This paper critically assesses Sosa’s normative framework for performances as well as its application to epistemology. We first develop a problem for one of Sosa’s central theses in the general theory of performance normativity according to which performances attain fully desirable status if and only if they are fully apt. More specifically, we argue that given Sosa’s account of full aptness according to which a performance is fully apt only if safe from failure, this thesis can’t be true. We then (...) embark on a rescue mission on behalf of Sosa and work towards a weakened account of full aptness. The key idea is to countenance a distinction between negligible and non-negligible types of risk and to develop an account of full aptness according to which even performances that are endangered by risk can be fully apt, so long as the risk is of a negligible type. While this alternative account of full aptness solves the problem we developed for Sosa earlier on, there is also bad news for Sosa. When applied to epistemology, the envisaged treatment of barn façade cases as cases in which the agent falls short of fully apt belief will no longer work. We show that, as a result, Sosa faces a new version of a familiar dilemma for virtue epistemology. Either he construes full aptness as strong enough to get barn façade cases right in which case his view will run right into the problem we develop. Or else he construes full aptness as weak enough to avoid this problem but then he will not be able to deal with barn façade cases in the way envisaged. (shrink)

Se revisan varios libros publicados recientemente que corresponderían al campo de la epistemología política. Sus autores pertenecen a tradiciones tan distintas como los Estudios sobre la Ciencia, Sociologíael Conocimiento, Epistemología, Filosofía de la Ciencia o Economía. La convergencia en este tema es el dato más significativo, habida cuenta de las bien conocidas controversias contemporáneas sobre la ciencia.El núcleo central de los trabajos es la relación entre ciencia y democracia.

En este trabajo nos proponemos defender una versión de la tesis de la �mente extendida� frente a las críticas de algunos autores para quienes los sistemas que llaman �extracraneales� no cumplirían las condiciones que deben cumplir los componentes de los procesos mentales. Proponemos la integración de funciones como un criterio para considerar un conjunto de procesos como un proceso mental. Desde este punto de vista, consideramos que, en ciertas situaciones, algunos sistemas externos podrían llegar a cumplir este criterio.

En este artículo pretendemos arrojar luz sobre la normatividad propia del conocimiento humano. Describimos el dominio normativo epistémico como un campo de agencia humana que está definido por el conocimiento entendido como logro. La normatividad del conocimiento se apoya en la contribución del agente epistémico a la consecución de ciertas tareas. Tal contribución es epistémicamente significativa cuando el agente llega a participar en la consecución del éxito. Por último identificamos algunos rasgos asociados con la agencia epistémica completa (condiciones de integración (...) cognitiva y autonomía epistémica), y aclaramos lo que queremos decir con implicación apelando a la idea de adoptar una perspectiva epistémica. (shrink)

Group polarization—roughly, the tendency of groups to incline towards more extreme positions than initially held by their individual members— has been rigorously studied by social psychol- ogists, though in a way that has overlooked important philosophical questions about this phenomenon which remain unexplored. Two such salient questions are metaphysical and epistemological, respectively. From a metaphysical point of view, can group polarization, understood as an epistemic feature of a group, be reduced to epistemic features of its individual members? Relatedly, from an (...) epistemological point of view, is group polarization best understood as a kind of cognitive bias or rather in terms of intellectual vice? This book taxonomizes this possibility space by comparing four models which combine potential answers to the metaphysical and epistemological questions. The models we consider are: group polarization as a collective bias, a summation of individual epistemic vices; a summation of individual biases; and a collective epistemic vice. We defend a collective vice model of group polarization over the competing alternatives. (shrink)

Winning a lottery, being hit by a stray bullet, or surviving a plane crash, all are instances of a mundane phenomenon: luck. Mundane as it is, the concept of luck nonetheless plays a pivotal role in central areas of philosophy, either because it is the key element of widespread philosophical theses or because it … Continue reading Luck →.

What is the nature of knowledge? A popular answer to that long-standing question comes from robust virtue epistemology, whose key idea is that knowing is just a matter of succeeding cognitively—i.e., coming to believe a proposition truly—due to an exercise of cognitive ability. Versions of robust virtue epistemology further developing and systematizing this idea offer different accounts of the relation that must hold between an agent’s cognitive success and the exercise of her cognitive abilities as well as of the very (...) nature of those abilities. This paper aims to give a new robust virtue epistemological account of knowledge based on a different understanding of the nature and structure of the kind of abilities that give rise to knowledge. (shrink)

In “Knowledge Under Threat” (Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 2012), Tomas Bogardus proposes a counterexample to the safety condition for knowledge. Bogardus argues that the case demonstrates that unsafe knowledge is possible. I argue that the case just corroborates the well-known requirement that modal conditions like safety must be relativized to methods of belief formation. I explore several ways of relativizing safety to belief-forming methods and I argue that none is adequate: if methods were individuated in those ways, safety would fail (...) to explain several much-discussed cases. I then propose a plausible externalist principle of method individuation. On the one hand, relativizing safety to belief-forming methods in the way suggested allows the defender of safety to account for the cases. On the other hand, it shows that the target known belief of Bogardus’s example is safe. Finally, I offer a diagnosis of a common error about the kind of cases that are typically considered potential counterexamples to the necessity of the epistemic condition: proponents of the alleged counterexamples mistake a strong condition that I call super-safety for safety. (shrink)

A notorious objection to robust virtue epistemology—the view that an agent knows a proposition if and only if her cognitive success is because of her intellectual virtues—is that it fails to eliminate knowledge-undermining luck. Modest virtue epistemologists agree with robust virtue epistemologists that if someone knows, then her cognitive success must be because of her intellectual virtues, but they think that more is needed for knowledge. More specifically, they introduce independently motivated modal anti-luck principles in their accounts to amend the (...) problem of eliminating luck—this makes their views instances of impure virtue epistemology. The aim of the paper is to argue, firstly, that such a move lacks adequate motivation; secondly, that the resulting impure accounts equally fail to handle knowledge-undermining luck. On a more positive note, these results bolster a more orthodox virtue-theoretic approach to knowledge that assigns a fundamental explanatory role to the notion of ability. In this sense, the paper also sketches an account of ability and a corresponding account of knowledge that explains how success from ability is incompatible with success from luck. (shrink)

This essay explains the notion of luck in terms of risk. It starts by distinguishing two senses of risk, the risk that an event has of occurring and the risk at which an agent is with respect to an event. It cashes out the former in modal terms and the latter in terms of lack of control. It then argues that the presence or absence of event-relative risk marks a distinction between two types of luck or fortune commonly overlooked in (...) ordinary usage of the terms “luck” and “fortune.” After offering a detailed account of the notion of control, the essay advances a new version of the so-called lack of control account of luck: lucky events are events with respect to which one is at risk and hence events over which one lacks control in the specified way. Finally, it argues that its account steers clear of counterexamples to the lack of control account of luck. (shrink)

This essay explains the notion of luck in terms of risk. It starts by distinguishing two senses of risk, the risk that an event has of occurring and the risk at which an agent is with respect to an event. It cashes out the former in modal terms and the latter in terms of lack of control. It then argues that the presence or absence of event-relative risk marks a distinction between two types of luck or fortune commonly overlooked in (...) ordinary usage of the terms “luck” and “fortune.” After offering a detailed account of the notion of control, the essay advances a new version of the so-called lack of control account of luck: lucky events are events with respect to which one is at risk and hence events over which one lacks control in the specified way. Finally, it argues that its account steers clear of counterexamples to the lack of control account of luck. (shrink)

An explanatorily powerful approach to the modal dimension of knowledge is Robert Nozick’s idea that knowledge stands in a tracking relation to the world. However, pinning down a specific modal condition has proved elusive. In this paper, I offer a diagnosis and a positive proposal. The root of the problem, I argue, is the unquestioned assumption that tracking is a matter of directly preserving conformity between what is believed and what is the case in certain possible worlds. My proposal is (...) that what we track is whether the conditions for belief formation are appropriate in such worlds. Accordingly, we indirectly track the truth by ensuring that we only use our methods of belief formation in conditions that make it likely that conformity is preserved between what is believed and what is the case. (shrink)

This paper proposes a methodological turn for the epistemology of disagreement, away from focusing on highly idealized cases of peer disagreement and towards an increased focus on disagreement simpliciter. We propose and develop a normative framework for evaluating all cases of disagreement as to whether something is the case independently of their composition—i.e., independently of whether they are between peers or not. The upshot will be a norm of disagreement on which what one should do when faced with a disagreeing (...) party is to improve the epistemic properties of one’s doxastic attitude or, alternatively, hold steadfast. (shrink)

In almost any domain of endeavour, successes can be attained through skill, but also by dumb luck. An archer’s wildest shots occasionally hit the target. Against enormous odds, some fair lottery tickets happen to win. The same goes in the case of purely cognitive or intellectual endeavours. As inquirers, we characteristically aim to believe truly rather than falsely, and to attain such standings as knowledge and understanding. Sometimes such aims are attained with commendable competence, but of course, not always. Epistemic (...) luck is a species of luck which features in circumstances where a given cognitive success—in the broadest sense, some form of cognitive contact with reality—is attained in a manner that is interestingly lucky—viz., chancy, accidental or beyond our control. In the paradigmatic case, this involves the formation of a belief that is luckily true, and where the subject plausibly deserves little credit for having gotten things right. Although the literature on epistemic luck has focused predominantly on the relationship between luck and propositional knowledge—which is widely taken to exclude luck—epistemologists are increasingly exploring the compatibility of epistemic luck with other kinds of epistemic standings, such as knowledge-how and understanding. (shrink)

Suppose an inquiring group wants to let a certain view stand as the group's view. But there’s a problem: the individuals in that group do not initially all agree with one another about what the correct view is. What should the group do, given that it wants to settle on a single answer, in the face of this kind of intragroup disagreement? Should the group members deliberate and exchange evidence and then take a vote? Or, given the well-known ways that (...) evidence exchange can go wrong, e.g., by exacerbating pre-existing biases, compromising the independence of individual judgments, etc., should the group simply take a vote without deliberating at all? While this question has multiple dimensions to it—including ethical and political dimensions—we approach the question through an epistemological lens. In particular, we investigate to what extent it is epistemically advantageous and disadvantageous that groups whose members disagree over some issue use deliberation in comparison to voting as a way to reach collective agreements. Extant approaches in the literature to this ‘deliberation versus voting’ comparison typically assume there is some univocal answer as to which group strategy is best, epistemically. We think this assumption is mistaken. We approach the deliberation versus voting question from a pluralist perspective, in that we hold that a group’s collective endeavor to solve an internal dispute can be aimed at different, albeit not necessarily incompatible, epistemic goals, namely the goals of truth, evidence, understanding, and epistemic justice. Different answers to our guiding question, we show, correspond with different epistemic goals. We conclude by exploring several ways to mitigate the potential epistemic disadvantages of solving intragroup disagreement by means of deliberation in relation to each epistemic goal. (shrink)

In a recent article in this journal, Wolfgang Freitag argues that Gettier-style cases that are based on the notion of “distant” epistemic luck cannot be ruled out as cases of knowledge by modal conditions such as safety or sensitivity. I argue that safety and sensitivity can be easily fixed and that Freitag provides no convincing reason for the existence of “distant” epistemic luck.

The traditional view of lying says that lying is a matter of intending to deceive others by making statements that one believes to be false. Jennifer Lackey has recently defended the following version of the traditional view: A lies to B just in case (i) A states that p to B, (ii) A believes that p is false and (iii) A intends to be deceptive to B in stating that p. I argue that, despite all the virtues that Lackey ascribes (...) to her view, conditions (i), (ii) and (iii) are not sufficient for lying. (shrink)

I propose to consider the interpersonal character of testimony as a kind of social bond created by the mutual intention of sharing knowledge. The paper explores the social mechanism that supports this mutual intention starting from an initial situation of modelling the other’s epistemic perspective. Accepting testimony as a joint action creates epistemic duties and responsibilities and the eventual success can be considered as a genuine achievement at the social level of epistemology. Trust is presented here as the symptom that (...) both parties are involved in such a social bond. (shrink)

In a series of papers, Jesper Kallestrup and Duncan Pritchard argue that the thesis that knowledge is a cognitive success because of cognitive ability is incompatible with the idea that whether or not an agent’s true belief amounts to knowledge can significantly depend upon factors beyond her cognitive agency. In particular, certain purely modal facts seem to preclude knowledge, while the contribution of other agents’ cognitive abilities seems to enable it. Kallestrup and Pritchard’s arguments are targeted against views that hold (...) that all it takes to manifest one’s cognitive agency is to properly exercise one’s belief-forming abilities. I offer an account of the notion of cognitive ability according to which our epistemic resources are not exhausted by abilities to produce true beliefs as outputs, but also include dispositions to stop belief-formation when actual or modal circumstances are not suitable for it. Knowledge, I argue, can be accordingly conceived as a cognitive success that is also due to the latter. The resulting version of robust virtue epistemology helps explain how purely modal facts as well as other agents’ cognitive abilities may have a bearing on the manifestation of one’s cognitive agency, which shows in turn that robust virtue epistemology and epistemic dependence are not incompatible after all. (shrink)

I argue that Duncan Pritchard’s anti-luck virtue epistemology is insufficient for knowledge. I show that Pritchard fails to achieve the aim that motivates his adoption of a virtue-theoretic condition in the first place: to guarantee the appropriate direction of fit that known beliefs have. Finally, I examine whether other virtue-theoretic accounts are able to explain what I call the direction of fit problem.

Under what conditions is a group belief resulting from deliberation constitutive of group knowledge? What kinds of competences must a deliberating group manifest when settling a question so that the resulting collective belief can be considered group knowledge? In this paper, we provide an answer to the second question that helps make progress on the first question. In particular, we explain the epistemic normativity of deliberation-based group belief in terms of a truth norm and an evidential norm, introduce a virtue-reliabilist (...) condition on deliberative group knowledge, and provide an account and a taxonomy of the types of group competences that are necessary for this type of collective knowledge. (shrink)

Our aim in this paper is to throw some light on the kind of normativity characteristic of human knowledge. We describe the epistemic normative domain as that field of human agency defined by knowledge understood as an achievement. The normativity of knowledge rests on the contribution of the epistemic agent to the fulfillment of certain tasks. Such contribution is epistemically significant when the agent becomes engaged in the obtaining of success. Finally, we identify some features associated with full epistemic agency (...) and elucidate what we mean by engagement by appealing to the idea of adopting an epistemic perspective. En este artículo pretendemos arrojar luz sobre la normatividad propia del conocimiento humano. Describimos el dominio normativo epistémico como un campo de agencia humana que está definido por el conocimiento entendido como logro. La normatividad del conocimiento se apoya en la contribución del agente epistémico a la consecución de ciertas tareas. Tal contribución es epistémicamente significativa cuando el agente llega a participar en la consecución del éxito. Por último identificamos algunos rasgos asociados con la agencia epistémica completa, y aclaramos lo que queremos decir con implicación apelando a la idea de adoptar una perspectiva epistémica. (shrink)

According to Alan Millar, justified beliefs are well-founded beliefs. Millar cashes out the notion of well-foundedness in terms of having an adequate reason to believe something and believing it for that reason. To make his account of justified belief compatible with perceptual justification he appeals to the notion of recognitional ability. It is argued that, due to the fact that Millar’s is a knowledge-first view, his appeal to recognitional abilities fails to offer an explanatory account of familiar cases in the (...) literature and, as a consequence, of the notion of perceptual justification. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to explore the hypothesis that luck is a risk-involving phenomenon. I start by explaining why this hypothesis is prima facie plausible in view of the parallelisms between luck and risk. I then distinguish three ways to spell it out: in probabilistic terms, in modal terms, and in terms of lack of control. Before evaluating the resulting accounts, I explain how the idea that luck involves risk is compatible with the fact that risk concerns unwanted (...) events whereas luck can concern both wanted and unwanted events. I turn to evaluating the modal and probabilistic views and argue, firstly, that they fail to account for the connection between risk and bad luck; secondly, that they also fail to account for the connection between risk and good luck. Finally, I defend the lack of control view. In particular, I argue that it can handle the objections to the probabilistic and modal accounts and that it can explain how degrees of luck and risk covary. (shrink)

Resumen: Este libro pretende convertir la tecnología en un objeto de reflexion seria y rigurosa que no se limite a pensar sobre las consecuencias de la tecnica, atienda el hecho de que los sistemas tecnológicos son objetos culturales, los mas importantes objetos culturales de nuestra civilizacion, y los ingenieros, por ello mismo, creadores de cultura con el mismo estatuto que cientificos o artistas. El volumen reune varios ensayos sobre cuestiones filosoficas, que plantea la teología actual : como determina nuestra cultura (...) contemporanea, como se desarrolla y que relación existe entre desarrollo económico y social y el desarrollo tecnologico. La obra es parte de un programa de desarrollo de un análisis interno de los sistemas tecnológicos, de la lógica de las normas tecnologicas y de los nuevos metodos de conocer especificamente tecnológicos, como es el modelado de sistemas, a mitad de camino entre la lógica y la analogía. Se examinan, a modo de ejemplo, algunas tecnologias contemporaneas, en particular las ligadas a la reproducción funcional de seres vivos y del conocimiento, la inteligencia artificial y ciencias cognotivas. Jose Ortega y Gasset inauguro una tradición en filosofía de la tecnica a la que este volumen se honra en pertenecer. (shrink)

Truth is an epistemological concept that sometimes is claimed to have explanatory strength. It is argued, within a realistic view about causality and explanation, that concepts must represent naturalistic properties in order to have explanatory power. The eliminativistic theories about truth fail to account the use of predicate “truth” in explanatory contexts. Many antirealistic explanations of truth are reconstructed in order to sustain that thesis. Specially, we focus on the minimalist theory of truth. As we argue, we cannot eliminate the (...) predicate “truth” in some of the most relevant contexts of science and daily life. (shrink)

Se revisan varios libros publicados recientemente que corresponderían al campo de la epistemología politica. Sus autores pertenecen a tradiciones tan distintas como los Estudios sobre la Cieneia, Sociologia del Conocimiento, Epistemología, Filosafia de la Cieneia o Economía. La convergencia en este tema es el dato más significativo, habida cuenta de las bien conocidas controversias contemporaneas sabre Ia ciencia. EI nucleo central de los trabajos es la relación entre ciencia y democracia.We review a few volumes appeared in the last years about (...) the topic of Political Epistemology. The authors came from different traditions such as Science Studies, Sociology of Science, Epistemology, Philosophy of Science or Economics. This convergence is the most meaningful fact, given the well-known controversies in the general field of science. the hard core of the reviewed volumes is the relationship between science and democtratic studies. (shrink)

This paper presents a possibilistic conception of technological artifacts facing technological determinism. Technological artifacts are considered points in a space of pragmatic possibilities determined by the abilities of different sociocultural aspects. The determination process of one possibility is the design of an artifact that comes true as long as the abilities are effective. A design is a process of creation at several levels of reality: material, functional, usefulness. At the same time, the idea of design may also include the social (...) participation of the community, which hereby collectively expresses its desires. This proposed alternative responds to determinism as well as to social constructivism. (shrink)

The aim of this article is to present trust as a meta-emotion, such that it is an emotion that precedes first-order emotions. It examines how trust can be considered a meta-emotion by establishing criteria for identifying trust as a meta-emotion. How trust plays out differently in aesthetic and ordinary contexts can provide another mode for investigating meta-emotions. The article illustrates how it is possible to recognize these meta-emotions in narratives. Finally, it presents one of the aims of trust, sharing knowledge (...) between agents, when someone who provides testimony shares knowledge in an epistemic trust process with others. It shows a relationship construction between subjects and objects thanks to the trust, a meta-emotion that represents emotional ties between subjects to achieve another emotion. (shrink)

We propose to extend a reliabilist perspective from epistemology to the very concept of rational justification. Rationality is defined as a cognitive virtue contextually relative to an information domain, to the mean performance of a cognitive community, and to normal conditions of information gathering. This proposal answers to the skeptical position derived from the evidence of the cognitive fallacies and, on the other hand, is consistent with the ecological approach to the cognitive biases. Rationality is conceived naturalistically as a control (...) system of the flow of information: reliabilism is the approach that qualifies this system as virtuous. There can be specific-domain devices selected by evolution, although the constraints of the very flow of information can be also represented, even with imperfect means of formalization, and then rationality becomes reflective. Reliable rationality is postulated in conclusion as a more philosophically abstract concept than maximal, minimal or bounded rationality. (shrink)