First published in 2012. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

The second part of the book presents an alternative beyond the historical positions of Part I, one that defends a virtue epistemology combined with epistemic ...

In this paper, I argue that there is a notion of 'counterfactual success' which stands to knowledge how as true belief stands to propositional knowledge. (I attempt to avoid the question of whether knowledge how is a type of propositional knowledge.).

'Post-truth', Oxford Dictionary's 2016 word of the year, appears to cover only the turn away from reason in contemporary politics. In fact the truth behind 'post-truth' is historically and philosophically more complex. As Fuller shows in this book, it reaches into the nature of knowledge itself.

A knowledge-based decision theory faces what has been called the prodigality problem : given that many propositions are assigned probability 1, agents will be inclined to risk everything when betting on propositions which are known. In order to undo probability 1 assignments in high risk situations, the paper develops a theory which systematically connects higher level goods with higher-order knowledge.

Nasr (Islamic studies, George Washington U.), in a series of ten lectures, argues that, unlike in the West, where scientific thought has been secularized, in the East, knowledge and religious experience have remained unified. Drawing from Buddhist, Hindu, Judaic, Christian, and Islamic traditions, he finds in each the idea of perennial wisdom as a philosophical basis for such unity. Paperback edition ($10.95) not seen. A reprint of the 1987 original with a new (short) preface. The paper edition (06459-4) is (...) available for $13.50. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR. (shrink)

The main task of the present paper is to investigate the nature of collective knowledge and discuss what kind of justificatory aspects are involved in it to discuss it from collective belief. The central kind of collective knowledge investigated is normatively binding knowledge attributed to a social group. A distinction is made between natural knowledge and constitutive knowledge related to social (especially institutional) matters. In the case of the latter kind of knowledge, in contrast (...) to the former kind, justification and the criteria of justification are purely social. Knowledge is regarded as a primitive, irreducible notion that accordingly does not fall prey to Gettier-type paradoxes. (shrink)

Robert C. Stalnaker presents a set of essays on the structure of inquiry. First he focuses on the concepts of knowledge, belief, and partial belief, and on the rules and procedures we ought to use to determine what to believe. Then he explores the relations between conditionals and causal and explanatory concepts.

Branching-time temporal logics have proved to be an extraordinarily successful tool in the formal specification and verification of distributed systems. Much of their success stems from the tractability of the model checking problem for the branching time logic CTL, which has made it possible to implement tools that allow designers to automatically verify that systems satisfy requirements expressed in CTL. Recently, CTL was generalised by Alur, Henzinger, and Kupferman in a logic known as Alternating-time Temporal Logic (ATL). The key insight (...) in ATL is that the path quantifiers of CTL could be replaced by cooperation modalities, of the form , where is a set of agents. The intended interpretation of an ATL formula is that the agents can cooperate to ensure that holds (equivalently, that have a winning strategy for ). In this paper, we extend ATL with knowledge modalities, of the kind made popular in the work of Fagin, Halpern, Moses, Vardi and colleagues. Combining these knowledge modalities with ATL, it becomes possible to express such properties as group can cooperate to bring about iff it is common knowledge in that . The resulting logic — Alternating-time Temporal Epistemic Logic (ATEL) — shares the tractability of model checking with its ATL parent, and is a succinct and expressive language for reasoning about game-like multiagent systems. (shrink)

According to a thesis famously associated with Anscombe'sIntention, knowledge is a necessary condition of intentional action: when acting intentionally, we know what we are doing. Call this the Agential Knowledge thesis. The Agential Knowledge thesis remains, of course, controversial. Furthermore, as even some of its proponents acknowledge, it can appear puzzling: Why should acting intentionally require knowing what you are doing? My aim in this paper is to propose an explanation and defence of the Agential Knowledge (...) thesis, based on the idea that acting intentionally is exercising control, in a relevant sense. My argument rests on two things: first, articulating a modal conception of the relevant sense of control, and, secondly, arguing that agential knowledge is distinctively practical. As I explain, the truth of the Agential Knowledge thesis opens promising paths for future work in the philosophy of action. (shrink)

How is knowledge of the external world possible? How is knowledge of other minds possible? How is a priori knowledge possible? These are all examples of how-possible questions in epistemology. In this highly original book Quassim Cassam explains how such questions arise and how they should be answered.

Most current work in epistemology deals with the evaluation and justification of information already acquired. In this book, Jaakko Hintikka instead discusses the more important problem of how knowledge is acquired in the first place. His model of information-seeking is the old Socratic method of questioning, which has been generalized and brought up-to-date through the logical theory of questions and answers that he has developed. Hintikka also argues that philosophers' quest for a definition of knowledge is ill-conceived and (...) that the entire notion of knowledge should be replaced by the concept of information. He offers an analysis of the different meanings of the concept of information and of their interrelations. The result is a new and illuminating approach to the field of epistemology. (shrink)

The relationship between mind and matter, mental states and physical states, has occupied the attention of philosophers for thousands of years. Richard Fumerton's primary concern is the knowledge argument for dualism - an argument that proceeds from the idea that we can know truths about our existence and our mental states without knowing any truths about the physical world. This view has come under relentless criticism, but here Fumerton makes a powerful case for its rehabilitation, demonstrating clearly the importance (...) of its interconnections with a wide range of other controversies within philosophy. Fumerton analyzes philosophical views about the nature of thought and the relation of those views to arguments for dualism, and investigates the connection between a traditional form of foundationalism about knowledge, and a foundationalist view about thought that underlies traditional arguments for dualism. His book will be of great interest to those studying epistemology and the philosophy of mind. (shrink)

For the past fifty years anxiety over naturalism has driven debates in social theory. One side sees social science as another kind of natural science, while the other rejects the possibility of objective and explanatory knowledge. _Interpretation and Social Knowledge_ suggests a different route, offering a way forward for an antinaturalist sociology that overcomes the opposition between interpretation and explanation and uses theory to build concrete, historically specific causal explanations of social phenomena.

This volume gathers eleven new and three previously unpublished essays that take on questions of epistemic justification, responsibility, and virtue. It contains the best recent work in this area by major figures such as Ernest Sosa, Robert Audi, Alvin Goldman, and Susan Haak.

Russell's classic examination of the relation between individual experience and the general body of scientific knowledge. It is a rigorous examination of the problems of an empiricist epistemology.

We argue that honesty in assertion requires non-empirical knowledge that what one asserts is what one believes. Our argument proceeds from the thought that to assert honestly, one must follow and not merely conform to the norm ‘Assert that p only if you believe that p’. Furthermore, careful consideration of cases shows that the sort of doxastic self-knowledge required for following this norm cannot be acquired on the basis of observation, inference, or any other form of detection of (...) one’s own doxastic states. It is, as we put it, transparent rather than empirical self-knowledge. (shrink)

People are unable to report how they decide whether to move backwards or forwards to catch a ball. When asked to imagine how their angle of elevation of gaze would change when they caught a ball, most people are unable to describe what happens although their interception strategy is based on controlling changes in this angle. Just after catching a ball, many people are unable to recognise a description of how their angle of gaze changed during the catch. Some people (...) confidently choose incorrect descriptions that would guarantee failure of interception demonstrating unconscious knowledge co-existing with systematically different conscious beliefs. Where simple solutions to important evolutionary problems exist, unconscious perception needs to be impervious to conscious beliefs. (shrink)

Russell's classic examination of the relation between individual experience and the general body of scientific knowledge. It is a rigorous examination of the problems of an empiricist epistemology.

This work investigates how ancient philosophers understood productive knowledge or technê and used it to explain ethics, rhetoric, politics and cosmology. In eleven chapters leading scholars set out the ancient debates about technê from the Presocratic and Hippocratic writers, through Plato and Aristotle and the Hellenistic age, ending in the Neoplatonism of Plotinus and Proclus. Amongst the many themes that come into focus are: the model status of ancient medicine in defining the political art, the similarities between the Platonic (...) and Aristotelian conceptions of technê, the use of technê as a paradigm for virtue and practical rationality, technê´s determining role in Platonic conceptions of cosmology, technê´s relationship to experience and theoretical knowledge, virtue as an 'art of living', the adaptability of the criteria of technê to suit different skills, including philosophy itself, the use in productive knowledge of models, deliberation, conjecture and imagination. (shrink)

This book presents a strong case for substance dualism and offers a comprehensive defense of the knowledge argument, showing that materialism cannot accommodate or explain the 'hard problem' of consciousness. Bringing together the discussion of reductionism and semantic vagueness in an original and illuminating way, Howard Robinson argues that non-fundamental levels of ontology are best treated by a conceptualist account, rather than a realist one. In addition to discussing the standard versions of physicalism, he examines physicalist theories such as (...) those of McDowell and Price, and accounts of neutral monism and panpsychism from Strawson, McGinn and Stoljar. He also explores previously unnoticed historical parallels between Frege and Aristotle, and between Hume and Plotinus. His book will be a valuable resource for scholars and advanced students of philosophy of mind, in particular those looking at consciousness, dualism, and the mind-body problem. (shrink)

It is only in fairly recent philosophy that psychological self-knowledge has come to be seen as problematical; once upon a time the hardest philosophical difficulties all seemed to attend our knowledge of others. But as philosophers have canvassed various models of the mental that would make knowledge of other minds less intractable, so it has become unobvious how to accommodate what once seemed evident and straightforward–the wide and seemingly immediate cognitive dominion of minds over themselves.

This paper examines what it takes to be the intrinsic human goods of knowledge and achievement and argues that they are at many points parallel. Both are compounds, and of parallel elements: belief, justification, and truth in the one case, and intentional pursuit, competence, and success in the other. Each involves a Moorean organic unity, so its full presence or value requires a connection between its elements: an outside-in connection, where what makes a belief true helps explain why it’s (...) justified, for knowledge, and an inside-out connection, where what makes a pursuit competent helps explain its success, for achievement. The features that determine the degrees of value of instances of the two goods, or make some truths more worth knowing and some goals more worth achieving, are also similar, turning in both cases largely on two forms of generality. And more specific goods that follow from valuing generality, such as integrated understanding and complex, difficult achievement, mirror each other structurally. Taken together, these many parallels suggest that knowledge and achievement may both instantiate a more abstract value of rational connection to reality. With or without that deeper unification, the parallels strengthen the claims of both to be genuine goods. (shrink)

The book is divided into 3 parts. The first argues that activities which appear to be timeless - gathering knowledge, analysing, disseminating and employing it - are in fact time-bound and take different forms in different periods and places. The second part tries to counter the tendency to write a triumphalist history of the 'growth' of knowledge by discussing losses of knowledge and the price of specialization. The third part offers geographical, sociological and chronological overviews, contrasting the (...) experience of centres and peripheries and arguing that each of the main trends of the period - professionalization, secularization, nationalization, democratization, etc, coexisted and interacted with its opposite."--Publisher. (shrink)

The usual, comparative, conception of Inference to the Best Explanation takes it to be ampliative. In this paper I propose a conception of IBE that takes it to be a species of eliminative induction and hence not ampliative. This avoids several problems for comparative IBE. My account of Holmesian inference raises the suspicion that it could never be applied, on the grounds that scientific hypotheses are inevitably underdetermined by the evidence. I argue that this concern may be resisted by acknowledging, (...) as Timothy Williamson has shown, that all knowledge is evidence. This suggests an approach to resisting scepticism different from those that embrace fallibilism. (shrink)

Here is a traditional way of thinking about human knowledge. Knowledge is a species of true belief. The crucial difference between knowledge and other kinds of true belief is that propositions that are known have a special property. Justified propositions either have intrinsic justification or else they are obtainable by means of a justification-conferring argument from other justified propositions that the knower believes. The only propositions with intrinsic justification are those that fall into one of two classes: (...) the set of a priori truths and the set of propositions recording the sensory experiences of the knower. (shrink)

A single argument template---the EPH template---can be used to generate versions of the best known and most challenging skeptical problems. In his brilliantly groundbreaking book Knowledge and Its Limits, Timothy Williamson presents a theory of knowledge and evidence which he clearly intends to provide a response to skepticism in its most important forms. After laying out EPH skepticism and reviewing possible ways of responding to it, I show how elements of Williamson’s theory motivate a hitherto unexplored way of (...) responding to EPH-generated skeptical arguments. Then I offer reasons to doubt the correctness of Williamson’s response. (shrink)

This paper provides a complete characterization of epistemic models in which distributed knowledge complies with the principle of full communication (van der Hoek et al., 1999; Gerbrandy, 1999). It also introduces an extended notion of bisimulation and corresponding model comparison games that match the expressive power of distributed knowledge operators.

In this book Haridimos Tsoukas, one of the most imaginative organization theorists of our time, examines the nature of knowledge in organizations, and how individuals and scholars approach the concept of knowledge. -/- Tsoukas firstly looks at organizational knowledge and its embeddedness in social contexts and forms of life. He shows that knowledge is not just a collection of free floating representations of the world to be used at will, but an activity constitutive of the world. (...) On the one hand the organization as an institutionalized system does produce regularities that can can be captured via propositional forms of knowledge. On the other, the organization as practice, as a lifeworld, or as an open-ended system produce stories, values, and shared traditions which can only be captured by narrative forms of knowledge. -/- Secondly, Tsoukas looks at the issue of how individuals deal with the notion of complexity in organizations: Our inability to reduce the behaviour of complex organizations to their constituent parts. Drawing on concepts such as discourse, narrativity, and reflexivity, he adopts a hermeneutical approach to the issue. -/- Finally Tsoukas examines the concept of meta-knowledge, and how we know what we know. Arguing that the underlying representationalist epistemology of much of mainstream management causes many problems, he advocates adopting a more discursive approach. He describes what such an epistemology might be, and illustrates it with examples from organization studies and strategic management. -/- An ideal introduction to the thinking of a leading organizational theorist, this book will be essential reading for academics, researchers, and students of Knowledge Management, Organization Studies, Management Studies, Business Strategy, and Applied Epistemology. (shrink)

A common view holds that consciousness is needed for knowledge acquired in one domain to be applied in a novel domain. We present evidence for the opposite; where the transfer of knowledge is achieved only in the absence of conscious awareness. Knowledge of artificial grammars was examined where training and testing occurred in different vocabularies or modalities. In all conditions grammaticality judgments attributed to random selection showed above-chance accuracy , while those attributed to conscious decisions did not. (...) Participants also rated each string’s familiarity and performed a perceptual task assessing fluency. Familiarity was predicted by repetition structure and was thus related to grammaticality. Fluency, though increasing familiarity, was unrelated to grammaticality. While familiarity predicted all judgments only those attributed to random selection showed a significant additional contribution of grammaticality, deriving primarily from chunk novelty. In knowledge transfer, as in visual perception , the unconscious may outperform the conscious. (shrink)

This book provides a comprehensive investigation into Hans Morgenthau's life and work. Identifying power, knowledge, and dissent as the fundamental principles that have informed his worldview, this book argues that Morgenthau's lasting contribution to the discipline of International Relations is the human condition of politics.

First published in 1962. Kant’s philosophical works, and especially the _Critique of Pure Reason_, have had some influence on recent British philosophy. But the complexities of Kant’s arguments, and the unfamiliarity of his vocabulary, inhibit understanding of his point of view. In _Kant’s Theory of Knowledge _an attempt is made to relate Kant’s arguments in the _Critique of Pure Reason _to contemporary issues by expressing them in a more modern idiom. The selection of issues discussed is intended to present (...) a continuous argument, of an epistemological kind, which runs centrally through the _Critique_. The argument deals with essentially with the problems, raised in the Transcendental Analytic, about the status of categories. It deals with certain preliminary assumptions made in setting these problems, and discusses the way in which the various sections of the Analytic contribute to their solution. It also deals with Kant’s criticisms of traditional metaphysics, and ends with an account of his effort in the Third Antinomy to resolve the conflict between freedom and causality, and so to effect a transition of knowledge to moral philosophy. (shrink)

In this paper, we develop and refine the idea that understanding is a species of explanatory knowledge. Specifically, we defend the idea that S understands why p if and only if S knows that p, and, for some q, S’s true belief that q correctly explains p is produced/maintained by reliable explanatory evaluation. We then show how this model explains the reception of James Bjorken’s explanation of scaling by the broader physics community in the late 1960s and early 1970s. (...) The historical episode is interesting because Bjorken’s explanation initially did not provide understanding to other physicists, but was subsequently deemed intelligible when Feynman provided a physical interpretation that led to experimental tests that vindicated Bjorken’s model. Finally, we argue that other philosophical models of scientific understanding are best construed as limiting cases of our more general model. (shrink)

Can we conceive cogently of all knowledge – in particular, all knowledge of truths – as being knowledge-how? This paper provides reasons for thinking not only that is this possible, but that it is conceptually advantageous and suggestive. Those reasons include adaptations of, and responses to, some classic philosophical arguments and ideas, from Descartes, Hume, Peirce, Mill, and Ryle. The paper’s position is thus a practicalism – a kind of pragmatism – about the nature of knowledge, (...) arguing that all knowledge is knowledge-how to act – to do this, to do that. Such a conception can include, too, a distinctive view of the metaphysical relation between knowledge and belief. We see that, contrary to what most contemporary epistemologists say, knowledge need not be a form of belief. Instead, a belief that p can be a way simply of enriching or strengthening knowledge that p. It can do this in a paracticalist way, by allowing one to do more with the knowledge. (shrink)

In this article, I oppose the view that knowledge is a species of belief, and argue that belief should be defined in terms of knowledge, instead of the other way round. However, I reject the idea that the concept of knowledge has a primary or basic role or position in our system of mental and logical concepts, because I reject the hierarchical conception of philosophical analysis implicit in this idea. I approach the topic of knowledge and (...) belief from a discussion of Richard Holton’s views about facts and factive verbs. (shrink)

In this paper I propose an account of self-knowledge based on a framework of predictive processing. Predictive processing understands the brain as a prediction-action machine that tries to minimize error in its predictions about the world. For this view to evolve into a complete account of human cognition we ought to provide an idea how it can account for self-knowledge – knowledge of one’s own mental states. I provide an attempt for such an account starting from remarks (...) on introspection made by Hohwy. I develop Hohwy’s picture into a general model for knowledge of one’s mental states, discussing how predictions about oneself can be used to capture self-knowledge. I further explore empirical predictions, and thereby argue that the model provides a good explanation for failure of self-knowledge in cases involving motor aftereffects, such as the broken escalator phenomenon. I conclude that the proposed account is incomplete, but provides a valuable first step to connect research on predictive processing with the epistemology of self-knowledge. (shrink)

This article discusses how to deal with the relations between different cultural perspectives in classrooms, based on a proposal for considering understanding and knowledge as goals of science education, inspired by Dewey’s naturalistic humanism. It thus combines educational and philosophical interests. In educational terms, our concerns relate to how science teachers position themselves in multicultural classrooms. In philosophical terms, we are interested in discussing the relations between belief, understanding, and knowledge under the light of Dewey’s philosophy. We present (...) a synthesis of Dewey’s theory of inquiry through his naturalistic humanism and discuss its implications for the concepts of belief, understanding, and knowledge, as well as for the goals of science teaching. In particular, we highlight problems arising in the context of possible conflicts between scientific and religious claims in the school environment that result from totalitarian positions. We characterize an individual’s position as totalitarian if he or she takes some way of thinking as the only one capable of expressing the truth about all that exists in the world, lacks open-mindedness to understand different interpretative perspectives, and attempts to impose her or his interpretation about the facts to others by violent means or not. From this stance, any other perspective is taken to be false a priori and, accordingly, as a putative target to be suppressed or adapted to the privileged way of thinking. We argue, instead, for a more fallibilist evaluation of our own beliefs and a more respectful appraisal of the diversity of students’ beliefs by both students and teachers. (shrink)