Distant Peers

What is the nature of rational disagreement? A number of philosophers have recently addressed this question by examining how we should respond to epistemic conflict with a so‐called epistemic peer—that is, someone over whom you enjoy no epistemic advantage. Some say that you're rationally required to suspend judgment in these cases—thereby denying the very possibility of a certain kind of rational disagreement. Others say that it's permissible to retain your beliefs even in the face of epistemic conflict. By distinguishing between close peers and distant peers, I argue that it's rational to respond to different types of peers in different ways. I also argue that remote peers—a particularly distant kind of distant peer—provide us with an important lesson in epistemic humility.     

人类对知识的好奇:认识性好奇心

认识性好奇心是个体对新知识的好奇,可从状态和特质角度理解,其中特质认识性好奇心又区分为兴趣型和剥夺型两种类型。近年来众多证据表明,认识性好奇心受知道感、性别、对信息的偏好模式等因素影响,并在学习、记忆及创造性方面起到积极作用。未来研究有必要着眼于毕生发展的角度进行纵向考察,完善其测量方式,并深入考察认识性好奇心对学习的影响机制,从而为教育实践提供一定启示。     

Overcoming obstacles to a truly global psychological theory,research, and praxis in Africa

In African countries, psychology as it is taught, researched, and practised contributes to epistemic injustice and epistemological violence while depriving Africans of epistemic agency. This is largely because psychology has remained and continues to remain Eurocentric. However, the continual Eurocentric hegemony is not entirely imposed but internalised. This has made this Eurocentric hegemony self-perpetuating with African involvement. In this paper, the sources of this hegemony are explored with a view to identifying how Africans themselves contribute to the persistence of these academic “ills”. Furthermore, processes are examined through which African psychologists can disentangle themselves from this vicious cycle in order to make accurate and innovative contributions to the global understanding of human nature. Nsamenang’s pioneering role in confronting the wrongs is discussed, paving the way for the next generation of African psychologists to make contributions that are similar to, or surpass, Nsamenang’s lifetime contributions. I conclude by making some recommendations as to the way forward in the post-Nsamenang era.     

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.     

Epistemic Instrumentalism and the Too Few Reasons Objection

Abstract

According to epistemic instrumentalism (EI), epistemic normativity arises from and depends on facts about our ends. On that view, a consideration C is an epistemic reason for a subject S to Φ only if Φ-ing would promote an end that S has. However, according to the Too Few Epistemic Reasons objection, this cannot be correct since there are cases in which, intuitively, C is an epistemic reason for S to Φ even though Φ-ing would not promote any of S’s ends. After clarifying both EI and the Too Few Epistemic Reasons objection, I examine three major instrumentalist replies and argue that none of them is satisfactory. I end by briefly sketching a fourth possible response, which is, I suggest, more promising than the other three.     

SOSA ON EPISTEMIC CIRCULARITY AND REFLECTIVE KNOWLEDGE

Abstract: Ernest Sosa has done important work on epistemic circularity, epistemic virtue, and reflective knowledge. He holds that epistemic circularity need not be vicious and need not prevent us from knowing that our ways of forming beliefs are reliable. In this article, I briefly explore Sosa's defense of this view and raise some questions about what is required for reflective knowledge.     

Modest meta‐philosophical skepticism

Intractable disagreement among philosophers is ubiquitous. An implication of such disagreement is that many philosophers hold false philosophical beliefs (i.e. at most only one party to a dispute can be right). Suppose that we distribute philosophers along a spectrum arranged from philosophers with mostly true philosophical beliefs on one end (high‐reliability), to those with mostly false philosophical beliefs on the other (low‐reliability), and everyone else somewhere in‐between (call this is the reliability spectrum). It is hard to see how philosophers could accurately locate themselves on the reliability spectrum; they are prima facie as well positioned as their peers with respect to philosophical matters (call this the placement problem). In this paper, I argue that the reliability spectrum and placement problem lend support to modest meta‐philosophical skepticism: we have a pro tanto (but not an all‐things‐considered) reason to withhold ascent to philosophical claims.     

Chisholm's Epistemic Principles

Abstract: An exposition and discussion of Chisholm's “epistemic principles.” These are compared with relevant views of Wilfrid Sellars and Richard Foley. A further comparison, with the approach favored by Descartes, is argued to throw light on the status of such principles.     

“PURE” VERSUS “PRACTICAL” EPISTEMIC JUSTIFICATION

Abstract: In this article I distinguish a type of justification that is “epistemic” in pertaining to the grounds of one's belief, and “practical” in its connection to what act(s) one may undertake, based on that belief. Such justification, on the proposed account, depends mainly on the proportioning of “inner epistemic virtue” to the “outer risks” implied by one's act. The resulting conception strikes a balance between the unduly moralistic conception of William Clifford and contemporary naturalist virtue theories.     

Cohen on ‘Epistemic’

Stewart Cohen offers a critique of much contemporary epistemology. Epistemologies use the term ‘epistemic’ in order to specify the issues they investigate and about which they disagree. Cohen sees widespread confusion about these issues. The problem, he argues, is that ‘epistemic’ is functioning as an inadequately defined technical term. I will argue, rather, that the troubles come more from non-technical vocabulary, in particular with ‘justification’ and ‘ought’, and generally from the difficulty of explaining normativity. Overall, the message of this paper is that normativity is what’s hard to understand, not the term ‘epistemic.’     

A non‐normative account of assertion

Many contemporary philosophers argue that assertion is governed by an epistemic norm. In particular, many defend the knowledge account of assertion, which says that one should assert only what one knows. Here, I defend a non‐normative alternative to the knowledge account that I call the repK account of assertion. According to the repK account, assertion represents knowledge, but it is not governed by a constitutive epistemic rule. I show that the repK account offers a more straightforward interpretation of the conversational patterns and intuitions that motivate the knowledge account. It does so in terms of ordinary normative principles that philosophers already accept, none of which are constitutive to assertion. I then contend that the repK account is preferable to the knowledge account because it is simpler, its implications are less contentious, and it avoids a problem for normative accounts of assertion recently raised by Peter Pagin. I also argue that the repK account offers a satisfying explanation of selfless assertion, a counterexample to the knowledge account posed by Jennifer Lackey.     

Knowledge-How and Epistemic Value

A conspicuous oversight in recent debates about the vexed problem of the value of knowledge has been the value of knowledge-how. This would not be surprising if knowledge-how were, as Gilbert Ryle [1945, 1949 Ryle, Gilbert 1949. The Concept of Mind, London: Hutchinson's University Library.[Crossref] , [Google Scholar]] famously thought, fundamentally different from knowledge-that. However, reductive intellectualists [e.g. Stanley and Williamson 2001 Ryle, Gilbert 1949. The Concept of Mind, London: Hutchinson's University Library.[Crossref] , [Google Scholar]; Brogaard 2008, 2009 Brogaard, Berit 2009. What Mary Did Yesterday: Reflections on Knowledge-Wh, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 78/2: 439–67.[Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar], 2011 Brogaard, Berit 2011. Knowledge-How: A Unified Account, in Knowing How: Essays on Knowledge, Mind, and Action, ed. John Bengson and Marc A. Moffett, New York: Oxford University Press: 136–60. [Google Scholar]; Stanley 2011a Stanley, Jason 2011a. Knowing (How), Noûs 45/2: 207–38.[Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar], 2011b Stanley, Jason 2011b. Know How, Oxford: Oxford University Press.[Crossref] , [Google Scholar]] maintain that knowledge-how just is a kind of knowledge-that. Accordingly, reductive intellectualists must predict that the value problems facing propositional knowledge will equally apply to knowledge-how. We show, however, that this is not the case. Accordingly, we highlight a value-driven argument for thinking (contra reductive intellectualism) that knowledge-how and knowledge-that come apart.     

Implicit racial bias and epistemic pessimism

Implicit bias results from living in a society structured by race. Tamar Gendler has drawn attention to several epistemic costs of implicit bias and concludes that paying some costs is unavoidable. In this paper, we reconstruct Gendler’s argument and argue that the epistemic costs she highlights can be avoided. Though epistemic agents encode discriminatory information from the environment, not all encoded information is activated. Agents can construct local epistemic environments that do not activate biasing representations, effectively avoiding the consequences of activation. We conclude that changing our local environments provides a way to avoid paying implicit bias’s epistemic costs.     

The internal environment of knowledge claims: One aspect of the knowledge-society connection

In the sociology of knowledge, the relationship between society and knowledge —or rather what separates them — remains an unsolved problem. A critical analysis of various solutions that we must look for to this problem suggests the plausibility of a passage between social groups, styles of argumentation and objects of knowledge. An empirical model of decision displacements is proposed on the basis of a corpus of texts and of observations derived from concrete analysis of a laboratory situation.     

Rethinking Epistemic Relativism

“Relativism” is often treated as a dirty word in philosophy, but relativistic theories are not entirely unappealing—they have features that might be tempting if they weren't thought to be outweighed by problematic consequences. The aim of this paper is to rethink both our attitude to epistemic relativism and the basic features of the view itself. The paper discusses four objections and uses them to isolate five constraints on a more plausible epistemic relativism. It then sketches out a view that meets all of these constraints. This stratified epistemic relativism offers a complex, socially informed picture of justification that accounts for the many different kinds of roles that epistemic agents act, and think, in accordance with each day, and can serve as a starting point for constructing a more detailed epistemic relativism, which could secure its appealing benefits without incurring the costs traditionally associated with relativist views.     

Constructive Empiricism and the Vices of Voluntarism

Abstract

Constructive empiricism – as formulated by Bas van Fraassen – makes no epistemological claims about the nature of science. Rather, it is a view about the aim of science, to be situated within van Fraassen’s broader voluntarist epistemology. Yet while this epistemically minimalist framework may have various advantages in defending the epistemic relevance of constructive empiricism, I show how it also has various disadvantages in maintaining its internal coherence.     

Epistemology shmepistemology: moral error theory and epistemic expressivism

Some philosophers object to moral error theory by arguing that there a parity between moral and epistemic normativity. They maintain that moral and epistemic error theory stand or fall together, that epistemic error theory falls, and that moral error theory thus falls too. This paper offers a response to this objection on behalf of moral error theorists. I defend the view that moral and epistemic error theory do not stand or fall together by arguing that moral error theory can be sustained alongside epistemic expressivism. This unusual combination of theories can be underpinned by differences in the foundational norms that guide moral and epistemic inquiry. I conclude that the problem of epistemic normativity fails to show that it is compulsory for us to reject moral error theory.     

Knowledge and availability

The mentioning of error-possibilities makes us less likely to ascribe knowledge. This paper offers a novel psychological account of this data. The account appeals to “subadditivity,” a well-known psychological tendency to judge possibilities as more likely when they are disjunctively described.