Knowledge in Action

This paper argues that the role of knowledge in the explanation and production of intentional action is as indispensable as the roles of belief and desire. If we are interested in explaining intentional actions rather than intentions or attempts, we need to make reference to more than the agent's beliefs and desires. It is easy to see how the truth of your beliefs, or perhaps, facts about a setting will be involved in the explanation of an action. If you believe you can stop your car by pressing a pedal, then, if your belief is true, you will stop. If it is false, you will not. By considering cases of unintentional actions, actions involving luck and cases of deviant causal chains, I show why knowledge is required. By looking at the notion of causal relevance, I argue that the connection between knowledge and action is causal and not merely conceptual.
"What knowledge adds to belief is not psychologically relevant." ¹ —Stephen Stich     

The paradox(es) of pitying and fearing fictions

The acknowledged paradox in our emotional response to fictional characters and events is that the very beliefs required by a cognitive account of the emotions are excluded by knowledge that the context is fictional. Various proposed solutions have failed to reconcile cognitivism with respect to the emotions with the facts of that response. Those offered include denying cognitivism by excluding the belief on the emotions, denying genuine emotional response in these contexts, or advocating either fictional realism or irrationalism in such response. By specifically examining pity and fear this paper tries to reconcile genuine emotional response to fictional characters and events with a unified cognitive account of the emotions by arguing that instead of excluding belief the existential condition on the beliefs in an emotion can be lifted by the invitation to imagine. At the same time it shows that the richness of that response need not be denied and throws some light on further related paradoxes (for instance by indicating why not all emotions are rationally possible in fictive contexts and that although we can pity fictions we cannot rationally fear them). Then by explaining why, unlike in ordinary contexts we do not act on our emotions in fictive ones, it differentiates the reasons for passivity in fictional and in historical circumstances.     

Making Room at the Table: Lutheran Ministry in a Religiously Plural America

Religious pluralism is a part of the American experience. This article proposes that Christianity in the United States is not under attack, as some claim, but that such religiosity has been a part of the American experience from the very beginning. Such diversity is now more public and acceptable. This reality requires clergy and lay leaders to develop skills to help their congregations navigate their ongoing multi‐faith relationships within families, at work, school, and within civic organizations. The article argues that Christian faithfulness is not a matter of changing what we believe in response to religious pluralism, but how we articulate our beliefs in such a context. Finally, the author proposes several practical guidelines for developing such pastoral skills through the use of Luther's Catechisms.     

A Puzzle Concerning Time Perception

According to a plausible and influential account of perceptual knowledge, the truth-makers of beliefs that constitute perceptual knowledge must feature in the causal explanation of how we acquire those beliefs. However, this account runs into difficulties when it tries to accommodate time perception – specifically perception of order and duration – since the features we are apparently tracking in such perception are (it is argued) not causal. The central aim of the paper is to solve this epistemological puzzle. Two strategies are examined. The first strategy locates the causal truth-makers within the psychological mechanism underlying time perception, thus treating facts about time order and duration as mind-dependent. This strategy, however, is problematic. The second strategy modifies the causal account of perceptual knowledge to include a non-causal component in the explanation of belief-acquisition, namely chronometric explanation. Applying this much more satisfactory approach to perceptual knowledge of time, we can preserve the mind-independence of order and duration, but not that of time's flow.     

Introspection,mindreading, and the transparency of belief

This paper explores the nature of self‐knowledge of beliefs by investigating the relationship between self‐knowledge of beliefs and one's knowledge of other people's beliefs. It introduces and defends a new account of self‐knowledge of beliefs according to which this type of knowledge is developmentally interconnected with and dependent on resources already used for acquiring knowledge of other people's beliefs, which is inferential in nature. But when these resources are applied to oneself, one attains and subsequently frequently uses a method for acquiring knowledge of beliefs that is non‐inferential in nature. The paper argues that this account is preferable to some of the most common empirically motivated theories of self‐knowledge of beliefs and explains the origin of the widely discussed phenomenon that our own beliefs are often transparent to us in that we can determine whether we believe that p simply by settling whether p is the case.     

THE MAKING OF EXTRAORDINARY PSYCHOLOGICAL PHENOMENA

This article considers the extraordinary phenomena that have been central to unorthodox areas of psychological knowledge. It shows how even the agreed facts relating to mesmerism, spiritualism, psychical research, and parapsychology have been framed as evidence both for and against the reality of the phenomena. It argues that these disputes can be seen as a means through which beliefs have been formulated and maintained in the face of potentially challenging evidence. It also shows how these disputes appealed to different forms of expertise, and that both sides appealed to belief in various ways as part of the ongoing dispute about both the facts and expertise. Finally, it shows how, when a formal Psychology of paranormal belief emerged in the twentieth century, it took two different forms, each reflecting one side of the ongoing dispute about the reality of the phenomena.     

Old Wine in New Bottles

Evolutionary debunking arguments (EDAs) purport to show that robust moral realism, the metaethical view that there are non-natural and mind-independent moral properties and facts that we can know about, is incompatible with evolutionary explanations of morality. One of the most prominent evolutionary debunking arguments is advanced by Sharon Street, who argues that if moral realism were true, then objective moral knowledge is unlikely because realist moral properties are evolutionary irrelevant and moral beliefs about those properties would not be selected for. However, no evolutionary, causal explanation plays an essential role in reaching the argument’s epistemological conclusion. Street’s argument depends on the Benacerraf-Field challenge, which is the challenge to explain the reliability of our moral beliefs about causally inert moral properties. The Benacerraf-Field challenge relies on metaphysically necessary facts about realist moral properties, rather than on contingent Darwinian facts about the origin of our moral beliefs. Attempting to include an essential causal empirical premise yet avoiding recourse to the Benacerraf-Field problem yields an argument that is either self-defeating or of limited scope. Ultimately, evolutionary, causal explanations of our moral beliefs and their consequences do not present the strongest case against robust moral realism. Rather, the question is whether knowledge of casually-inert, mind-intendent properties is plausible at all.     

Evidence and the openness of knowledge

The paper argues that knowledge is not closed under logical inference. The argument proceeds from the openness of evidential support and the dependence of empirical knowledge on evidence, to the conclusion that knowledge is open. Without attempting to provide a full-fledged theory of evidence, we show that on the modest assumption that evidence cannot support both a proposition and its negation, or, alternatively, that information that reduces the probability of a proposition cannot constitute evidence for its truth, the relation of evidential support is not closed under known entailment. Therefore the evidence-for relation is deductively open regardless of whether evidence is probabilistic or not. Given even a weak dependence of empirical knowledge on evidence, we argue that empirical knowledge is also open. On this basis, we also respond to the strongest argument in support of knowledge closure (Hawthorne 2004a). Finally, we present a number of significant benefits of our position, namely, offering a unified explanation for a range of epistemological puzzles.     

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”.     

Interpretation,Reasons, and Facts

Donald Davidson argues that his interpretivist approach to meaning shows that accounting for the intentionality and objectivity of thought does not require an appeal, as John McDowell has urged it does, to a specifically rational relation between mind and world. Moreover, Davidson claims that the idea of such a relation is unintelligible. This paper takes issue with these claims. It shows, first, that interpretivism, contra Davidson's express view, does not depend essentially upon an appeal to a causal relation between events in the world and speakers' beliefs. Second, it shows that interpretivism essentially, if implicitly, depends upon interpreters' appealing to facts taken in in perception, and that such facts are suited to provide a rational connection between mind and world. The paper then argues that none of Davidson's legitimate epistemological arguments tell against the idea that experience, in the form of the propositional contents of perception, can play a role in doxastic economy. Finally, it argues that granting experience such a role is consistent with Davidson's coherentist slogan that nothing can count as a reason for holding a belief except another belief.     

Why We Care Whether Our Beliefs Are True: An Answer to Stephen Stich?

Do we really care whether our beliefs are true? Stephen Stich gives us a very surprising but challenging answer: Once we find out what it means for a belief to be true, the answer to the above question is “a consistently negative” one. He argues that there is neither intrinsic nor instrumental value in having true beliefs. However, his argument is based on some very dubious reasons. For instance, one of his reasons is that if we value true beliefs intrinsically, we will leave out a huge space of mental states that have no truth values but would vastly increase their user’s power or happiness or biological fitness. But this is false because we can value different things intrinsically at the same time. He is even less successful in arguing against instrumental value in having true beliefs. He admits that he does not establish a knockdown argument against the value of having true beliefs, but he insists that the burden of argument be surely on those who maintain that there is value in having true beliefs. To meet his challenge, we have shown that there is cognitive intrinsic value in holding true beliefs and that generally, true beliefs are more conducive to our survival than false beliefs. If we completely depend on our false beliefs to achieve our goals, we will act like a blind cat who can only catch a mouse by chance.     

ON THE COHERENCE OF HIGHER‐ORDER BELIEFS

Let us by ‘first‐order beliefs’ mean beliefs about the world, such as the belief that it will rain tomorrow, and by ‘second‐order beliefs’ let us mean beliefs about the reliability of first‐order, belief‐forming processes. In formal epistemology, coherence has been studied, with much ingenuity and precision, for sets of first‐order beliefs. However, to the best of our knowledge, sets including second‐order beliefs have not yet received serious attention in that literature. In informal epistemology, by contrast, sets of the latter kind play an important role in some respectable coherence theories of knowledge and justification. In this paper, we extend the formal treatment of coherence to second‐order beliefs. Our main conclusion is that while extending the framework to second‐order beliefs sheds doubt on the generality of the notorious impossibility results for coherentism, another problem crops up that might be no less damaging to the coherentist project: facts of coherence turn out to be epistemically accessible only to agents who have a good deal of insight into matters external to their own belief states.     

From Logos to Pathos in Social Psychology and Academic Argumentation: Reconciling Postmodernism and Positivism in a Sociology of Persuasion

This paper argues that one can empirically test, via positivist methods, the post-modern attack on positivist epistemologies: Postmodern perspectives hold Knowledge and Truth to be intersubjective, consensus-driven social constructions. But traditional scientific approaches to knowledge, exemplified here by the cognitive social psychology of persuasion, seem oblivious to this and continue to detach the study of attitudes, beliefs, and emotions from that of knowledge, facts, and reason. Abandoning these artificial distinctions in both epistemology and method would enable this social psychology, reconstituted as a Sociology of Persuasion, to contribute greatly to illuminating the processes of Truth and Knowledge construction in social interaction. Moreover, this would facilitate academic engagement in civic discourse.     

The role of sound intensity and stop-consonant voicing on McGurk fusions and combinations

The present paper argues that generalisation is conservative. Our goal was to experimentally study the links between knowledge generalisation and the storage of contextual elements. The knowledge domain, very simple chess configurations, allowed subjects, novices in chess, to acquire micro-expertise based on the analysis of a single source problem. In the first experimental phase, subjects had to analyse a source problem. We induced two modes of source-problem encoding: In the first group, subjects were given explanations focused on the sequence of elementary solving steps; in the other group they were given the general principle relevant to the category of problems in question. Subjects had then to solve different tests (solving isomorphic problems, recall tests, similarity tests) designed to answer two questions: The first question was to test whether the experimental manipulation in the two groups had in fact generated knowledge that varied in abstractness; the second question was to determine whether generalisation is accompanied by storage of surface features of the source problem. Results show that the knowledge generalisation is conservative. Subjects who generalise their knowledge have a better memory retention of context-dependent elements than the other subjects.     

Epistemic Circularity Squared? Skepticism about Common Sense

Epistemic circularity occurs when a subject forms the belief that a faculty F is reliable through the use of F. Although this is often thought to be vicious, externalist theories generally don't rule it out. For some philosophers, this is a reason to reject externalism. However, Michael Bergmann defends externalism by drawing on the tradition of common sense in two ways. First, he concedes that epistemically circular beliefs cannot answer a subject's doubts about her cognitive faculties. But, he argues, subjects don't have such doubts, so epistemically circular beliefs are rarely called upon to play this role. Second, following Thomas Reid, Bergmann argues that we have noninferential, though epistemically circular, knowledge that our faculties are reliable. I argue, however, that Bergmann's view is undermined by doubts a subject should have and that there is no plausible explanation for how we can have noninferential knowledge that our faculties are reliable.     

Can There Be Brute,Contingent Moral Facts

In this paper I argue that whether or not a world is good can be a contingent fact about the world that is not dependent upon that world's natural facts, or, indeed, upon anyother facts. If so, the property, good, does not supervene upon the facts of nature (or upon any other facts). My argument for this claimis that it is possible to view the very world in which we live (viz. the natural facts that constitute it) as good and to view it as bad.     

How Knowledge Works

The doctrine that knowledge is a species of belief has encouraged philosophers to confuse the question of what knowledge is and the question of how it can be acquired. But we can form a conception of knowledge by asking how knowledge gets expressed in our mental lives and in our conduct, instead of asking where it comes from. Accordingly, knowledge can be defined as the ability to do things, or refrain from doing things, or believe, or want, or doubt things, for reasons that are facts. I examine the nature of reasons, and the relationship between reasons, facts and beliefs; I consider the question of whether animals without language are capable of knowledge; and I briefly criticize Wittgenstein's doctrine that I cannot be said to know that I am in pain.     

A CLOSER LOOK AT CLOSURE SCEPTICISM

The paper argues that there is no valid closure principle that can be used to infer sceptical conclusions. My argument exploits the Gettier Intuition that knowledge is incompatible with accidentally true belief. This intuition is interpreted as placing a constraint on beliefs that can count as knowledge: only beliefs which are based on reasons that are relevantly linked to the beliefs' truth can qualify as knowledge. I argue that closure principles are to reflect this constraint by accommodating the requirement that a subject's belief p needs to be based on her competent derivation of p from a known q . The emerging account is finally argued to reconcile Dretske's anti-closure intuitions with the intuition that we can extend knowledge by deduction, while simultaneously blocking closure arguments for scepticism about the external world.     

ONE TRUE LOGIC?

This is a paper about the constituents of arguments. It argues that several different kinds of truth-bearer may be taken to compose arguments, but that none of the obvious candidates—sentences, propositions, sentence/truth-value pairs etc.—make sense of logic as it is actually practiced. The paper goes on to argue that by answering the question in different ways, we can generate different logics, thus ensuring a kind of logical pluralism that is different from that of J. C. Beall and Greg Restall.