Knowing and Not‐Knowing For Your Own Good: The Limits of Epistemic Paternalism

Epistemic paternalism is the thesis that a paternalistic interference with an individual's inquiry is justified when it is likely to bring about an epistemic improvement in her. In this article I claim that in order to motivate epistemic paternalism we must first account for the value of epistemic improvements. I propose that the epistemic paternalist has two options: either epistemic improvements are valuable because they contribute to wellbeing, or they are epistemically valuable. I will argue that these options constitute the foundations of a dilemma: either epistemic paternalism collapses into general paternalism, or a distinctive project of justified epistemic paternalism is implausible.     

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.     

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.     

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.     

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.     

Outside‐In: Jung's myth of interiority ambiguated. Or ‐ Knowing me,Knowing Jung – ahah!

Given his lifelong battle against one‐sidedness Jung's persistent prioritising of the ‘inner life’ over the ‘outer’ can seem problematic. The question is raised as to whether an approach that seems to verge uncomfortably close to solipsism can sometimes render Jung blind to the intuition that psychic life is constituted by an on‐going interplay between inner and outer, self and other (an intuition that he himself sometimes articulated so brilliantly). The ‘ambiguation’ of Jung's work offers an opportunity to confront this problem by utilising a critical dynamic that is consistent with Jung's psychological insights.     

Knowing in the “Executive Way”: Knowing How,Rules, Methods,Principles and Criteria

I advance a variety of intellectualism about knowing‐how that is, paradoxically, suggested by Ryle's positive discussions of that phenomenon. I discuss the roots of the view in Ryle's work, its affinity with John Hyman's (2015) view of factual knowledge, and important points of contrast with Stanley and Williamson's (2001) proposal. Drawing on work by Cath (2015) and Wiggins (2012) I also discuss conditions on knowing practically, in ‘the executive way’, as an alternative to appealing to practical modes of presentation.     

Knowing Your Ability

In this article, we present an attempt to reconcile intellectualism and the anti‐intellectualist ability account of knowledge‐how by reducing “S knows how to F” to, roughly speaking, “S knows that she has the ability to F demonstrated by a concrete way w.” More precisely, “S has a certain ability” is further formalized as the proposition that S can guarantee a certain goal by a concrete way w of some method under some precondition. Having the knowledge of our own ability, we can plan our future actions accordingly, which would not be possible by merely having the ability without knowing it, and this pinpoints the crucial difference between knowledge‐how and ability. Our semi‐formal account avoids most of the objections to both intellectualism and the anti‐intellectualist ability account, and provides a multistage learning process of knowledge‐how, which reveals various subtleties.     

Knowing Other People: A Second‐Person Framework

What does it mean to know another person, and how is such knowledge different from other kinds of knowledge? These questions constitute an important part of what I call ‘second‐person epistemology’ – the study of how we know other people. I claim that knowledge of other people is not only central to our everyday lives, but it is a kind of knowledge that is unlike other kinds of knowledge. In general, I will argue that second‐person knowledge arises from repeated interactions with another person, and that it also requires employment of certain cognitive abilities and a unique kind of second‐order knowledge. This paper provides the framework for a second‐person epistemology by examining some of our ordinary claims about what it means to know another person. I describe four conditions that typically characterize knowing another person. Then I describe the psychological grounds of knowing a person. Finally, I conclude with some thoughts about the unique symmetries of second person knowledge and the role of such knowledge in our broader epistemological endeavours.