Revisiting Confucian Jen Ethics and Feminist Care Ethics: A Reply to Daniel Star and Lijun Yuan

At two fronts I defend my 1994 article. I argue that differences between Confucian jen ethics and feminist care ethics do not preclude their shared commonalities in comparison with Kantian. utilitarian, and contractarian ethics, and that Confucians do care. I also argue that Confucianism is capable of changing its rules to reflect its renewed understanding of jen, that care ethics is feminist, and that similarities between Confucian and care ethics have significant implications.     

A Priori Knowledge of the World: Knowing the World by Knowing our Minds

Philosophical Studies -     

Knowing The World By Knowing One's Mind

This paper addresses the question whetherintrospection plus externalism about mental contentwarrant an a priori refutation of external-worldskepticism and ontological solipsism. The suggestionis that if thought content is partly determined byaffairs in the environment and if we can havenon-empirical knowledge of our current thoughtcontents, we can, just by reflection, know about theworld around us – we can know that our environment ispopulated with content-determining entities. Afterexamining this type of transcendental argument anddiscussing various objections found in the literature,I argue that the notion of privileged self-knowledgeunderlying this argument presupposes that we canlearn, via introspection, that our so-called thoughtsare propositional attitudes rather than contentlessstates. If, however, externalism is correct andthought content consists in the systematic dependencyof internal states on relational properties, we cannotknow non-empirically whether or not we havepropositional attitudes. Self-knowledge (apropositional attitude) is consistent with us lackingthe ability to rule out, via introspection, thepossibility that we don't have any propositionalattitudes. Self-knowledge provides us with knowledgeof what is in our minds, but not that we haveminds. Hence, the combination of externalism with thedoctrine of privileged self-knowledge does not allowfor an a priori refutation of skepticism and istherefore unproblematic.     

Beliefless Knowing

Orthodox epistemology tells us that knowledge requires belief. While there has been resistance to orthodoxy on this point, the orthodox position has been ably defended and continues to be widely endorsed. In what follows, I aim to undermine the belief requirement on knowledge. I first show that awareness does not require belief. Next, I turn my attention to the relation between knowledge and awareness, showing that awareness entails knowledge in a certain range of cases and thus that the cases of awareness without belief that I discuss are also cases of knowledge without belief. Throughout I draw attention to the fact that these are not isolated cases and that beliefless knowledge is a rather common phenomenon. I conclude by arguing that beliefless knowledge is consistent with the idea that all knowledge is grounded in belief and the idea that knowledge is essentially a representational state.     

Non-Accidental Knowing

Knowledge excludes luck. According to the received view, this intuition reveals that knowing is essentially modal in character. This paper demurs. Either knowledge does not exclude luck, or the entailment reveals nothing about its conceptual character. It is argued that knowledge excludes accidentality, and that this notion is not modal but causal-explanatory. There are three central tasks. The first is to explicate the concept of accident. The second is to argue that the concepts of luck and accident are “intensionally distinct,” which is to say that no member of the intension of either holds on both. The third is to argue that an anti-accident requirement on knowledge is preferable to an anti-luck analogue on abductive grounds.     

Knowing not

Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, 252 Bloor Street, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M5S 1V6 People often know rapidly and reliably that they do not know something. A review of contemporary theory reveals that the issue has not received much attention; moreover, the accounts available assume that recognition that one does not know something is achieved only by failure to establish that one does know it. A reaction time experiment assessed two aspects of knowing not, by asking people whether they knew common nouns well enough to use them in sentences and whether they had visited certain cities. The findings were that affirmations of negation were often more rapid than positive reports; hence, the account of knowing not as the complement of knowing that something is the case is not necessarily correct. We suggest that knowing not may be attained as rapidly as positive knowledge on the basis of ability to carry out analytical procedures.