Knowing how things might have been

I know that I could have been where you are right now and that you could have been where I am right now, but that neither of us could have been turnips or natural numbers. This knowledge of metaphysical modality stands in need of explanation. I will offer an account based on our knowledge of the natures, or essencess, of things. I will argue that essences need not be viewed as metaphysically bizarre entities; that we can conceptualise and refer to essences; and that we can gain knowledge of them. We can know about which properties are, and which properties are not, essential to a given entity. This knowledge of essence offers a route to knowledge of the ways those entities must be or could be.

     

Between the Bounds of Experience and Divine Intuition: Kant's Epistemic Limits and Hegel's Ambitions

Hegel seeks to overturn Kant's conclusion that our knowledge is restricted, or that we cannot have knowledge of things as they are in themselves. Understanding this Hegelian ambition requires distinguishing two Kantian characterizations of our epistemic limits: First, we can have knowledge only within the “bounds of experience”. Second, we cannot have knowledge of objects that would be accessible only to a divine intellectual intuition, even though the faculty of reason requires us to conceive of such objects. Hegel aims to drive a wedge between these two characterizations, showing that we can have knowledge beyond Kant's bounds of experience, yet without need of divine intuition. And attention to such knowledge is supposed to show that we have no legitimate need to even conceive of divine intuition and its objects—and no need to conclude that our own knowledge is restricted by comparison, or that we cannot know things as they are in themselves. I focus here on the initial case Hegel uses to introduce this extended argument strategy: we can have more knowledge of natural kinds and laws than would be allowed by Kant's bounds of experience.     

Knowledge,adequacy, and approximate truth

Approximation involves representing things in ways that might be close to the truth but are nevertheless false. Given the widespread reliance on approximations in science and everyday life, here we ask whether it is conceptually possible for false approximations to qualify as knowledge. According to the factivity account, it is impossible to know false approximations, because knowledge requires truth. According to the representational adequacy account, it is possible to know false approximations, if they are close enough to the truth for present purposes. In this paper, we adopt an experimental methodology to begin testing these two theories. When an agent provides a false and practically inadequate answer, both theories predict that people will deny knowledge. But the theories disagree about an agent who provides a false but practically adequate answer: the factivity hypothesis again predicts knowledge denial, whereas the representational adequacy hypothesis predicts knowledge attribution. Across two experiments, our principal finding was that people tended to attribute knowledge for false but practically adequate answers, which supports the representational adequacy account. We propose an interpretation of existing findings that preserves a conceptual link between knowledge and truth. According to this proposal, truth is not necessary for knowledge, but it is a feature of prototypical knowledge.     

Being in a position to know

The concept of being in a position to know is an increasingly popular member of the epistemologist’s toolkit. Some have used it as a basis for an account of propositional justification. Others, following Timothy Williamson, have used it as a vehicle for articulating interesting luminosity and anti-luminosity theses. It is tempting to think that while knowledge itself does not obey any closure principles, being in a position to know does. For example, if one knows both p and ‘If p then q’, but one dies or gets distracted before being able to perform a modus ponens on these items of knowledge and for that reason one does not know q, one is still plausibly in a position to know q. It is also tempting to suppose that, while one does not know all logical truths, one is nevertheless in a position to know every logical truth. Putting these temptations together, we get the view that being in a position to know has a normal modal logic. A recent literature has begun to investigate whether it is a good idea to give in to these twin temptations—in particular the first one. That literature assumes very naturally that one is in a position to know everything one knows and that one is not in a position to know things that one cannot know. It has succeeded in showing that, given the modest closure condition that knowledge is closed under conjunction elimination (or ‘distributes over conjunction’), being a position to know cannot satisfy the so-called K axiom (closure of being in a position to know under modus ponens) of normal modal logics. In this paper, we explore the question of the normality of the logic of being in a position to know in a more far-reaching and systematic way. Assuming that being in a position to know entails the possibility of knowing and that knowing entails being in a position to know, we can demonstrate radical failures of normality without assuming any closure principles at all for knowledge. (However, as we will indicate, we get further problems if we assume that knowledge is closed under conjunction introduction.) Moreover, the failure of normality cannot be laid at the door of the K axiom for knowledge, since the standard principle NEC of necessitation also fails for being in a position to know. After laying out and explaining our results, we briefly survey the coherent options that remain.

     

Constitutive Rules: Games,Language, and Assertion

Many philosophers think that games like chess, languages like English, and speech acts like assertion are constituted by rules. Lots of others disagree. To argue over this productively, it would be first useful to know what it would be for these things to be rule-constituted. Searle famously claimed in Speech Acts that rules constitute things in the sense that they make possible the performance of actions related to those things (Searle 1969). On this view, rules constitute games, languages, and speech acts in the sense that they make possible playing them, speaking them and performing them. This raises the question what it is to perform rule-constituted actions (e. g. play, speak, assert) and the question what makes constitutive rules distinctive such that only they make possible the performance of new actions (e. g. playing). In this paper I will criticize Searle's answers to these questions. However, my main aim is to develop a better view, explain how it works in the case of each of games, language, and assertion and illustrate its appeal by showing how it enables rule-based views of these things to respond to various objections.     

Intrinsic Natures: A Critique of Langton on Kant

This paper argues that there is an important respect in which Rae Langton's recent interpretation of Kant is correct: Kant's claim that we cannot know things in themselves should be understood as the claim that we cannot know the intrinsic nature of things. However, I dispute Langton's account of intrinsic properties, and therefore her version of what this claim amounts to. Langton's distinction between intrinsic, causally inert properties and causal powers is problematic, both as an interpretation of Kant, and as an independent metaphysical position. I propose a different reading of the claim that we cannot know things intrinsically. I distinguish between two ways of knowing things: in terms of their effects on other things, and as they are apart from these. 1 argue that knowing things' powers is knowing things in terms of effects on other things, and therefore is not knowing them as they are in themselves, and that there are textual grounds for attributing this position to Kant.     

The Epistemology of Non-Instrumental Value

Might there be knowledge of non‐instrumental values? Arguments are give for two principal claims. One is that if there is such knowledge, it typically will have features that do not entirely match those of other kinds of knowledge. It will have a closer relation to the kind of person one is or becomes, and in the way it combines features of knowing‐how with knowing‐that. There also are problems of indeterminacy of non‐instrumental value which are not commonly found in other things that we can know about. The second claim is that there is a strong prima‐facie case for holding that there is such knowledge, and that the usual arguments against this are all faulty.     

Epistemic presentism

Commonsense functionalism is taken to entail a version of the extended mind thesis, according to which one’s dispositional beliefs may be partly constituted by artifacts. As several opponents of the extended mind thesis have objected, claiming so can generate a cognitive/knowledge bloat, according to which we may count as knowing the contents of trusted websites, even before looking them up (!). One way to retain commonsense functionalism, but avoid the ensuing “cognitive/knowledge bloat” worry is to introduce epistemic presentism—the view that there are no dispositional beliefs and that we can only believe, and thereby know, things in the present. Independently of the above problem, epistemic presentism can be further motivated by shedding light on two central epistemological questions: (1) how to understand the distinction between doxastic and propositional justification and (2) how to interpret the closure principle. The view also aligns with strong intuitions about what we may take ourselves to know, what the relation between action and belief is, and what may count as part of our minds.     

Mind and epistemic constructivism: Wang Yangming and Kant

This essay explores the philosophical insights of Zhu Xi, Wang YangMing, Kant, and Husserl and therefore proposes a new epistemic constructivism. It demonstrates that a knowing mind is a constructor, not merely a mirror-like copier or a camera-like copier in the experience of knowing. It argues that just as different kinds of machine produce kinds of product of different qualities, different kinds of mind produce different kinds of knowledge; to know X is to construct belief and understanding of X that has truth. Therefore, while Kant correctly indicated that before we set out to know things in the world, we should inquire what the mind can know, Confucian masters profoundly suggest that in order to know things in the world and know better, we should constantly expand our mind to the extent that it is broad（博）, great（大）, refined（精）and profound （深）so that our mind can know millions of things in the world.     

The metacognitive disambiguation effect

From an early age, children show a tendency to map novel labels onto unfamiliar rather than familiar kinds of objects. Accounts of this tendency have not addressed whether children develop a metacognitive representation of what they are doing. In 3 experiments (each N = 48), preschoolers received a test of the metacognitive disambiguation effect, which involved deciding whether the referent of a novel label was located in a bucket of things “I know” or bucket of things “I don’t know.” Most 4-year-olds passed this test, whereas most 3-year-olds did not. Children’s performance was predicted by their ability to report whether various words and pseudowords were ones that they knew, even after age and vocabulary size were controlled. As children develop an awareness of their lexical knowledge/ignorance, they also develop a metacognitive representation of their tendency to map novel labels onto unfamiliar rather than familiar kinds.     

Extreme Betting

It is often thought that bets on the truth of known propositions become irrational if the losing costs are high enough. This is typically taken to count against the view that knowledge involves assigning credence 1. I argue that the irrationality of such extreme bets can be explained by considering the interactions between the agent and the bookmaker. More specifically, the agent’s epistemic perspective is altered by the fact that the bookmaker proposes that unusual type of bet. Among other things, being willing to offer a bet with unnecessarily harmful losing costs is likely to undermine the baseline level of trustworthiness required for it to be rational to engage in betting exchanges. This sort of explanation does not require granting either that we assign credence lower than 1 to known propositions or that knowledge is sensitive to practical stakes. Moreover, I show that, in our ordinary lives, we frequently perform actions that we know would be disastrous if certain conditions did not obtain. This behaviour can be seen as a form of implicit extreme betting and, nevertheless, it is often rational.     

Self‐Knowledge and Rational Agency: A Defense of Empiricism

How does one know one's own beliefs, intentions, and other attitudes? Many responses to this question are broadly empiricist, in that they take self‐knowledge to be epistemically based in empirical justification or warrant. Empiricism about self‐knowledge faces an influential objection: that it portrays us as mere observers of a passing cognitive show, and neglects the fact that believing and intending are things we do, for reasons. According to the competing, agentialist conception of self‐knowledge, our capacity for self‐knowledge derives from our rational agency—our ability to conform our attitudes to our reasons, and to commit ourselves to those attitudes through avowals (Burge 1996; Moran 2001; Bilgrami 2006; Boyle 2009). This paper has two goals. The first is exegetical: to identify agentialism's defining thesis and precisely formulate the agentialist challenge to empiricism. The second goal is to defend empiricism from the agentialist challenge. I propose a way to understand the role of agency in reasoning and avowals, one that does justice to what is distinctive about these phenomena yet is compatible with empiricism about self‐knowledge.     

ANIMAL PASSIONS AND BEASTLY VIRTUES: COGNITIVE ETHOLOGY AS THE UNIFYING SCIENCE FOR UNDERSTANDING THE SUBJECTIVE,EMOTIONAL, EMPATHIC,AND MORAL LIVES OF ANIMALS

Abstract. In this essay, my response to four papers that were presented at the 2004 annual meeting of the American Academy of Religion in a session devoted to my research on animal behavior and cognitive ethology, I stress the importance of interdisciplinary research and collaboration for coming to terms with various aspects of animal behavior and animal cognition. I argue that we have much to learn from other animals concerning a set of “big” questions including who we are in the grand scheme of things, the role science (“science sense”) plays in our understanding of the world in which we live, what it means to “know” something, what some other ways of knowing are and how they compare to what we call “science,” and the use of anecdotes and anthropomorphism to inform studies of animal behavior. I ask, Are other minds really all that private and inaccessible? Can a nonhuman animal be called a person? What does the future hold if we continue to dismantle the only planet we live on and persecute the other animal beings with whom we are supposed to coexist? I argue that cognitive ethology is the unifying science for understanding the subjective, emotional, empathic, and moral lives of animals, because it is essential to know what animals do, think, and feel as they go about their daily routines in the company of their friends and when they are alone. It is also important to learn why both the similarities and differences between humans and other animals have evolved. The more we come to understand other animals, the more we will appreciate them as the amazing beings they are, and the more we will come to understand ourselves.     

How we make discoveries

In trying to make discoveries, we are trying to uncover knowledge of HIDDEN realities. It appears impossible to uncover knowledge of hidden realities. How can we evaluate results? (How can we find out whether they are true or even good approximation when we cannot compare them to the hidden realities?) But we are often able to do things which appear impossible; it depends on whether we have chanced onto, or discovered, or invented, the relevant OPERATING PRINCIPLES. It appeared impossible to fly to the moon in one lifetime. We discovered the principle of the rocket. If we can discover the operating principle for making discoveries, we know how we make discoveries. In this paper, I show step by step how we can discover this operating principle.     

Transfer of metacognitive skills and hint seeking in monkeys

Metacognition is knowledge that can be expressed as confidence judgments about what one knows (monitoring) and by strategies for learning what one does not know (control). Although there is a substantial literature on cognitive processes in animals, little is known about their metacognitive abilities. Here we show that rhesus macaques, trained previously to make retrospective confidence judgments about their performance on perceptual tasks, transferred that ability immediately to a new perceptual task and to a working memory task. We also show that monkeys can learn to request "hints" when they are given problems that they would otherwise have to solve by trial and error. This study demonstrates, for the first time, that nonhuman primates share with humans the ability to monitor and transfer their metacognitive ability both within and between different cognitive tasks, and to seek new knowledge on a need-to-know basis.     

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.     

Material Objects,Constitution, and Mysterianism

It is sometimes claimed that ordinary objects, such as mountains and chairs, are not material in their own right, but only in virtue of the fact that they are constituted by matter. As Fine puts it, they are “only derivatively material” (2003, 211). In this paper I argue that invoking “constitution” to account for the materiality of things that are not material in their own right explains nothing and renders the admission that these objects are indeed material completely mysterious. Although there may be metaphysical contexts in which mysterianism can be accepted with equanimity, I further argue, the question of the materiality of quotidian objects is not one of them.     

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.     

Locke's Reply to the Skeptic

Given his representationalism how can Locke claim we have sensitive knowledge of the external world? We can see the skeptic as asking two different questions: how we can know the existence of external things, or more specifically how we can know inferentially of the existence of external things. Locke's account of sensitive knowledge, a form of non‐inferential knowledge, answers the first question. All we can achieve by inference is highly probable judgment. Because Locke's theory of knowledge includes both first order psychological and second order normative conditions, sensitive knowledge can be non‐inferential and less certain than intuitive and demonstrative knowledge.     

Epistemic closure,assumptions and topics of inquiry

According to the principle of epistemic closure, knowledge is closed under known implication. The principle is intuitive but it is problematic in some cases. Suppose you know you have hands and you know that ‘I have hands’ implies ‘I am not a brain-in-a-vat’. Does it follow that you know you are not a brain-in-a-vat? It seems not; it should not be so easy to refute skepticism. In this and similar cases, we are confronted with a puzzle: epistemic closure is an intuitive principle, but at times, it does not seem that we know by implication. In response to this puzzle, the literature has been mostly polarized between those who are willing to do away with epistemic closure and those who think we cannot live without it. But there is a third way. Here I formulate a restricted version of the principle of epistemic closure. In the standard version, the principle can range over any proposition; in the restricted version, it can only range over those propositions that are within the limits of a given epistemic inquiry and that do not constitute the underlying assumptions of the inquiry. If we adopt the restricted version, I argue, we can preserve the advantages associated with closure, while at the same time avoiding the puzzle I’ve described. My discussion also yields an insight into the nature of knowledge. I argue that knowledge is best understood as a topic-restricted notion, and that such a conception is a natural one given our limited cognitive resources.