Can we have objective knowledge of right and wrong, of how we should live and what there is reason to do? Can it be anything but luck when our moral beliefs are true? Kieran Setiya confronts these questions in their most compelling and articulate forms, and argues that if there is objective ethical knowledge, human nature is its source.

Improbable knowing is knowing something even though it is almost certain on one’s evidence at the time that one does not know that thing. Once probabilities on the agent’s evidence are introduced into epistemic logic in a very natural way, it is easy to construct models of improbable knowing, some of which have realistic interpretations, for instance concerning agents like us with limited powers of perceptual discrimination. Improbable knowing is an extreme case of failure of the (...) KK principle, that is, of a case of knowing something even though one does not know at the time that one knows that thing. A generalization of the argument yields cases of improbable rationality, in which it is rational for one to do something even though it is almost certain on one’s evidence at the time that it is not rational for one to do that thing. When the models are elaborated to represent appearances and beliefs as well as knowledge, they turn out to contain Gettier cases. Neglect of the possibility of improbable knowing may cause some sceptical claims and claims of the non-closure of knowledge under competent deduction to look more plausible than they deserve to. A formal appendix explores the closely related question of the conditions under which a reflection principle is violated. The principle says that the evidential probability of a proposition conditional on the evidential probability of that proposition’s being c is itself c. (shrink)

In a series of recent papers, Timothy Williamson has argued for the surprising conclusion that there are cases in which you know a proposition in spite of its being overwhelmingly improbable given what you know that you know it. His argument relies on certain formal models of our imprecise knowledge of the values of perceptible and measurable magnitudes. This paper suggests an alternative class of models that do not predict this sort of improbable knowing. I show that such models (...) are motivated by independently plausible principles in the epistemology of perception, the epistemology of estimation, and concerning the connection between knowledge and justified belief. (shrink)

I distinguish between two senses in which feminists have argued that the knower is social: 1. situated or socially positioned and 2. interdependent. I argue that these two aspects of the knower work in cooperation with each other in a way that can produce willful hermeneutical ignorance, a type of epistemic injustice absent from Miranda Fricker's Epistemic Injustice. Analyzing the limitations of Fricker's analysis of the trial of Tom Robinson in Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird with attention to the (...) way in which situatedness and interdependence work in tandem, I develop an understanding of willful hermeneutical ignorance, which occurs when dominantly situated knowers refuse to acknowledge epistemic tools developed from the experienced world of those situated marginally. Such refusals allow dominantly situated knowers to misunderstand, misinterpret, and/or ignore whole parts of the world. (shrink)

This paper aims to identify the constitutive rule of assertion, conceived by analogy with the rules of a game. That assertion has such rules is by no means obvious; perhaps it is more like a natural phenomenon than it seems. One way to find out is by supposing that it has such rules, in order to see where the hypothesis leads and what it explains. That will be done here. The hypothesis is not perfectly clear, of course, but we have (...) at least a crude conception of constitutive rules, which we may refine as we elaborate the hypothesis. Although no attempt will be made here to define ‘rule’, some remarks on constitutive rules will focus the discussion. (shrink)

What is the relationship between understanding and knowing? This paper offers a defence of reductionism about understanding: the view that instances of understanding reduce to instances of knowing. I argue that knowing is both necessary and sufficient for understanding. I then outline some advantages of reductionism.

How is it that we think and refer in the first-person way? For most philosophers in the analytic tradition, the problem is essentially this: how two apparently conflicting kinds of properties can be reconciled and united as properties of the same entity. What is special about the first person has to be reconciled with what is ordinary about it. The range of responses reduces to four basic options. The orthodox view is optimistic: there really is a way of reconciling these (...) apparently contradictory properties as contained within the same thing. The heretical views are pessimistic and content to be so: there is no such way, and that is because there is simply nothing to reconcile – because there is really nothing special about what is in question; or there is really nothing ordinary about it; or there is really nothing …. (shrink)

In this paper we argue that knowledge in health care is a multidimensional dynamic construct, in contrast to the prevailing idea of knowledge being an objective state. Polanyi demonstrated that knowledge is personal, that knowledge is discovered, and that knowledge has explicit and tacit dimensions. Complex adaptive systems science views knowledge simultaneously as a thing and a flow, constructed as well as in constant flux. The Cynefin framework is one model to help our understanding of knowledge as a personal construct (...) achieved through sense making. Specific knowledge aspects temporarily reside in either one of four domains – the known, knowable, complex or chaotic, but new knowledge can only be created by challenging the known by moving it in and looping it through the other domains. Medical knowledge is simultaneously explicit and implicit with certain aspects already well known and easily transferable, and others that are not yet fully known and must still be learned. At the same time certain knowledge aspects are predominantly concerned with content, whereas others deal with context. Though in clinical care we may operate predominately in one knowledge domain, we also will operate some of the time in the others. Medical knowledge is inherently uncertain, and we require a context-driven flexible approach to knowledge discovery and application, in clinical practice as well as in health service planning. (shrink)

abstract Ryle's claim that knowing how is distinct from knowing that is defended from critics like Stanley and Williamson and Snowdon. However, the way in which Ryle himself deploys this distinction is problematic. By effectively dismissing the idea that systematic propositional knowledge has a significant bearing on knowledge how, Ryle implicitly supports a view of vocational education that favours narrow notions of skill and associated training over knowledge informed occupational practice of the kind found in most Northern European (...) countries. The source of Ryle's error in excluding systematic propositional knowledge from a significant place in the constitution of knowing how is traced. It is argued that Ryle's original distinction survives without the exclusion of systematic propositional knowledge from knowing how and the resulting account does more justice to the practice of vocational education in advanced economies than does Ryle's original treatment. (shrink)

This article is an account of reflections drawn from a total of four explicitation interviews , with two people. The article has both methodological and substantive purposes. Methodologically, we explain the contribution of Neuro-Linguistic Programming in the elicitation of first person accounts through guided introspection. Aspects of NLP have been used by both Vermersch and Petitmengin-Peugeot as means for exploring people's inner worlds. We further elucidate NLP as a set of tools for researchers, emphasising the distinctions these enable researchers to (...) make within the structure of consciousness. As the nature of NLP's methodological contribution to the field of Psychophenomenology has been little articulated, this represents an original feature of this article. Substantively, we show how the application of these tools has generated insights into the fine experiential detail of what we term `moments of knowing'. First, our data suggest that suspension and Epoche, which manifested themselves as unrecognised, or pre-reflective moments of understanding for the participants, may be part of everyday 'knowing'. Second, consciousness appears to be multi-dimensional. In particular it appears that it may be helpful to distinguish between different dimensions of awareness that may be involved when exploring an inner landscape. Third, we consider the apparently transformative effect of the explicitation interview for one of these participants, which emphasises that the interview is an active exploration. Our findings question established views of transformative learning, which hitherto have regarded `critical reflection' as the central process involved in transformative learning. (shrink)

This paper principally argues for two controversial theses: that understanding, unlike knowledge, is distinctively valuable, and that understanding is the proper goal of inquiry.

We define a notion of the intelligence level of an idealized mechanical knowing agent. This is motivated by efforts within artificial intelligence research to define real-number intelligence levels of compli- cated intelligent systems. Our agents are more idealized, which allows us to define a much simpler measure of intelligence level for them. In short, we define the intelligence level of a mechanical knowing agent to be the supremum of the computable ordinals that have codes the agent knows to (...) be codes of computable ordinals. We prove that if one agent knows certain things about another agent, then the former necessarily has a higher intelligence level than the latter. This allows our intelligence no- tion to serve as a stepping stone to obtain results which, by themselves, are not stated in terms of our intelligence notion (results of potential in- terest even to readers totally skeptical that our notion correctly captures intelligence). As an application, we argue that these results comprise evidence against the possibility of intelligence explosion (that is, the no- tion that sufficiently intelligent machines will eventually be capable of designing even more intelligent machines, which can then design even more intelligent machines, and so on). (shrink)

"Draws on philosophers, political theorists, activists, and poets to explain how unspoken and unspeakable knowledge is important to racial and gender formation; offers a usable conception of implicit understanding"--Provided by publishers.

Jane Duran's Worlds of Knowing begins to fill an enormous gap in the literature of feminist epistemology: a wide-ranging, cross-cultural primer on worldviews and epistemologies of various cultures and their appropriations by indigenous feminist movements in those cultures. It is the much needed epistemological counterpart to work on cross-cultural feminist social and political philosophy. This project is absolutely breath-taking in scope, yet a manageable read for anyone with some background in feminist theory, history, or anthropology. Duran draws many comparisons (...) and connections to Western philosophical and feminist ideas, yet avoids facile or imperialistic over-universalization. Her book is powerful, comprehensive, and brave. It will prove an enormously useful resource for scholars in women's studies, philosophy, anthropology, religious studies, and history. (shrink)

THE PRESENT paper grows out of a previous paper of mine called "Fallibilism and Necessity." That paper was primarily concerned with an issue raised by Peirce’s philosophy of mathematics: whether it is possible to hold that our mathematical beliefs are fallible, while at the same time maintaining that mathematical truths are necessary. My conclusion was that fallibilism and necessity are, in fact, perfectly compatible, once one has correctly formulated what fallibilism is: the point became clear as soon as I realized (...) that fallibilism is a thesis about our liability to error, and not a thesis about the modal status of what we believe. This conclusion prompted the train of thought that resulted in the present paper: If fallibilism has to be conceived as a thesis primarily about cognitive agents and their liability to error, a fallibilist epistemology must allow a suitably central place to the knowing subject. Now Popper, of course, is a fallibilist; and yet he criticizes "traditional epistemology" for its preoccupation with the individual who knows or believes, and urges, instead, the claims of an "epistemology without a knowing subject." So I thought it would be worthwhile to try to work out a somewhat more developed account of the role of the knowing subject in a fallibilist epistemology, and to go about this, in the first instance, by comparing and contrasting what I believe to be the most fruitful approach with that favored by Popper. (shrink)

Problems concerning scientists’ uses of representations have received quite a bit of attention recently. The focus has been on how such representations get their contents and on just what those contents are. Less attention has been paid to what makes certain kinds of scientific representations different from one another and thus well suited to this or that epistemic end. This article considers the latter question with particular focus on the distinction between images and graphs on the one hand and descriptions (...) and related representations on the other. *Received January 2008; revised September 2009. †To contact the author, please write to: Department of Philosophy, Dartmouth College, Hanover, NH 03755; e‐mail: [email protected]. (shrink)

Medical decision making when a patient cannot participate is complicated by the question of whose voice should be heard. The most common answer to this question is that “autonomy” is paramount, and therefore it is the voice of the unwell person that should be given priority. Advance care planning processes and practices seek to capture this sentiment and to allow treatment preferences to be documented and decision makers to be nominated. Despite good intentions, advance care planning is often deficient because (...) it is unable to facilitate a relational approach to decision making in cases when the patient’s competence is reduced. In this article we present findings from a study of the ways in which older people and their significant others understand decision making in such circumstances. Critical to the participants’ understanding was the emergent concept of “relational knowing,” a concept that is poorly articulated in the advance care planning literature. Our findings suggest that the dominant understanding of decision making in conditions of impaired competence is incomplete and obscures much of what matters to people. We conclude that, having recognized a broader set of ethical concerns, it is necessary to develop a relational and narrative based approach that applies in appropriate settings. (shrink)

This article discusses a puzzle arising from the phenomenon of insight in obsessive–compulsive disorder. “Insight” refers to an awareness or understanding of obsessive thoughts as false or irrational. I argue that a natural and plausible way of characterizing insight in OCD conflicts with several different possible explanations of the epistemic attitude underlying insight‐directed obsessive thought. After laying out the puzzle for five proposed explanations of obsessive thought and then discussing several possible ways that the puzzle might be avoided, I close (...) the article by arguing that we can avoid the puzzle by adopting a new positive view of insight‐directed obsessive thought. (shrink)

Abstract Recent empirical studies of categorization, concept development, semantic structure, and reasoning reveal the inadequacies of all theories that regard knowledge as static, propositional, and sentential. These studies show that conceptual structure and reason are grounded in patterns of bodily experience. Structures of our spatial/temporal orientations, perceptual interactions, and motor programs provide an imaginative basis for our knowledge of, and reasoning about, more abstract domains. Such a view transcends both foundationalism and extreme relativism or scepticism.

abstract Ryle's claim that knowing how is distinct from knowing that is defended from critics like Stanley and Williamson and Snowdon. However, the way in which Ryle himself deploys this distinction is problematic. By effectively dismissing the idea that systematic propositional knowledge has a significant bearing on knowledge how, Ryle implicitly supports a view of vocational education that favours narrow notions of skill and associated training over knowledge informed occupational practice of the kind found in most Northern European (...) countries. The source of Ryle's error in excluding systematic propositional knowledge from a significant place in the constitution of knowing how is traced. It is argued that Ryle's original distinction survives without the exclusion of systematic propositional knowledge from knowing how and the resulting account does more justice to the practice of vocational education in advanced economies than does Ryle's original treatment. (shrink)

Louis Arnaud Reid; Art: feeling and knowing, Journal of Philosophy of Education, Volume 15, Issue 1, 30 May 2006, Pages 43–52, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-97.

I first outline the arguments by which Hegel upholds the validity of his ‘rationalistic’ ideal of an ‘absolute knowing’, and then attempt to state precisely the sense in which such a Hegelian conception can be rightfully styled ‘idealistic’, and the reasons why it turns out to be preferable to the opposite empirical-realistic outlook. Thirdly, I examine his critique of ‘finite knowing’. Finally, I enumerate the fundamental features of that ‘speculative (i.e., strictly philosophical) knowing’ which, as the Absolute (...) Idea, Hegel sets against ‘finite knowing’ as the higher category in which the peculiar deficiencies and contradictions of the latter are integrated and reconciled. (shrink)

If particularism is right, the broad moral claims we make are usually riddled with exceptions. But such generalizations can still be a useful, even necessary part of moral life. They help us show what we should do, and they are essential for understanding why we should do it.

Twin-earth thought experiments, standardly construed, support the externalist doctrine that the content of propositional attitudes involving natural-kind terms supervenes upon properties external to those who entertain them. But this doctrine in conjunction with a common view of self-knowledge might have the intolerable consequence that substantial propositions concerning the environment could be knowable a priori. Since both doctrines, externalism and privileged self-knowledge, appear independently plausible, there is then a paradox facing the attempt to hold them concurrently. I shall argue, however, that (...) externalist claims about the dependence of content on environmental factors presuppose certain theses about the semantics of natural-kind terms that, if sound, would make those claims eligible for empirical justification instead. In fact, that is the only interpretation of their epistemic status that could square with the standard conclusion from twin-earth cases. Furthermore, it can be shown to solve the paradox of externalism and self-knowledge in a more doxastically conservative way--accommodating precisely each of the well-accepted intuitions about knowledge, closure and the individuation of content given up by available competitors. (shrink)

Many epistemologists have been attracted to the view that knowledge-wh can be reduced to knowledge-that. An important challenge to this, presented by Jonathan Schaffer, is the problem of “convergent knowledge”: reductive accounts imply that any two knowledge-wh ascriptions with identical true answers to the questions embedded in their wh-clauses are materially equivalent, but according to Schaffer, there are counterexamples to this equivalence. Parallel to this, Schaffer has presented a very similar argument against binary accounts of knowledge, and thereby in favour (...) of his alternative contrastive account, relying on similar examples of apparently inequivalent knowledge ascriptions, which binary accounts treat as equivalent. In this article, I develop a unified diagnosis and solution to these problems for the reductive and binary accounts, based on a general theory of knowledge ascriptions that embed presuppositional expressions. All of Schaffer's apparent counterexamples embed presuppositional expressions, and once the effect of these is taken into account, it becomes apparent that the counterexamples depend on an illicit equivocation of contexts. Since epistemologists often rely on knowledge ascriptions that embed presuppositional expressions, the general theory of them presented here will have ramifications beyond defusing Schaffer's argument. (shrink)

Testimony is a vital and ubiquitous source of knowledge. Were we to refrain from accepting the testimony of others, our lives would be impoverished in startling and debilitating ways. Despite the vital role that testimony occupies in our epistemic lives, traditional epistemological theories have focused primarily on other sources, such as sense perception, memory, and reason, with relatively little attention devoted specifically to testimony. In recent years, however, the epistemic significance of testimony has been more fully appreciated. I shall here (...) focus on two questions that have received the most attention in recent work in the epistemology of testimony. First, is testimonial knowledge acquired only by being transmitted from speaker to hearer? Second, must a hearer have positive reasons to justifiedly accept a speaker's testimony? (shrink)

The Reality Club is an informal group of adventurous intellectuals whose by-invitation-only membership roster reads like a Who's Who of American arts, science, politics, and business—particle physicist Gerald Feinberg, anthropologist Mary Catherine Bateson, linguist Vitaly Shevoroshkin, cyberneticist and video artist Paul Ryan. Theirs are the cutting-edge minds of our time, whose ideas are creating the reality of tomorrow. The Reality Club has been meeting once or twice a month, in private sessions in New York City, since 1981. Now it's going (...) public in a series of thematic books, of which WAYS OF KNOWING—thirteen provocative essays on the theme of how we learn, think, and process information—is the third volume. Like its predecessors, SPECULATIONS and DOING SCIENCE, it is required reading for anyone who appreciates the life of the mind, the unflinching search for truth, and reading for sheer intellectual pleasure. (shrink)

Belief is considered a kind of performance, which attains one level of success if it is true (or accurate), a second level if competent (or adroit), and a third if true because competent (or apt). Knowledge on one level (the animal level) is apt belief. The epistemic normativity constitutive of such knowledge is thus a kind of performance normativity. A problem is posed for this account by the fact that suspension of belief seems to fall under the same sort of (...) epistemic normativity as does belief itself, yet to suspend is of course precisely not to perform, certainly not with the aim of truth. The paper takes up this problem, and proposes a solution that distinguishes levels of performance norrmativity, including a first order where execution competence is in play, and a second order where the performer must assess the risks attendant on issuing a first-order performance. This imports a level of reflective knowledge that ascends above the animal level. (shrink)