Given the evidence available today, we know that the later Middle Ages knew strong forms of idealism. However, Plato alone will not do to explain some of its features. Aristotle was the most important philosophical authority in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, but until now no one dared explore in his thought the roots of this idealism because of the dogma of realism surrounding him. I challenge this dogma, showing that the Stagirite contained in his thought the roots of idealist (...) aspects that will be developed, namely by Dietrich of Freiberg and Eckhart of Hochheim, into a fully idealist epistemology. (shrink)

My NCPS 2012 conference paper. The paper is a development of the abstract below. The file you can upload contains my brief "A Fast & Frugal Rebuttal of Epistemic Situationism," while the whole paper develops a fuller reply to the Alfano, and Doris and Olin papers also presented in this session, papers in which these authors extend the "situationist challenge" to virtue ethics, to different varieties of virtue epistemology. Abstract. This paper mounts an empirically-based rebuttal to the radical implications that (...) self-described “epistemic situationists” including Mark Alfano and John Doris would have us draw from mood and conformity studies. The compatibility of virtue epistemologies with dual process theory (Kahneman; Stanovich) in cognitive and social psychology is developed as one main way of defending the empirical adequacy of many or most forms of virtue epistemology. Although philosophical situationists ignore dual process models of human reasoning, I argue that the latter offer ample empirical support for the “psychological realizability” of the intellectual character-traits posited by virtue-focused epistemologies and featured in the credit theory of knowing. Draft by Guy Axtell (Radford University), for NCPS, 2012. All rights reserved. Contact me at gsaxtell@radford.edu; or join us online at JanusBlog: The Virtue Theory Discussion Forum at http://janusblog.squarespace.com. For further development of these issues and arguments, see also my "Thinking Twice about Virtue and Vice (2013, forthcoming) . (shrink)

The traditional tripartite and tetrapartite analyses describe the conceptual components of propositional knowledge from a universal epistemic point of view. According to the classical analysis, since truth is a necessary condition of knowledge, it does not make sense to talk about “false knowledge” or “knowing wrongly.” There are nonetheless some natural languages in which speakers ordinarily make statements about a person’s knowing a given subject matter wrongly. In this paper, we first provide a brief analysis of “knowing wrongly” in Turkish. (...) Then, taking Allan Hazlett’s recent account of the gap between traditional analyses of knowledge and actual epistemic practices of real cognitive agents as a point of departure, we spell out a non-universalist and non-extensionalist perspective on the value of “knowing wrongly.”. (shrink)

Contrastive epistemologists say knowledge displays the ternary relation “ S knows p rather than q ”. I argue that “ S knows p rather than q ” is often equivalent to “ S knows p rather than not- p ” and hence equivalent to “ S knows p ”. The result is that contrastive knowledge is often binary knowledge disguised.

The Proper Functionist account of warrant – like many otherexternalist accounts – is vulnerable to certain Gettier-style counterexamples involving accidentally true beliefs. In this paper, I briefly survey the development of the account, noting the way it was altered in response to such counterexamples. I then argue that Alvin Plantinga's latest amendment to the account is flawed insofar as it rules out cases of true beliefs which do intuitively strike us as knowledge, and that a conjecture recently put forward by (...) Thomas Crisp is also defective. I conclude by presenting my own suggestion as to how the account can be made less vulnerable to counterexamples involving accidentally true beliefs. Although I stay within the confines of Proper Functionism here, I think that my proposal (modulo a few details) could be attached to other externalist accounts of warrant as well. -/- . (shrink)

It is a piece of philosophical commonsense that belief and knowledge are states. Some epistemologists reject this claim in hope of answering certain difficult questions about the normative evaluation of belief. I shall argue, however, that this move offends not only against philosophical commonsense but also against ordinary common sense, at least as far as this is manifested in the semantic content of the words we use to talk about belief and knowledge. I think it is relatively easily to show (...) with some linguistic tests that ordinary belief and knowledge attributions should be classified aspectually as state descriptions. Hence, the move some epistemologists (especially virtue epistemologists like Sosa) to deny that belief and knowledge are states threatens to simply change the topic rather than open up answers to difficult questions in epistemology. I do not know fully how to answer the relevant questions about the normative evaluation of belief, but I pursue this critical point here in service of a positive proposal about the general framework in which they should be answered. In brief, the general framework is one which recognizes an important place for what I call state-norms, beside the action-norms which are more familiar from normative theory. And it locates the epistemic norms that apply to beliefs and are relevant for knowledge on the state-norm side of this divide. This turns out to be not only consistent with but indeed to underwrites the philosophical and ordinary commonsense that belief and knowledge are states. (shrink)

The Gettier Problem is the problem of revising the view that knowledge is justified true belief in a way that is immune to Gettier counter-examples. The “Gettier Problem problem”, according to Lycan, is the problem of saying what is misguided about trying to solve the Gettier Problem. In this paper I take up the Gettier Problem problem. I distinguish giving conditions that are necessary and sufficient for knowledge from giving conditions that explain why one knows when one does know. I (...) argue that the problem with the Gettier Problem is that it requires us to articulate conditions that suffice for knowledge even if those conditions are non-explanatory. After defending this view, I take up two related methodological issues, one about the evidence that can be given in favor of an account of knowledge, and one about the role that investigating justification might play in investigating knowledge. (shrink)

In this essay, which draws on a set of interrelated issues in the phenomenology of perception, I call into question the assumption that Buddhist philosophers of the Dignāga-Dharmakīrti tradition pursue a kind of epistemic foundationalism. I argue that the embodied cognition paradigm, which informs recent efforts within the Western philosophical tradition to overcome the Cartesian legacy, can be also found– albeit in a modified form–in the Buddhist epistemological tradition. In seeking to ground epistemology in the phenomenology of cognition, the Buddhist (...) epistemologist, I claim, is operating on principles similar to those found in Husserl’s phenomenological tradition. (shrink)

Knowledge generation can be naturalized by adopting computational model of cognition and evolutionary approach. In this framework knowledge is seen as a result of the structuring of input data (data → information → knowledge) by an interactive computational process going on in the agent during the adaptive interplay with the environment, which clearly presents developmental advantage by increasing agent’s ability to cope with the situation dynamics. This paper addresses the mechanism of knowledge generation, a process that may be modeled as (...) natural computation in order to be better understood and improved. (shrink)

This paper provides an overview of connective knowledge. It is intended to be an introduction, expressed as non-technically as possible.

Además de la percepción sensible y del conocimiento por medio de conceptos abstractos, Hegel distingue una tercera forma específica de conocer de la inteligencia humana, a saber: el “pensar”. Hegel define el pensar como la unidad del objeto y el sujeto. Ahora bien, ¿no es el objeto exterior dado a la percepción sensible después de todo siempre diferente del contenido de la representación abstracta del sujeto? Si con la categoría “pensar” Hegel no se refiere en realidad a una forma más (...) de representar, ¿a qué actividad concreta y reconocible de la inteligencia se refiere entonces propiamente? Nuestro trabajo tiene por objeto responder a esta pregunta analizando la función específica que Hegel le atribuye al lenguaje en relación con el pensamiento, toda vez que en la progresiva elevación del sujeto cognoscente a la actividad de pensar y comprender la realidad el lenguaje ocupa en su concepción un lugar decisivo y fundamental. (shrink)

This paper focuses on two methodological questions that arise from Plato’s account of collection and division. First, what place does the method of collection and division occupy in Plato’s account of philosophical inquiry? Second, do collection and division in fact constitute a formal “method” (as most scholars assume) or are they simply informal techniques that the philosopher has in her toolkit for accomplishing different philosophical tasks? I argue that Plato sees collection and division as useful tools for achieving two distinct (...) goals – generating real definitions and discovering the basic natural kinds of a given domain of knowledge – both of which occupy a preliminary stage in his account of philosophical inquiry. As to the second question, I claim that the evidence for seeing collection and division as a formal method is weak. Although Plato calls the procedure a technê and a methodos, he makes no real attempt to formalize it in any way. For Plato, collection and division do not constitute an algorithmic process that can be learned from a rule book. Instead the ability to collect and divide properly are skills that good dialecticians must acquire through the kind of hands-on training illustrated by the Sophist and Statesman. Whereas Aristotle insists on formal rules for making proper divisions, Plato seems to emphasize the need to recognize where the natural joints of the world are. In this sense, Plato’s Sophist and Statesman and Aristotle’s Topics and Analytics present two very different pictures of collection and division. (shrink)

Richard Feldman and William Lycan have defended a view according to which a necessary condition for a doxastic agent to have knowledge is that the agent’s belief is not essentially based on any false assumptions. I call this the no-essential-false-assumption account, or NEFA. Peter Klein considers examples of what he calls “useful false beliefs” and alters his own account of knowledge in a way which can be seen as a refinement of NEFA. This paper shows that NEFA, even given Klein’s (...) refinement, is subject to counterexample: a doxastic agent may possess knowledge despite having an essential false assumption. Advocates of NEFA could simply reject the intuition that the example is a case of knowledge. However, if the example is interpreted as not being a case of knowledge, then it can be used as a potential counterexample against both safety and sensitivity views of knowledge. I also provide a further case which, I claim, is problematic for all of the accounts just mentioned. I then propose, briefly, an alternative account of knowledge which handles all these cases appropriately. (shrink)

Most philosophers believe that testimony is not a fundamental source of knowledge, but merely a way to transmit already existing knowledge. However, Jennifer Lackey has presented some counterexamples which show that one can actually come to know something through testimony that no one ever knew before. Yet, the intuitive idea can be preserved by the weaker claim that someone in a knowledge-constituting testimonial chain has to have access to some non-testimonial source of knowledge with regard to what is testified. But (...) even this weaker claim has a counterexample which I develop in close connection with a safety-account of knowledge. Thus, testimonial statements can sometimes enable us to know something for which none of our informants has any source of knowledge available. I conclude that my counterexample nevertheless does not affect the core of our intuitions about testimony, although it establishes that testimony can indeed be a fundamental source of knowledge. (shrink)

lnfallibilism is the view that a belief cannot be at once warranted and false. In this essay we assess three nonpartisan arguments for infallibilism, arguments that do not depend on a prior commitment to some substantive theory of warrant. Three premises, one from each argument, are most significant: (1) if a belief can be at once warranted and false, then the Geltier Problem cannot be solved; (2) if a belief can be at once warranted and false, then its warrant can (...) be transferred to an accidentally true belief; (3) if a belief can be at once warranted and false, then it can be warranted and accidentally true. We argue that each of these is either false or no more plausible than its denial. Along the way, we offer a solution to the Gettier Problem that is compatible with fallibilism. (shrink)

Robert Almeder has argued1 that three “fourth conditions” for nondefectiveness of knowledge justification claims, proposed in the recent literature,2 are essentially similar, require modification in order to eliminate the possibility of an unknowable defeater, and, so modified, render attainment of non-basic factual knowledge impossible. Although I believe there are objections to be raised against his exposition and reduction of the three proposed fourth conditions, I wish only to raise some doubts about the supposed necessity of the modifications and then to (...) argue against his claim that, so modified, the result is too stringent. (shrink)

I propose a necessary and sufficient condition on knowledge in terms of explanation.

In the scientific study of mind a distinction is drawn between explicit knowledge–knowledge that can be elicited from a subject by suitable inquiry or prompting, can be brought to consciousness, and externally expressed in words–and implicit knowledge–knowledge that cannot be elicited, cannot be made directly conscious, and cannot be articulated. Michael Polanyi (1967) argued that we usually ‘know more than we can say’. The part we can articulate is explicitly known; the part we cannot is implicit.

Duncan Pritchard’s book (Epistemic Luck, Oxford University Press, 2005) concerns the interplay between two disturbing kinds of epistemic luck, termed “reflective” and “veritic,” and two types of arguments for skepticism, one based on a closure principle for knowledge and the other on an underdetermination thesis about the quality of our evidence for the everyday propositions we believe. Pritchard defends the view that a safety-based account of knowledge can answer the closure argument and provide an account of how veritic epistemic luck (...) is eliminated. He also argues that reflective epistemic luck cannot be eliminated, and that even though it is the sort of luck with which the underdetermination argument is concerned, the fact that this type of luck cannot be eliminated doesn’t undermine knowledge. Instead, it undermines the assertibility of our knowledge, at least in skeptical contexts. So when the skeptic challenges the idea that we know using the underdetermination principle, we have no legitimate response to offer, and it is this fundamental fact of epistemic life that Pritchard terms our inevitable epistemic angst. (shrink)

According to David Lewis’s contextualist analysis of knowledge, there can be contexts in which a subject counts as knowing a proposition just because every possibility that this proposition might be false is irrelevant in those contexts. In this paper I argue that, in some cases at least, Lewis’ analysis results in granting people non-evidentially based knowledge of ordinary contingent truths which, intuitively, cannot be known but on the basis of appropriate evidence.

In order to create a good world, we need to learn how to do it - how to resolve our appalling problems and conflicts in more cooperative ways than at present. And in order to do this, we need traditions and institutions of learning rationally devoted to this end. When viewed from this standpoint, what we have at present - academic inquiry devoted to the pursuit of knowledge and technological know-how - is an intellectual and human disaster. We urgently need (...) a new, more rigorous kind of inquiry that gives intellectual priority to the tasks of articulating our problems of living and proposing and critically assessing possible cooperative solutions. This new kind of inquiry would have as its basic aim to improve, not just knowledge, but also personal and global wisdom - wisdom being understood to be the capacity to realize what is of value in life. To develop this new kind of inquiry we will need to change almost every branch and aspect of the academic enterprise. (shrink)

It is commonly held that epistemic standards for S ’s knowledge that p are affected by practical considerations, such as what is at stake in decisions that are guided by that p . I defend a particular view as to why this is, that is referred to as “pragmatic encroachment.” I then discuss a “new argument against miracles” that uses stakes considerations in order to explore the conditions under which stakes affect the level of epistemic support that is required for (...) knowledge. Finally, I generalize my results to include other religiously significant propositions such as “God exists” and “God does not exist.”. (shrink)

This paper defends a simple thesis: that knowledge is belief for reasons that are both objectively and subjectively sufficient. I take a dogmatic approach, devoting the bulk of the paper to an explanation of what this means, and of why it explains both what knowledge is like, and why it is important; the theory is justified by its fruits. I go on to illustrate, by appeal to my main thesis, how knowledge comes to play some of the key roles that (...) it does, including looking at Williamson’s arguments that knowledge is prime and for its distinctive explanatory role, as well as why my account explains and predicts the complicated behavior of knowledge in cases involving defeaters, defeated defeaters, and defeaters whose defeaters are defeated, as well as the different possible kinds of defeat – the primary source of complications in the Gettier literature. These facts are easily explained by the central thesis of the paper, without either giving up on the analysis of knowledge or resorting to arbitrary or ad hoc measures. Since the last five decades of literature might lead one to find it fairly audacious to propose an analysis of knowledge, a final section addresses the putative inductive grounds for general pessimism about the Gettierological project. (shrink)

Knowledge of the nature of knowledge is deplorably scarce. Fortunately, the reason is not lack of interest. On the contrary, the bewildering variety of competing theories is part of the problem. It is to, be hoped, however, that intensive discussion of such theories will help reduce the scarcity. In what follows I want to contribute to this end by briefly discussing two of the theories.

Keith Hossack argues in his The Metaphysics of Knowledge(2007) that knowledge is a simple and metaphysically fundamental relation between a thinker and a fact: knowledge is uptake of fact. Facts are conceived as combinations of particulars and universals, distinct from true propositions. Hossacks's general argument is, roughly, that one can define central philosophical concepts (belief, content, justification, etc.) if one assumes that knowledge is primitive, but that knowledge cannot be defined in terms of such concepts. In this paper, I will (...) question Hossack's view of knowledge and his use of knowledge in the theory of content. To anticipate one of the main points: there is knowledge that cannot be uptake of a fact, because there is no fact to be taken up. The conclusion is that Hossack needs either to revise his theory of facts or his metaphysics of knowledge. Something has to give. (shrink)

Bootstrapping is a suspicious form of reasoning that verifies a source's reliability by checking it against itself. Theories that endorse such reasoning face the bootstrapping problem. This article considers which theories face the problem, and surveys potential solutions. The initial focus is on theories like reliabilism and dogmatism, which allow one to gain knowledge from a source without knowing that it is reliable. But the discussion quickly turns to a more general version of the problem that does not depend on (...) this allowance. Five potential solutions to the general problem are evaluated, and some implications for the literature on peer disagreement are considered. (shrink)

A unique and much needed book exploring the debt Deleuze owes to Kantian arguments and principles.