An argument that takes issue with the contemporary epistemological consensus that justification is distinct from knowledge, proposing instead that justified belief simply is knowledge, and arguing in detail that a belief is justified when ...

I will be arguing that a subject’s belief that p is justified if and only if he knows that p: justification is knowledge. I will start by describing two broad classes of allegedly justified beliefs that do not constitute knowledge and which, hence, cannot be what they are often taken to be if my view is correct. It is far from clear what my view is until I say a lot more about the relevant concept or concepts of justification that (...) concern me. The following section describes several concepts of justification that epistemologists have employed, and, in particular, identifies the two concepts of justification that I claim are coextensive with the concept of knowledge. One of those is the deontological conception of justification: I will be arguing that one ought not believe that p unless one knows that p. I imagine that the major opposition to my view will be that it is simply obvious that there are justified false beliefs, a feeling that I try to dispel in the lengthy section on concepts of justification before I finally get around to giving the main arguments in favor of my view. A view as unorthodox as mine demands more than a single argument: I offer four in the third section. Everyone allows that many people have many unjustified beliefs, and everyone has some unjustified beliefs, but such beliefs appear to be far more prevalent on my view than on more orthodox views. In the last section, I argue that unjustified beliefs, although widespread, are not quite as common as they might appear to be on my view. (shrink)

I argue that thoughts and concepts are mental representations rather than abstracta. I propose that the most important difference between the two views is that the mentalist believes that there are concept and thought tokens as well as types; this reveals that the dispute is not terminological but ontological. I proceed to offer an argument for mentalism. The key step is to establish that concepts and thoughts have lexical as well as semantic properties. I then show that this entails that (...) concepts and thoughts are susceptible to the type/token distinction. I finish by considering some objections to the argument. (shrink)

By introducing a name ‘one meter’ and stipulating that it refers to the length of stick S, the stipulator appears to be in a position to gain immediate knowledge of a mind- and language-independent fact-the fact that the length of stick S is one meter. It appears that other users of the name can gain this knowledge only through empirical enquiry. I argue that this presents a paradox. After clarifying the nature of the paradox, I offer a solution by arguing (...) that, contrary to appearances, other users of ‘one meter’ implicitly knew that the length of stick S is one meter before learning the name, as did the stipulator prior to introducing the name. There is some distinct knowledge that other users of the name can only gain empirically, but the stipulator cannot gain this knowledge without empirical enquiry either. (shrink)

By introducing a name ‘one meter’ and stipulating that it refers to the length of stick S, the stipulator appears to be in a position to gain immediate (and arguably a priori) knowledge of a mind- and language-independent fact-the fact that the length of stick S is one meter. It appears that other users of the name can gain this knowledge only through empirical enquiry. I argue that this presents a paradox. After clarifying the nature of the paradox, I offer (...) a solution by arguing that, contrary to appearances, other users of ‘one meter’ implicitly knew that the length of stick S is one meter before learning the name, as did the stipulator prior to introducing the name. There is some distinct knowledge that other users of the name can only gain empirically, but the stipulator cannot gain this knowledge without empirical enquiry either. (shrink)

The Coronavirus pandemic has significantly affected psychological wellbeing in older adults, with cases of depression, anxiety and loneliness rising in the general population. Cognitive health has also potentially been affected, as social isolation can lead to cognitive decline. Worrying about cognitive health can be damaging to psychological wellbeing and is especially relevant to explore in the context of the Coronavirus pandemic. The objective of the present study was to explore the associations between cognitive health worries and wellbeing, and to investigate (...) whether physical activity and social contact can mitigate negative effects of the pandemic on psychological wellbeing. Older adults completed an online survey which included measures of cognitive health worries, depression, anxiety, loneliness, social isolation, fatigue, impact of the Coronavirus pandemic, quality of life, subjective vitality, and physical activity. Analyses indicated that cognitive health worries, lower levels of physical activity and smaller amounts of social interaction were associated with poorer psychological and physical wellbeing. Results showed that worrying about cognitive health is associated with poorer wellbeing, and so interventions are needed to encourage positive cognitive functioning in times of social isolation. Promoting physical activity and social interaction is also beneficial, as results show that exercise and social contact are linked with improved wellbeing. (shrink)

I am justified in believing that my lottery ticket—call it t1—will not win, on statistical grounds. Those grounds apply equally to any other ticket, so I am justified in believing of any other ticket ti (let i take values from 2 to 1000000) that it will not win. I am not, however, justified in believing the giant conjunctive proposition that t1 will not win & t2 will not win & . . . & t1,000,000 will not win. On the contrary, (...) I am justified in believing that some ticket will win, hence that one of those conjuncts is false. Suggested solution: justified belief is not closed under conjunction. It does not follow from the fact that I am justified in believing p and justified in believing q that I am justified in believing p & q. (shrink)

This is an examination of two essays on minimal religion by Mikhail Epstein (1982 and 1999), assessing the usefulness of the term ‘minimal religion’ for the analysis of religion in contemporary Russia.

This is an examination of two essays on minimal religion by Mikhail Epstein, assessing the usefulness of the term 'minimal religion' for the analysis of religion in contemporary Russia.

My aim is to motivate and develop a view of what senses are. Senses, as I conceive of them, avoid a number of the problems that plague a broadly Fregean approach to the semantics of belief ascriptions, as I hope to show. The chief innovation of my view that enables these solutions is that beliefs are taken to have multiple, truth-conditionally equivalent contents. In traditional Fregean terminology, a belief does not involve a relation to a single thought, but to many (...) thoughts, some of which are very fine-grained, and some of which are rather coarse-grained. Each thought is a structured entity ultimately composed of unstructured senses that themselves vary in their level of grain. It is no part of my attempted vindication of senses that senses are closely related to the meanings of words, phrases, and sentences; this feature of historical Fregeanism I disavow. I endorse rather the equally traditional claim that senses are concepts or, if truth-evaluable, the propositional contents of belief. (shrink)

It appears that the objects of belief and the objects of assertion are, often, one and the same. The objects of assertion must be communicable – if an assertion leads to successful communication, the audience grasps what the speaker said. There are good reasons for thinking that beliefs are relations to very fine-grained contents, however, which appear to be unsuitable for reliable transmission from speaker to audience. I consider two accounts of the apparent intersection of the objects of belief and (...) the objects of assertion, and find them unable to embrace both of these claims. I defend the view that beliefs have multiple, truth-conditionally equivalent contents on the grounds that it is able to reconcile the apparently conflicting claims. (shrink)

Pancreatitis is a complex, progressively destructive inflammatory disorder. Alcohol was long thought to be the primary causative agent, but genetic contributions have been of interest since the discovery that rare PRSS1, CFTR and SPINK1 variants were associated with pancreatitis risk. We now report two associations at genome-wide significance identified and replicated at PRSS1-PRSS2 and X-linked CLDN2 through a two-stage genome-wide study. The PRSS1 variant likely affects disease susceptibility by altering expression of the primary trypsinogen gene. The CLDN2 risk allele is (...) associated with atypical localization of claudin-2 in pancreatic acinar cells. The homozygous CLDN2 genotype confers the greatest risk, and its alleles interact with alcohol consumption to amplify risk. These results could partially explain the high frequency of alcohol-related pancreatitis in men. © 2012 Nature America, Inc. All rights reserved. (shrink)

In a "parenthesis of fascinated horror" before "the complete discovery and subjection of the body to science", Renaissance anatomists and poets shared peculiar emotions of dread and desire towards the bodies they dissected and described. Jonathan Sawday's ambitious project is to evoke the common taboos, resistances, and fears which the human body provoked in its various early modern investigators, while telling "stories of terrible cruelty, which are tinged by a form of dark eroticism". He is justifiably proud of the (...) historical range of his study, across medicine, cartography, literature, the law, myth, art, theology, social history, and philosophy. But he seeks more than a synthesis of these disparate domains, hoping also both to sketch a new grand narrative about conceptual, practical, and phenomenological changes regarding the body, and further "if not to dispel, then at least to explain" our own multiple, ambiguous feelings about our innards. Thus he marvellously maintains simultaneous attention to culture and psychology, combining high theory with historical precision in rare and risky fashion. (shrink)

In Without Justification,[1] Jonathan Sutton undermines the orthodox view that a justified belief needn’t constitute knowledge; develops a battery of arguments for the unorthodox thesis that you justifiedly believe P iff you know P; and explores the topics of testimony and inference in light of his equation of justification and knowledge (J=K). This book is essential reading at epistemology’s cutting edge. In §I, we’ll take an extended tour of the book, raising various questions and objections along the way. (...) In §II, we’ll assess Sutton’s three main arguments for J=K, which form the heart of his project. (shrink)

Experiences of embodied remembering are familiar and diverse. We settle bodily into familiar chairs or find our way easily round familiar rooms. We inhabit our own kitchens or cars or workspaces effectively and comfortably, and feel disrupted when our habitual and accustomed objects or technologies change or break or are not available. Hearing a particular song can viscerally bring back either one conversation long ago, or just the urge to dance. Some people explicitly use their bodies to record, store, or (...) cue memories. Others can move skilfully, without stopping to think, in complex and changing environments thanks to the cumulative expertise accrued in their history of fighting fires, or dancing, or playing hockey. The forms of memory involved in these cases may be distinct, operating at different timescales and levels, and by way of different mechanisms and media, but they often cooperate in the many contexts of our practices of remembering. (shrink)

As a topic in the philosophy of psychology, dreaming is a fascinating, diverse, and severely underdeveloped area of study. The topic excites intense public interest in its own right, while also challenging our confidence that we know what the words “conscious” and “consciousness” mean. So dreaming should be at the forefront of our interdisciplinary investigations: theories of mind which fail to address the topic are incomplete. This chapter illustrates the tight links between conceptual and empirical issues by highlighting surprisingly deep (...) disagreements among leading dream scientists over what might seem basic aspects of their topic. (shrink)

This paper introduces a new, expanded range of relevant cognitive psychological research on collaborative recall and social memory to the philosophical debate on extended and distributed cognition. We start by examining the case for extended cognition based on the complementarity of inner and outer resources, by which neural, bodily, social, and environmental resources with disparate but complementary properties are integrated into hybrid cognitive systems, transforming or augmenting the nature of remembering or decision-making. Adams and Aizawa, noting this distinctive complementarity argument, (...) say that they agree with it completely: but they describe it as “a non-revolutionary approach” which leaves “the cognitive psychology of memory as the study of processes that take place, essentially without exception, within nervous systems.” In response, we carve out, on distinct conceptual and empirical grounds, a rich middle ground between internalist forms of cognitivism and radical anti-cognitivism. Drawing both on extended cognition literature and on Sterelny’s account of the “scaffolded mind” (this issue), we develop a multidimensional framework for understanding varying relations between agents and external resources, both technological and social. On this basis we argue that, independent of any more “revolutionary” metaphysical claims about the partial constitution of cognitive processes by external resources, a thesis of scaffolded or distributed cognition can substantially influence or transform explanatory practice in cognitive science. Critics also cite various empirical results as evidence against the idea that remembering can extend beyond skull and skin. We respond with a more principled, representative survey of the scientific psychology of memory, focussing in particular on robust recent empirical traditions for the study of collaborative recall and transactive social memory. We describe our own empirical research on socially distributed remembering, aimed at identifying conditions for mnemonic emergence in collaborative groups. Philosophical debates about extended, embedded, and distributed cognition can thus make richer, mutually beneficial contact with independently motivated research programs in the cognitive psychology of memory. (shrink)

How should one understand knowledge-wh ascriptions? That is, how should one understand claims such as ‘‘I know where the car is parked,’’ which feature an interrogative complement? The received view is that knowledge-wh reduces to knowledge that p, where p happens to be the answer to the question Q denoted by the wh-clause. I will argue that knowledge-wh includes the question—to know-wh is to know that p, as the answer to Q. I will then argue that knowledge-that includes a contextually (...) implicit question. I will conclude that knowledge is a question-relative state. Knowing is knowing the answer, and whether one knows the answer depends (in part) on the question. (shrink)

Discovering someone disagrees with you is a common occurrence. The question of epistemic significance of disagreement concerns how discovering that another disagrees with you affects the rationality of your beliefs on that topic. This book examines the answers that have been proposed to this question, and presents and defends its own answer.

To better understand the nature of joint expertise and its underlying processes, we need not only analyses of the general conditions for skilled group action, but also descriptive accounts of the features and dimensions that vary across distinct performances and contexts, such as sport and the arts. And in addition to positioning our accounts against current models of individual skill, we need concepts and lessons from work on collaborative processes in other cognitive domains. This paper examines ecological or situational components (...) of expert joint action in practice, then offers a selective survey of some key cognitive and affective resources that shape and transform group performance. (shrink)

In this study of events and their places in our language and thought, Bennett propounds and defends views about what kind of item an event is, how the language of events works, and about how these two themes are interrelated. He argues that most of the supposedly metaphysical literature is really about the semantics of their names, and that the true metaphysic of events--known by Leibniz and rediscovered by Kim--has not been universally accepted because it has been tarred with the (...) brush of a false semantic theory. (shrink)

William James is known as a nineteenth-century philosopher, psychologist, and psychical researcher. Less well-known are the medical fixations that united his multiple identities and drove his ambition to change the way American society conceived of itself in body, mind, and soul. William James, M.D. offers an account of the development and cultural significance of James's ideas and works, and establishes, for the first time, the relevance of medical themes to his major lines of thought. James lived at a time when (...) old assumptions about faith and the moral and religious possibilities for human worth and redemption were increasingly displaced by a concern with the medically "normal" and the perfectibility of the body. Woven into treatises warning of the degeneration of humanity, these ideas comprised the origins of the eugenics movement and were manifest in a growing social stigma attached to illness and invalidism, a disturbing intellectual current in which James felt personally implicated. Most chronicles of James's life have portrayed a distressed young man, a psychological or spiritual crisis, followed by the emergence of a mature thinker who threw off his pallor of mental sickness for good. In contrast, Emma Sutton draws on his personal correspondence, unpublished notebooks, and diaries to show that James considered himself a genuine invalid to the end of his days. Sutton makes the compelling case that his philosophizing was not an abstract occupation but an impassioned response to his own life experiences and challenges. To ignore the medical James is to misread James altogether. Sales points: First book to map William James's preoccupation with medical ideas, concerns, and values across the disciplinary breadth of his work Reveals how themes of invalidism, health, and healing underpinned the genesis of many of James's major philosophical, psychological, and political ideas Draws on the approximately 9,400 items of Jamesian correspondence, together with his private notes and reading lists. (shrink)

Ichikawa and Jarvis offer a new rationalist theory of mental content and defend a traditional epistemology of philosophy. They argue that philosophical inquiry is continuous with non-philosophical inquiry, and can be genuinely a priori, and that intuitions do not play an important role in mental content or the a priori.

As one of the first readers of this fine collection of chapters in improvisation studies, I’ve been interactively constructing my experiences and interpretations of the chapters as I go along. Engaged reading – like all our characteristic activities – has a substantial improvisatory dimension. Readers are neither passively downloading data transmitted fully formed from the contributors’ minds nor making up whatever we like, projecting our own views onto a blank slate of a book. In forging and sharing here my own (...) idiosyncratic responses, I reach out to other, future readers by welcoming and inviting creative pushback, aiming to open up options, to accept and expand on the rich fare these authors offer us. (shrink)

Should society care about Christian morality? Are Christians out of touch with complex moral decision-making? Christian Morality: An Interdisciplinary Framework for Thinking about Contemporary Moral Issues provides readers with a framework for identifying and applying Christian moral principles to divisive issues. First, readers learn of the theological and philosophical foundations of Christian ethics. Two additional chapters explain how personal and social factors influence our capacity to think critically and Christianly about morality. Second, readers will learn about forming Christian moral judgments (...) by seeing how different thinkers address six contemporary moral issues: abortion, same-sex relationships, equal treatment of men and women in the workplace, sex education, and racial bias in incarceration polices. (shrink)

Conditional sentences are among the most intriguing and puzzling features of language, and analysis of their meaning and function has important implications for, and uses in, many areas of philosophy. Jonathan Bennett, one of the world's leading experts, distils many years' work and teaching into this Philosophical Guide to Conditionals, the fullest and most authoritative treatment of the subject. An ideal introduction for undergraduates with a philosophical grounding, it also offers a rich source of illumination and stimulation for graduate (...) students and professional philosophers. (shrink)

Ideas about soul and body – about thinking or remembering, mind and life, brain and self – remain both diverse and controversial in our neurocentric age. The history of these ideas is significant both in its own right and to aid our understanding of the complex sources and nature of our concepts of mind, cognition, and psychology, which are all terms with puzzling, difficult histories. These topics are not the domain of specialists alone, and studies of emotion, perception, or reasoning (...) have never been isolated theoretical endeavours. As Francis Bacon described human philosophy or ‘the knowledge of ourselves’, within which he located the study of body, soul, and mind, it ‘deserveth the more accurate handling, by how much it toucheth us more nearly’ (1605/ 2000: 93). The history of ideas in these domains is particularly challenging given the practical dimensions and implications of theories of mind. Because theories of human nature and debates about body and mind do ‘touch us’ so ‘nearly’, they attract and can thus reveal, in specific historical contexts, interconnected discourses or associations which may be quite unlike our own. So there are no neat boundaries around a historical category of ‘seventeenth-century British philosophy of the soul’. The central topic of this chapter can be thought of either as pneumatology, the doctrine or science of spirits and souls, or as continuous with the ‘psychologia’ or psychology of Aristotelian traditions (Park and Kessler 1988; Hatfield 1995: 184-6). In neither case, however, should we expect any deep unity to be provided by history, geography, discipline, or subject-matter. (shrink)

Fundamental physics makes no clear use of causal notions; it uses laws that operate in relevant respects in both temporal directions and that relate whole systems across times. But by relating causation to evidence, we can explain how causation fits in to a physical picture of the world and explain its temporal asymmetry. This paper takes up a deliberative approach to causation, according to which causal relations correspond to the evidential relations we need when we decide on one thing in (...) order to achieve another. Tamsin's taking her umbrella is a cause of her staying dry, for example, if and only if her deciding to take her umbrella for the sake of staying dry is adequate grounds for believing she'll stay dry. This correspondence explains why causation matters: knowledge of causal structure helps us make decisions that are evidence of outcomes we seek. The account also explains why we can control the future and not the past, and why causes come before their effects. When agents properly deliberate, their decisions can never count as evidence for any outcomes they may seek in the past. From this it follows that causal relations don't run backwards. This deliberative asymmetry is itself traced back to asymmetries of evidence and entropy, providing a new way of deriving causal asymmetry from temporally symmetric laws. (shrink)

Davidson's account of weakness of will dependsupon a parallel that he draws between practicaland theoretical reasoning. I argue that theparallel generates a misleading picture oftheoretical reasoning. Once the misleadingpicture is corrected, I conclude that theattempt to model akratic belief on Davidson'saccount of akratic action cannot work. Thearguments that deny the possibility of akraticbelief also undermine, more generally, variousattempts to assimilate theoretical to practicalreasoning.