of epistemic relativism is what he calls epistemic pluralism, according to which (i) 'there are many fundamentally different, genuinely alternative epistemic systems' , but (ii) 'no... more
According to Paul Boghossian (2006, 73) a core tenet of epistemic relativism is what he calls epistemic pluralism, according to which (i) 'there are many fundamentally different, genuinely alternative epistemic systems' , but (ii) 'no facts by virtue of which one of these systems is more correct than any of the others'. Embracing the former claim is more or less uncontroversial– viz., a descriptive fact about epistemic diversity. The latter claim by contrast is very controversial. Interestingly, the Wittgenstenian 'hinge' epistemologist, in virtue of maintaining that rational evaluation is essentially local, will (arguably, at least) be committed to the more controversial leg of the epistemic pluralist thesis, simply in virtue of countenancing the descriptive leg. This paper does three central things. First, it is shown that this 'relativistic' reading of Wittgenstein's epis-temology is plausible only if the locality of rational evaluation (in conjunction with a reasonable appreciation of epistemic diversity) commits the Wittgenstenian to a further epistemic incom-mensurability thesis. Next, Duncan Pritchard's (e.g., 2009; 2015) novel attempt to save the hinge epistemologist from a commitment to epistemic incommensurability is canvassed and critiqued. Finally, it is suggested how, regardless of whether Pritchard's strategy is successful, there might be another very different way—drawing from recent work by John MacFarlane (2014)—for the hinge epistemologist to embrace epistemic pluralism while steering clear of epistemic relativism, understood in a very specific way.
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The primary aim of this paper is to expose a hitherto unnoticed metaepistemological mistake which features in various prominent arguments for epistemic relativism. In particular, I show that—at a crucial juncture—several popular strands... more
The primary aim of this paper is to expose a hitherto unnoticed metaepistemological mistake which features in various prominent arguments for epistemic relativism. In particular, I show that—at a crucial juncture—several popular strands of argument for epistemic relativism trade indispensably on a special instance of the naturalistic fallacy. Once this point is highlighted and sharpened, it will be shown that the would-be epistemic relativist faces a dilemma: either embrace the naturalistic fallacy (and all that this entails) or accept that, without committing this fallacy, the relativist's own argument ultimately supports relativism no more than scepticism.
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Diversity abounds, and typically, disagreement is not far behind. Unsurprisingly, when initial starting points are far enough apart (take for example, the famous 17th century dispute between Galileo and Cardinal Bellarmine) the ensuing... more
Diversity abounds, and typically, disagreement is not far behind. Unsurprisingly, when initial starting points are far enough apart (take for example, the famous 17th century dispute between Galileo and Cardinal Bellarmine) the ensuing disagreements can appear rationally irreconcilable. Some philosophers such as Richard Rorty (1979) have taken the presence of such disagreements as evidence for epistemic relativism. The present aim will be to canvass this general argument strategy, which moves from diversity to disagreement to epistemic relativism. In the course of doing so, objections will be raised to various forms that this argument has taken, and, finally, I'll contrast traditional forms of the diversity-disagreement-relativism sequence with a more contemporary, linguistically driven variant that has been defended in recent work by John MacFarlane (e.g., 2007; 2014).
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Epistemology is, roughly, the philosophical theory of knowledge, its nature and scope. What is the status of epistemological claims? Relativists regard the status of (at least some kinds of) epistemological claims as, in some way,... more
Epistemology is, roughly, the philosophical theory of knowledge, its nature and scope. What is the status of epistemological claims? Relativists regard the status of (at least some kinds of) epistemological claims as, in some way, relative--viz., that the truths which (some kinds of) epistemological claims aspire to are relative truths. Self-described relativists vary, sometimes dramatically, in how they think about relative truth and what a commitment to it involves. Section 1 outlines some of these key differences and distinguishes between broadly two kinds of approaches to epistemic relativism. Proposals under the description of traditional epistemic relativism are the focus of Sections 2-4. These are, (i) arguments that appeal in some way to the Pyrrhonian problematic; (ii) arguments that appeal to apparently irreconcilable disagreements (e.g., as in the famous dispute between Galileo versus Bellarmine); and (iii) arguments that appeal to the alleged incommensurability of epistemic systems or frameworks. New (semantic) epistemic relativism, a linguistically motivated form of epistemic relativism defended in the most sophistication by John MacFarlane (e.g., 2014), is the focus of Sections 5-6. According MacFarlane’s brand of epistemic relativism, whether a given knowledge-ascribing sentence is true depends on the epistemic standards at play in what he calls the context of assessment, which is the context in which the knowledge ascription (e.g., ‘Galileo knows the earth revolves around the sun’) is being assessed for truth or falsity. Because the very same knowledge ascription can be assessed for truth or falsity from indefinitely many perspectives, knowledge-ascribing sentences do not get their truth values absolutely, but only relatively. The entry concludes by canvassing some of the potential ramifications this more contemporary form of epistemic relativism has for projects in mainstream epistemology.
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Intellectual autonomy has long been identified as an epistemic virtue, one that has been championed influentially by (among others) Kant, Hume and Emerson. Manifesting intellectual autonomy, at least, in a virtuous way, does not require... more
Intellectual autonomy has long been identified as an epistemic virtue, one that has been championed influentially by (among others) Kant, Hume and Emerson. Manifesting intellectual autonomy, at least, in a virtuous way, does not require that we form our beliefs in cognitive isolation. Rather, as Roberts and Wood (2007, 259–60) note, intellectually virtuous autonomy involves reliance and outsourcing (e.g., on other individuals, technology, medicine, etc.) to an appropriate extent, while at the same time maintaining intellectual self-direction. In this essay, I want to investigate the ramifications for intellectual autonomy of a particular kind of epistemic dependence: cognitive enhancement. Cognitive enhancements (as opposed to therapeutic cogni-tive improvements) involve the use of technology and medicine to improve cognitive capacities in healthy individuals, through mechanisms ranging from smart drugs to brain-computer interfaces. With reference to case studies in bioethics, as well as the philosophy of mind and cognitive science, it is shown that epistemic dependence, in this extreme form, poses a prima facie threat to the retention of intellectual autonomy, specifically, by threatening to undermine our intellectual self-direction. My aim will be to show why certain kinds of cognitive enhancements are subject to this objection from self-direction, while others are not. Once this is established, we'll see that even some extreme kinds of cognitive enhancement might be not merely compatible with, but constitutive of, virtuous intellectual autonomy.
Research Interests: Cognitive Psychology, Philosophy, Philosophy of Mind, Epistemology, Applied Ethics, and 15 moreBioethics, Virtue Ethics, Virtues (Moral Psychology), Neuroethics, Medical Ethics, Personal and Moral Autonomy, Extended Mind, Social Epistemology, Autonomy, Virtue Epistemology, Human Enhancement, Cognitive Bias, Extended Cognition, Neuroethics, Bioethics, and Cognitive Enhancement
An account of meta-epistemic defeaters—distinct from traditional (first-order) epistemic defeaters—is motivated and defended, drawing from case studies involving epistemic error-theory (e.g., Olson 2011; cf., Streumer 2012) and epistemic... more
An account of meta-epistemic defeaters—distinct from traditional (first-order) epistemic defeaters—is motivated and defended, drawing from case studies involving epistemic error-theory (e.g., Olson 2011; cf., Streumer 2012) and epistemic relativism (e.g., MacFarlane 2005; 2011; 2014). Mechanisms of traditional epistemic defeat and meta-epistemic defeat are compared and contrasted, and some new puzzles are introduced.
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Virtue epistemology—no less than mainstream epistemology more generally—has by and large taken for granted the traditional intracranial picture of the mind, according to which the skull and skin mark the bounds of human cognizing. It is... more
Virtue epistemology—no less than mainstream epistemology more generally—has by and large taken for granted the traditional intracranial picture of the mind, according to which the skull and skin mark the bounds of human cognizing. It is only natural then that intellectual virtues themselves have typically been understood as seated firmly within the biological agent. Recent work in the philosophy of mind and cognitive science (e.g., Clark 2008; Clark and Chalmers 1998), however, challenges this traditional account of the mind by suggesting that cognitive processes can criss-cross the boundaries of brain, body and world, so as to include certain parts of the world which we regularly interact with. But if cognition can extend in such a way that physical, extra-organismic artifacts (e.g., iPhones, smartwatches, tactile-visual substitution systems, etc.) can feature in cognitive processes such as memory, perception and the like, what does this mean for virtue epistemology? The aim here will be to attempt to answer this broad question in two parts. First I outline how the extended cognition thesis interfaces with the virtue reliabilist (e.g., Greco 2010; 2012; Sosa 2009; 2015) and virtue responsibilist (e.g., Baehr 2011; Battaly 2015; Montmarquet 1993) programmes in contemporary virtue epistemology, respectively. Next, I propose and briefly develop what I take to be four of the most important new research questions which arise for virtue epistemologists who welcome aboard the possibility of ‘extended’ intellectual virtues—viz., (i) the parity problem, (ii) the achievement problem, (iii) the cognitive integration problem, and (iv) the autonomy problem.
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In Chapter 3 of Judgment and Agency, Ernest Sosa (2015) explicates the concept of a fully apt performance. In the course of doing so, he draws from illustrative examples of practical performances and applies lessons drawn to the case of... more
In Chapter 3 of Judgment and Agency, Ernest Sosa (2015) explicates the concept of a fully apt performance. In the course of doing so, he draws from illustrative examples of practical performances and applies lessons drawn to the case of cognitive performances, and in particular, to the cognitive performance of judging. Sosa's examples in the practical sphere are rich and instructive. But there is, I will argue, an important disanalogy between the practical and cognitive examples he relies on. The disanalogy turns on a problematic picture of the cognitive performance of guessing and its connection to aptness, knowledge and defeat. Once this critical line of argument is advanced, an alternative picture of guessing, qua cognitive performance, is articulated, one which avoids the problems discussed.
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Addressing the ‘virtue conflation’ problem requires the preservation of intuitive distinctions between virtue types, i.e, between intellectual and moral virtues. According to one influential attempt to avoid this problem proposed by Julia... more
Addressing the ‘virtue conflation’ problem requires the preservation of intuitive distinctions between virtue types, i.e, between intellectual and moral virtues. According to one influential attempt to avoid this problem proposed by Julia Driver (2003), moral virtues produce benefits to others—in particular, they promote the well-being of others—while the intellectual virtues, as such, produce epistemic good for the agent. We show that Driver’s demarcation of intellectual virtue, by adverting to the self/other distinction, leads to a reductio, and ultimately, that the prospects for resolving the virtue conflation problem look dim within an epistemic consequentialist axiology.
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Relativists about knowledge ascriptions think that whether a particular use of a knowledge-ascribing sentence, e.g., “Keith knows that the bank is open” is true depends on the epistemic standards at play in the assessor’s context—viz.,... more
Relativists about knowledge ascriptions think that whether a particular use of a knowledge-ascribing sentence, e.g., “Keith knows that the bank is open” is true depends on the epistemic standards at play in the assessor’s context—viz., the context in which the knowledge ascription is being assessed for truth or falsity. Given that the very same knowledge-ascription can be assessed for truth or falsity from indefinitely many perspectives, relativism has a striking consequence. When I ascribe knowledge to someone (e.g., when I say that, at a particular time, “Keith knows that the bank is open”), what I’ve said does not get a truth-value absolutely, but only relatively. If this semantic thesis about the word “knows” and its cognates is true, what implications would this have for epistemology, the philosophical theory of knowledge? The present aim will be to engage with this mostly unexplored question, and then to consider how the epistemological conclusions drawn might bear on the plausibility of a relativist semantics for “knows”.
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In recent work, Mark Alfano (2012; 2014) and Jennifer Saul (2013) have put forward a similar kind of provocative sceptical challenge. Both appeal to recent literature in empirical psychology to show that our judgments across a wide range... more
In recent work, Mark Alfano (2012; 2014) and Jennifer Saul (2013) have put forward a similar kind of provocative sceptical challenge. Both appeal to recent literature in empirical psychology to show that our judgments across a wide range of cases are riddled with unreliable cognitive heuristics and biases. Likewise, they both conclude that we know a lot less than we have hitherto supposed, at least on standard conceptions of what knowledge involves. It is argued that even if one grants the empirical claims that Saul and Alfano make, the sceptical conclusion that they canvass might not be as dramatic as it first appears. It is further argued, however, that one can reinstate a more dramatic sceptical conclusion by targeting their argument not at knowledge but rather at the distinct (and distinctively valuable) epistemic standing of understanding.
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Knowledge, like other things of value, can be faked. According to Hawley (2011), knowhow is harder to fake than knowledge-that, given that merely apparent propositional knowledge is in general more resilient to our attempts at successful... more
Knowledge, like other things of value, can be faked. According to Hawley (2011), knowhow is harder to fake than knowledge-that, given that merely apparent propositional knowledge is in general more resilient to our attempts at successful detection than are corresponding attempts to fake know-how. While Hawley's reasoning for a kind of detection resilience asymmetry between know-how and know-that looks initially plausible, it should ultimately be resisted. In showing why, we outline different ways in which knowhow can be faked even when a given performance is successful; and in doing so, we distinguish how know-how can be faked (no less than know-that) via upstream and downstream indicators of its presence, and within each of these categories, we'll distinguish (in connection with detection resilience) both faking symptoms and (various kinds of) criteria. The unappreciated resilience of faked knowledge-how to successful detection highlights a largely overlooked dimension of social-epistemic risk-risk we face not just in our capacity as recipients of testimony, but in our capacity as both (would-be) apprentices and clients of knowledge-how.