Easy Knowledge

Stewart Cohen has recently presented solutions to two forms of what he calls "The Problem of Easy Knowledge" ("Basic Knowledge and the Problem of Easy Knowledge," Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, LXV, 2, September 2002, pp. 309-329). I offer alternative solutions. Like Cohen's, my solutions allow for basic knowledge. Unlike his, they do not require that we distinguish between animal and reflective knowledge, restrict the applicability of closure under known entailments, or deny the ability of basic knowledge to combine with self-knowledge to provide inductive evidential support. My solution to the closure version of the problem covers a variation on the problem that is immune to Cohen's approach. My response to the bootstrapping version presents reasons to question whether the problem case, as Cohen presents it, is even possible, and, assuming it is, my solution avoids a false implication of Cohen's own. The key to my solutions for both versions is the distinction between an inference's transferring epistemic support, on the one hand, and its not begging the question against skeptics, on the other.     

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     

Later Wittgenstein and the Problem of Easy Knowledge

Consider the following epistemological principle:

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IV—Knowledge of Meaning

The paper is sympathetic to the idea that speakers have implicit knowledge of the semantics of sub-sentential elements of language, loosely, of words. Implicit knowledge is knowledge which the subject need not be capable of articulating yet which is a genuine propositional attitude and it is to be contrasted with tacit knowledge which refers to an information-bearing state which, however, is not a genuine propositional attitude. ¹ I begin by defending the implicit knowledge conception of speakers' knowledge of the meanings of words from a challenge articulated by Evans and then go on the offensive against positions which attempt to replace the notion of implicit knowledge in semantic theory by that of tacit knowledge.     

EMPIRICAL REALISM AND OTHER MINDS

In apparent vogue, perhaps as a reaction against excesses on the part of certain Wittgensteinians, is the idea that the existence and nature of other people's mental lives are things known to us on broadly empirical grounds. A particularly unabashed version of this idea is to be found in Hilary Putnam's "Other Minds"¹. Therein Putnam defines empirical realism as the "position that the existence of the external world is supported by experience in much the way that any scientific theory is supported by observational data,"² His concern in this article is to defend, after entering some criticism of detail, Paul Ziff's attempt to show that the same general sort of position is the proper one to adopt with regard to the traditional problem of other minds. I wish to argue here that the empirical realist's solution to the problem of other minds offered by Ziff and defended by Putnam is wrong.     

Contact with the Nomic: A Challenge for Deniers of Humean Supervenience about Laws of Nature Part I: Humean Supervenience

This the first part of a two-part article in which we defend the thesis of Humean Supervenience about Laws of Nature (HS). According to this thesis, two possible worlds cannot differ on what is a law of nature unless they also differ on the Humean base. the Humean base is easy to characterize intuitively, but there is no consensus on how, precisely, it should be defined. Here in Part I, we present and motivate a characterization of the Humean base that, we argue, enables HS to capture what is really stake in the debate, without taking on extraneous commitments.
"I tend to picture the [facts of the form "it is a law that s" and "is is not a lw that s"] as having been sprinkled been sprinkled like powdered sugar over the doughy surface of the non-nomic facts."—Marc Lange²
"Avoid empty carbohydrates."— Runner's World ³     

JOINING THE DISPUTATION: Taking Graham Seriously on Taking Chinese Thought Seriously

"…the understanding of Chinese philosophy depends …on philosophizing for oneself. Taking Chinese thought seriously is not simply a matter of acknowledging the rationality of some of it (and perhaps denying the name 'philosophy' to the rest), nor of discovering something valuable to oneself in the poetry of Lao-tzu ^a or the diagrams of the Yi. ^b Its study constantly involves one in important contemporary issues in moral philosophy, the philosophy and history of science, the deconstruction of established conceptual schemes, the problem of relating thought to linguistic structure, and correlative thinking to logic."¹
"To approach Chinese philosophy trusting to the dictionary and one's instinct for the language is to fail to take it altogether seriously, and the practice has been a perpetual drag on progress in discovering how much or how little that we call philosophyizing is actually there."²     

Why reliabilism does not permit easy knowledge

Reliabilism furnishes an account of basic knowledge that circumvents the problem of the given. However, reliabilism and other epistemological theories that countenance basic knowledge have been criticized for permitting all-too-easy higher-level knowledge. In this paper, I describe the problem of easy knowledge, look briefly at proposed solutions, and then develop my own. I argue that the easy knowledge problem, as it applies to reliabilism, hinges on a false and too crude understanding of ‘reliable’. With a more plausible conception of ‘reliable’, a simple and elegant solution emerges.     

TREATING WOMEN AS SEX-OBJECTS

In this paper we have two related aims. First, we aim to present an account of what it is to treat women as sex-objects.¹ Like other philosophical writers in the field, we hold that the central idea in an account of such treatment is the failure to treat women with proper respect in sexual behavior. This idea has been cashed out in terms of using,² and in terms of dehumanization or failure to accord equal rights to freedom and welfare.³ However, we believe that there is a central deficiency in most such philosophical accounts of treating women as sex-objects, namely, a failure to outline in any detail a theory of interpersonal norms so that one can grasp in more concrete terms what it is to avoid treating a woman as a sex-object. We aim to rectify this deficiency by presenting a model of interpersonal norms based on the work of the social psychologist Chris Argyris.⁴     

The Epistemological Problem of Other Minds and the Knowledge Asymmetry

The traditional epistemological problem of other minds seeks to answer the following question: how can we know someone else's mental states? The problem is often taken to be generated by a fundamental asymmetry in the means of knowledge. In my own case, I can know directly what I think and feel. This sort of self‐knowledge is epistemically direct in the sense of being non‐inferential and non‐observational. My knowledge of other minds, however, is thought to lack these epistemic features. So what is the basic source of my knowledge of other minds if I know my mind in such a way that I cannot know the minds of others? The aim of this paper is to clarify and assess the pivotal role that the asymmetry in respect of knowledge plays within a broadly inferentialist approach to the epistemological problem of other minds. The received dogma has always been to endorse the asymmetry for conceptual reasons and to insist that the idea of knowing someone else's mental life in the same way as one knows one's own mind is a complete non‐starter. Against this, I aim to show that it is at best a contingent matter that creatures such as us cannot know other minds just as we know a good deal of our own minds and also that the idea of having someone else's mind in one's own introspective reach is not obviously self‐contradictory. So the dogma needs to be revisited. As a result, the dialectical position of those inferentialists who believe that we know about someone else's mentality in virtue of an analogical inference will be reinforced.     

THE MODAL ARGUMENT FOR A PRIORI JUSTIFICATION

Kant famously argued that, from experience, we can only learn how something actually is, but not that it must be so. In this paper, I defend an improved version of Kant's argument for the existence of a priori knowledge, the Modal Argument , against recent objections by Casullo and Kitcher. For the sake of the argument, I concede Casullo's claim that we may know certain counterfactuals in an empirical way and thereby gain epistemic access to some nearby, nomologically possible worlds. But I maintain that our beliefs about metaphysical necessities still cannot be justified empirically. Furthermore, I reject Casullo's deflationary thesis about the significance of such justification. Kitcher's most troublesome objection is that we can gain any modal justification whatsoever through testimony , i.e. in an experiential way. This can be countered by distinguishing between productive sources of justification, like perception, and merely reproductive sources, like testimony. Thus, some productive a priori source will always be needed somewhere. ¹     

Easy Knowledge,Closure Failure,or Skepticism: A Trilemma

This article aims to provide a structural analysis of the problems related to the easy knowledge problem. The easy knowledge problem is well known. If we accept that we can have basic knowledge via a source without having any prior knowledge about the reliability or accuracy of this source, then we can acquire knowledge about the reliability or accuracy of this source too easily via information delivered by the source. Rejecting any kind of basic knowledge, however, leads into an infinite regress and, plausibly, to skepticism. The article argues that the third alternative, accepting basic knowledge but rejecting easy knowledge, entails closure failure. This is obviously the case for deductive bootstrapping, but, notably, the problem also arises for inductive bootstrapping. Hence, the set of problems related to the easy knowledge problem has the structure of a trilemma. We are forced to accept easy knowledge, closure failure, or skepticism.     

How can we come to know metaphysical modal truths?

Those who aim to give an account of modal knowledge face two challenges: the integration challenge of reconciling an account of what is involved in knowing modal truths with a plausible story about how we can come to know them, and the reliability challenge of giving a plausible account of how we could have evolved a reliable capacity to acquire modal knowledge. I argue that recent counterfactual and dispositional accounts of modal knowledge cannot solve these problems regarding specifically metaphysical modal truths—leaving us with the threat of skepticism about large portions of metaphysics, and certain other areas of philosophy. I argue, however, that both of these problems look insuperable only if we assume that metaphysical modal discourse serves a describing or tracking function. If we adopt instead a normativist approach to metaphysical modal discourse, which sees the basic function of modal discourse as giving us perspicuous ways of conveying, reasoning with, and renegotiating semantic rules, the problems show up very differently. The modal normativist can give a plausible response to both of the classic problems of how we can come to know metaphysical modal truths.

     

TERRORISM, SELF-DEFENSE, AND WHISTLEBLOWING

In a recent paper given at a Symposium on terrorism, Thomas Hill, Jr., discussed "Making Exceptions Without Abandoning the Principle: Or How a Kantian Might Think about Terrorism." His argument, however, after acknowledging that "terrorists of course often claim to have morally worthy ends and also means that are morally justified in the context," and further stating that "some such claims deserve a serious hearing,"¹ goes on to deal with the related question of
…what one may justifiably do in response to morally indefensible terrorism.²     

THE MIND AND THE 'SHEN-MING'a IN XUNZI

In Plan 21 of the Xunzi , the essay Dubs titles "The Removal of Prejudices"¹ and Watson calls "Dispelling Obsession"², there is a sentence one's eyes slide over rather easily until one tries to fit it into its context and that of the Xunzi generally. Dubs translates it "The mind is the ruler of the body and the master of the spirit" (p. 269); Watson shows a slight discomfort with the second clause when he gives "The mind is the ruler of the body and the master of its god-like intelligence" [whatever that is] (p. 129) Koester³ raises a few more doubts with his "Das Herz nimmt im Koerper die Stelle des Herrschers ein, es ist der Gebieter ueber die shen-ming (Geister, die im Koerper wohnen)" (p. 277). Interestingly enough, the commentatorial tradition seems to have felt no difficulties: Yang Liang's comment is merely a paraphrase of the sentence following, and Wang Xian-jian and Liang Qi-xiong simply quote him⁴.     

DOES THE THREAT OF AIDS CREATE DIFFICULTIES FOR LORD DEVLIN'S CRITICS?

Although over twenty years have passed since the Hart-Devlin exchange, the controversy over society's right to punish homosexuals remains alive, as is shown by recent concern over the spread of AIDS and the recent announcement of the Supreme Court that "majority sentiments about the morality of homosexuality" constitute an adequate justification for sodomy statutes under the due process clause of the fourteenth amendment.¹ Lord Devlin's moral justification for punishing homosexual conduct seems to follow a similar line of reasoning. The one argument to which his critics have paid the most attention begins with the assertion that society consists of a seamless web of ideas and values, the content of which is determined by whether the ordinary, reasonable person is disgusted by a particular type of conduct.² Among the types of conduct that disgust the ordinary person, he continues, is homosexual conduct.³ Therefore, Devlin concludes, society may punish homosexual conduct, even if it is consensual.     

Disjunctivism, contextualism and the sceptical aporia

We know things that entail things we apparently cannot come to know. This is a problem for those of us who trust that knowledge is closed under entailment. In the paper I discuss the solutions to this problem offered by epistemic disjunctivism and contextualism. The contention is that neither of these theories has the resources to deal satisfactory with the problem.     

Sosa’s Reflective Knowledge: How damaging is epistemic circularity?

The problem of epistemic circularity maintains that we cannot know that our central belief-forming practices (faculties) are reliable without vicious circularity. Ernest Sosa??s Reflective Knowledge (2009) offers a solution to this problem. Sosa argues that epistemic circularity is virtuous rather than vicious: it is not damaging. Contra Sosa, I contend that epistemic circularity is damaging. Section 1 provides an overview of Sosa??s solution. Section 2 focuses on Sosa??s reply to the Crystal-ball-gazer Objection. Section 2 also contends that epistemic circularity does not prevent us from being justified in (e.g.) perceptual beliefs, or from being justified in believing that (e.g.) sense perception is reliable. But, Sect. 3 argues that it does prevent us from being able to satisfactorily show that our central belief-forming practices (faculties) are reliable. That is, epistemic circularity prevents us from distinguishing between reliable and unreliable practices, from guiding ourselves to use reliable practices and avoid unreliable ones, and from defending reliable practices against skepticism. Hence, epistemic circularity is still damaging. The concluding section suggests that this has repercussions for Sosa??s analysis of the value of reflective knowledge.     

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.