Pragmatic encroachment,stakes, and religious knowledge

It is commonly held that epistemic standards for S’s knowledge that p are affected by practical considerations, such as what is at stake in decisions that are guided by that p. I defend a particular view as to why this is, that is referred to as “pragmatic encroachment.” I then discuss a “new argument against miracles” that uses stakes considerations in order to explore the conditions under which stakes affect the level of epistemic support that is required for knowledge. Finally, I generalize my results to include other religiously significant propositions such as “God exists” and “God does not exist.”     

Self‐deception and pragmatic encroachment: A dilemma for epistemic rationality

Self‐deception is typically considered epistemically irrational, for it involves holding certain doxastic attitudes against strong counter‐evidence. Pragmatic encroachment about epistemic rationality says that whether it is epistemically rational to believe, withhold belief or disbelieve something can depend on perceived practical factors of one's situation. In this paper I argue that some cases of self‐deception satisfy what pragmatic encroachment considers sufficient conditions for epistemic rationality. As a result, we face the following dilemma: either we revise the received view about self‐deception or we deny pragmatic encroachment on epistemic rationality. I suggest that the dilemma can be solved if we pay close attention to the distinction between ideal and bounded rationality. I argue that the problematic cases fail to meet standards of ideal rationality but exemplify bounded rationality. The solution preserves pragmatic encroachment on bounded rationality, but denies it on ideal rationality.     

Contextualism and fallibility: pragmatic encroachment, possibility, and strength of epistemic position

A critique of conversational epistemic contextualism focusing initially on why pragmatic encroachment for knowledge is to be avoided. The data for pragmatic encroachment by way of greater costs of error and the complementary means to raise standards of introducing counter-possibilities are argued to be accountable for by prudence, fallibility and pragmatics. This theme is sharpened by a contrast in recommendations: holding a number of factors constant, when allegedly higher standards for knowing hold, invariantists still recommend assertion (action), while contextualists do not. Given the knowledge norm of assertion, if one recommendation is preferable to the other, the result favors the preferred recommendation??s account of knowledge. In the final section, I offer a unification of these criticisms centering on the contextualist use of ??epistemic position??. Their use imposes on threshold notions of justification, warrant, or knowledge tests that are suitable only to unlimited comparative or scalar notions like confidence or certainty and places them at one with an important strand of sceptical reasoning.     

Pragmatic versus form-based accounts of referential contrast: evidence for effects of informativity expectations

Characterizing the relationship between form-based linguistic knowledge and representation of context has long been of importance in the study of on-line language processing. Recent experimental research has shown evidence of very rapid effects of referential context in resolving local indeterminacies on-line. However, there has been no consensus regarding the nature of these context effects. The current paper summarizes recent work covering a range of phenomena for which referential contrast has been shown to influence on-line processing, including prenominal and postnominal modification, focus operators, and intonational focus. The results of the body of work suggest that referential context effects are not limited to situations in which the linguistic form of the utterance directly specifies the point of contact with context. Rather, context effects of a pragmatic, Gricean nature appear to be possible, suggesting the relationship between linguistic form and context in rapid on-line processing can be of a very indirect nature.     

Socialising epistemic risk: On the risks of epistemic injustice

Epistemic risk is of central importance to epistemology nowadays: one common way in which a belief can fail to be knowledge is by being formed in an epistemically risky way, that is, a way that makes it true by luck. Recently, epistemologists have been expanding this rather narrow conception of risk in every direction, except arguably the most obvious one—to enable it to accommodate the increasingly commonplace thought that knowledge has an irreducibly social dimension. This paper fills this lacuna by bringing issues of epistemic injustice to bear on epistemic risk. In particular, it draws on the phenomenon of white ignorance, to sketch a more social notion of epistemic risk, on which the interests of one's epistemic community partly determine whether a belief-forming procedure is epistemically risky.     

Disentangling the course of epistemic development: parsing knowledge by epistemic content

Over the past three decades, research into the developmental course by means of which persons come to an increasingly mature conception of the knowing process has yielded an highly defracted picture. Despite some concert of opinion about the general bill of particulars, what remains deeply problematic is the increasingly radical disagreement that has arisen regarding the ages at which major milestones in the course of epistemic development are said to be reached. As a way of making some sense of these competing claims, it is argued that the emerging insight that knowledge is ineluctably shaped by those doing the knowing (i.e., that there is an unavoidable “world-to-mind direction of fit” (J.R. Searle, Intentionality: An Essay in the Philosophy of Mind, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1983) between things in the world and the manner of their understanding) does not arrive in a single piece. Instead, as the data presented here help to illustrate, an appreciation of the constructed character of knowledge more commonly arrives piecemeal and at different ontogenetic moments, the times of which are governed by the place that different objects of knowledge occupy along an envisioned continuum of diverse epistemic contents. On this account, not all “facts of the matter” are ordinarily seen to occupy the same epistemic footing. Rather, some so-called facts are commonly understood to be of an “institutional” sort, where “representational” diversity is early expected and widely tolerated. By contrast, other objects of knowledge are imagined to be more like “brute” facts that, on some less mature readings, fully escape the clutches of subjective opinion. Viewed against the backcloth of this proposed continuum, a developmental sequence hypothesized according to which growing persons first come to view “institutional” facts as humanly constructed before subsequently coming to a similar view about presumptively “brute” facts. To test this hypothesis, 242 young persons were administered a paper and pencil measure of epistemic reasoning (the EDQ). Results strongly support the hypothesis that respondents understood the interpretive nature of beliefs about “institutional” facts at an earlier age than so-called “brute” facts.     

States of excellence

Research from the individual-differences tradition pertinent to the optimal development of exceptional talent is reviewed, using the theory of work adjustment (TWA) to organize fundings. The authors show how TWA concepts and psychometric methods, when used together, can facilitate positive development among talented youth by aligning learning opportunities with salient aspects of each student's individuality. Longitudinal research and more general theoretical models of (adult) academic and intellectual development support this approach. This analysis also uncovers common threads running through several positive psychological concepts (e.g., effectance motivation, flow, and peak experiences). The authors conclude by underscoring some important ideals from counseling psychology for fostering intellectual development and psychological well-being. These include conducting a multifaceted assessment, focusing on strength, helping people make choices, and providing a developmental context for bridging educational and industrial psychology to facilitate positive psychological growth throughout the life span.     

The epistemic normativity of conjecture

Philosophical Studies - This paper has two aims: (1) it develops and defends a fully-fledged account of the epistemic normativity of conjecture (2) it goes sharply against orthodoxy, in arguing...     

Deontic and epistemic reasoning in children

It is widely accepted that adults show an advantage for deontic over epistemic reasoning. Two published studies (Cummins, 1996b; Harris and Núñez, 1996, Experiment 4) found evidence of this “deontic advantage” in preschool-aged children and are frequently cited as evidence that preschoolers show the same deontic advantage as adults. However, neither study has been replicated, and it is not clear from either study that preschoolers were showing the deontic advantage under the same conditions as adults. The current research investigated these issues. Experiment 1 attempted to replicate both Cummins’s and Harris and Núñez’s studies with 3- and 4-year-olds (N = 56), replicating the former with 4-year-olds and the latter with both 3- and 4-year-olds. Experiment 2 modified Cummins’s task to remove the contextual differences between conditions, making it more similar to adult tasks, finding that 4-year-olds (n = 16) show no evidence of the deontic advantage when no authority figure is present in the deontic condition, whereas both 7-year-olds (n = 16) and adults (n = 28) do. Experiment 3 removed the authority figure from the deontic condition in Harris and Núñez’s task, again finding that 3- and 4-year-olds (N = 28) show no evidence of the deontic advantage under these conditions. These results suggest that for preschoolers, the deontic advantage is reliant on particular contextual cues such as the presence of an authority figure, in the deontic condition. By 7 years of age, however, children are reasoning like adults and show evidence of the advantage when no such contextual cues are present.     

Parameterizing developmental changes in epistemic trust

Children rely on others for much of what they learn, and therefore must track who to trust for information. Researchers have debated whether to interpret children’s behavior as inferences about informants’ knowledgeability only or as inferences about both knowledgeability and intent. We introduce a novel framework for integrating results across heterogeneous ages and methods. The framework allows application of a recent computational model to a set of results that span ages 8 months to adulthood and a variety of methods. The results show strong fits to specific findings in the literature trust, and correctly fails to fit one representative result from an adjacent literature. In the aggregate, the results show a clear development in children’s reasoning about informants’ intent and no appreciable changes in reasoning about informants’ knowledgeability, confirming previous results. The results extend previous findings by modeling development over a much wider age range and identifying and explaining differences across methods.     

The epistemic efficacy of stupidity

I show that it follows from both externalist and internalist theories that stupid people may be in a better position to know than smart ones. This untoward consequence results from taking our epistemic goal to be accepting as many truths as possible and rejecting as many falsehoods as possible, combined with a recognition that the standard for acceptability cannot be set too high, else scepticism will prevail. After showing how causal, reliabilist, and coherentist theories devalue intelligence, I suggest that knowledge, as contemporary theories construe it, is not a particularly valuable cognitive achievement, and that we would do well to reopen epistemology to the study of cognitive excellences of all sorts.I am grateful to Warren Goldfarb for sharing his knowledge of wines with me, and to Kenneth Winkler for sharing his knowledge of birds.     

The epistemic significance of consensus

Philosophers have often noted that science displays an uncommon degree of consensus on beliefs among its practitioners. Yet consensus in the sciences is not a goal in itself. I consider cases of consensus on beliefs as concrete events. Consensus on beliefs is neither a sufficient nor a necessary condition for presuming that these beliefs constitute knowledge. A concrete consensus on a set of beliefs by a group of people at a given historical period may be explained by different factors according to various hypotheses. A particularly interesting hypothesis from an epistemic perspective is the knowledge hypothesis: shared knowledge explains a consensus on beliefs. If all the alternative hypotheses to the knowledge hypotheses are false or are not as good in explaining a concrete consensus on beliefs, the knowledge hypothesis is the best explanation of the consensus. If the knowledge hypothesis is best, a consensus becomes a plausible, though fallible, indicator of knowledge. I argue that if a consensus on beliefs is uncoerced, uniquely heterogeneous and large, the gap between the likelihood of the consensus given the knowledge hypothesis and its likelihoods given competing hypotheses tends to increase significantly. Consensus is a better indicator of knowledge than “success” or “human flourishing”.     

The virtues of epistemic conservatism

Although several important methodologies implicitly assume the truth of epistemic conservatism, the view that holding a belief confers some measure of justification on the belief, recent criticisms have led some to conclude that epistemic conservatism is an implausible view. That conclusion is mistaken. In this article, I propose a new formulation of epistemic conservatism that is not susceptible to the criticisms leveled at earlier formulations of epistemic conservatism. In addition to withstanding these criticisms, this formulation of epistemic conservatism has several benefits. First, this formulation has the benefits of earlier formulations of epistemic conservatism, that is to say it makes sense of our intuitions about justification in regard to both memory beliefs and beliefs for which we have forgotten our evidence. Second, it provides a good way of responding to the skeptic’s challenge concerning the possibility of possessing knowledge of the external world posed by the Alternative Hypotheses argument. Third, it provides responses to both forms of a new skeptical problem plaguing basic knowledge structure theories, the Problem of Easy Knowledge formulated by Stewart Cohen. I argue that given the many benefits of this formulation of epistemic conservatism and the fact that it is not vulnerable to the criticisms that undermine earlier formulations of epistemic conservatism, this formulation of epistemic conservatism is a plausible view to maintain.