Epistemological Sources

It’s intuitive to think that an intentional action requires that the agent knows that she’s doing so. In light of some apparent counterexamples, Setiya suggests that this intuitive insight is better captured in terms of credence: performing an intentional action requires the agent to have a higher credence that she’s doing so than she would have otherwise. I argue that there is no such thing as an agent’s credence for what she’s doing. After distinguishing this thesis from an idea some (...) defend under the slogan “deliberation crowds out prediction”, I explore the thesis’s broader epistemological implications for the belief-credence relation. (shrink)

Traditionally, philosophers have been skeptical that the imagination can justify beliefs about the actual world. After all, how could merely imagining something give you any reason to believe that it is true? However, within the past decade or so, a lively debate has emerged over whether the imagination can justify empirical belief and, if so, how. This paper provides a critical overview of the recent literature on the epistemology of imagination and points to avenues for future research.

Mikkonen’s new book and his emphasis on understanding should be regarded as an important contribution to the contemporary debate on the cognitive value of literary narratives. As I shall argue, his notion of understanding can also help explain how literature is existentially valuable. In so doing, his account can support a radicalized contemporary neo-cognitivism according to which literature can affect us existentially and lead to a personal transformation.

In this article, I define a cultural epistemology as a set of socially reinforced assumptions about how knowledge and truth are produced. Unlike a philosophical epistemology, a cultural epistemology is largely the product of culture and largely invisible. As products of culture, cultural epistemology are relatively unquestioned and, in many cases, philosophically unsophisticated. There are three common types of cultural epistemologies, influenced by who holds power in a given society: an epistemological monarchy, an epistemological oligarchy and an epistemological democracy. A (...) given cultural epistemology subsequently influences the legitimacy of culture and government itself. I argue argue that Americans tend to hold an "epistemological democracy" with two distinct facets: a trust in consensus, linked to living in a democratic republic, and a trust in their own self-interest, linked to market economics and capitalism more generally. These two facets combine, interact, and even oppose each other to legitimize and challenge American culture and its political and economic systems. (shrink)

Fruto de um seminário ocorrido no Sesc Consolação em 2015, este livro traz reflexões de intelectuais brasileiros e alemães sobre o tema da sabedoria no mundo contemporâneo. Educar para sabedoria, a relação entre saber e não saber, a sabedoria frente ao poder da economia, a sabedoria e o futuro e a sabedoria do coração são alguns dos temas abordados nesta obra, que pretende resgatar e qualificar uma discussão passível de aguçar nossa capacidade de discernimento em um cotidiano inundado pelo excesso (...) de informações. (shrink)

The idea that appearances provide justifications for beliefs—the principle of phenomenal conservatism—is self-evidently true. In the case of cognitive penetration, however, it seems that certain irrational etiologies of a belief may influence the epistemic quality of that belief. Susanna Siegel argues that these etiologies lead to ‘epistemic downgrade.’ Instead of providing us with a decisive objection, cognitive penetration calls for us to clarify our epistemic framework by understanding the formative parts of appearances. In doing so, the two different but inseparable (...) ideas of sensation and intellection provide us with a basis of our appearances. These appearances, in turn, provide us with the objective evidence needed to test our judgements. Thus, the extra-sensory concepts of intellectual identification and the appearances they help form become an epistemic groundwork. (shrink)

Abweichend vom orthodoxen Marxismus reduziert Adler indessen die Dialektik auf eine bloße Methodenlehre der Sozialwissenschaft, welcher keine Realdialektik des geschichtlichen Seins entsprechen soll. Ebenso lehnt Adler – darin einig mit anderen Theoretikern der zweiten Internationale wie Karl Kautsky und Karl Liebknecht – die Verbindung von wissenschaftlichem Sozialismus und Materialismus ab: der wahre Marxismus sei "in Wirklichkeit sozialer Idealismus". Der historische Materialismus verkehrt sich für Adler im Grunde in subjektiven Idealismus. Sein besonderes Interesse galt denn auch folgerichtig einer erkenntniskritischen Grundlegung der (...) Soziologie, in der die Marx'schen Motive eine Verbindung mit dem Transzendentalismus Kants eingegangen sind. Den formalen Begriff von Demokratie kritisierend, differenzierte Adler zwischen der politischen Demokratie als Herrschaftsorganisation der bürgerlichen Klasse und einer sozialen Demokratie, in der mit den Klassengegensätzen zugleich die Unterdrückung abgeschafft sein und an ihre Stelle eine "solidarische Verwaltungsreform" der Gesellschaft treten solle. Die Errichtung einer sozialistischen Gesellschaft blieb für Adler gebunden an das Marx'sche 'Zerbrechen der Staatsmaschinerie'. Adler schrieb diese Abhandlung im Jahr 1904. (shrink)

An epistemological orthodox view holds that knowing that p is an absolute ‘yes-or-no’ affair rather than something that comes in degrees. The rising epistemic gradualist theory challenges this orthodoxy by arguing that knowledge-that is a gradable concept. The predominant form of argument for gradualism in the current literature is the argument from component, according to which knowledge is gradable because its various components (e.g., justification, belief, truth) are gradable. I will show that the argument from components involves a non-sequitur: the (...) alleged gradability of knowledge’s components cannot ensure the gradability of knowledge per se. The crux of this logical lacuna lies in that the argument neglects the external gradability of knowledge, viz, there is no clear-cut threshold between knowledge and lack thereof. The lacuna can be mended by seeing knowledge-that as a spectrum concept such that a more complete gradualist picture can be achieved. (shrink)

*Editorial Note: This column reprints the Book Review on Amazon with permission from Dr. Giang Hoang, Monash University, Australia. It has been slightly edited for house-style presentation.

Standpoint epistemology is committed to the view that some epistemic advantage can be drawn from the position of powerlessness. Call this theepistemic privilege thesis. This thesis stands in need of explication and support. In providing that explication and support, I first distinguish between two readings of the thesis: the thesis that marginalized social locations confer some epistemic advantages (the epistemic advantage thesis) and the thesis that marginalized standpoints generate better, more accurate knowledge (the standpoint thesis). I then develop the former (...) by appealing to the notion of epistemic peers available in the disagreement literature. I next turn to the latter thesis, arguing that consciousness-raising plays an analogous role in the achievement of a standpoint as training does in the achievement of expertise. The upshot of this analysis is that it clarifies that while marginalization is necessary (though not sufficient) for epistemic advantage, it is neither necessary nor sufficient for epistemic privilege. (shrink)

An argument that nativism is true and important but mysterious, examining the particular case of ideas of sensible qualities. In this book, Colin McGinn presents a concise, clear, and compelling argument that the origins of knowledge are innate—that nativism, not empiricism, is correct in its theory of how concepts are acquired. McGinn considers the particular case of sensible qualities—ideas of color, shape, taste, and so on. He argues that these, which he once regarded as the strongest case for the empiricist (...) position, are in fact not well explained by the empiricist account that they derive from interactions with external objects. Rather, he contends, ideas of sensible qualities offer the strongest case for the nativist position—that a large range of our knowledge is inborn, not acquired through the senses. Yet, McGinn cautions, how this can be is deeply problematic; we have no good theories about how innate knowledge is possible. Innate knowledge is a mystery, though a fact. McGinn describes the traditional debate between empiricism and nativism; offers an array of arguments against empiricism; constructs an argument in favor of nativism; and considers the philosophical consequences of adopting the nativist position, discussing perception, the mind–body problem, the unconscious, metaphysics, and epistemology. (shrink)

This paper argues for the existence of a certain type of defeater for one’s belief that P—the presence of social incentives not to share evidence against P. Such pressure makes it relatively likely that there is unpossessed evidence that would provide defeaters for P because it makes it likely that the evidence we have is a lopsided subset. This offers, I suggest, a rational reconstruction of a core strand of argument in Mill’s On Liberty. A consequence of the argument is (...) that on morally and politically laden issues in particular, a high degree of doxastic openness might be appropriate. (shrink)

The imagination is ubiquitous in our cognitive lives. You might imagine rotating a puzzle piece to determine whether it fits in an open space, or imagine what things are like from another person's perspective to figure out how they are feeling, or imagine a new rug in your living room to determine whether it matches the color of your sofa. These examples are mundane, but they point to a deep philosophical puzzle: how could merely imagining something give you any reason (...) to believe that it is true? After all, you can imagine anything you want to, from the fictional to the fantastical. This has led many philosophers to be deeply skeptical of the epistemic value of the imagination. When imagination is accorded a justificatory role, it is typically limited to beliefs about what is metaphysically possible. More recently, some philosophers have begun to push back against this orthodoxy by arguing that the imagination can justify empirical beliefs about the actual world. But even then, most contemporary discussions focus on whether the imagination can justify empirical belief, rather than on how the imagination justifies empirical belief, thereby leaving many central questions about the epistemology of the imagination unanswered. This dissertation attempts to fill this lacuna by canvassing the theoretical landscape of this exciting new literature and developing an account of the epistemic structure of the imagination. The first chapter sets the stage for the rest of the dissertation by reviewing extant arguments for and against the view that the imagination can justify empirical belief before posing a new argument in its favor. The second chapter argues that imaginative justification is mediate but non-inferential; it depends on one’s prior justification without depending on an inference from one’s prior beliefs. The third chapter argues that the imagination is informative—it can represent new content and generate new justification—in virtue of its analog representational format. The fourth and final chapter argues that some imaginings just are beliefs, and that this grounds their justificatory force. Together, the arguments of this dissertation suggest that the imagination is a distinctive kind of ampliative reasoning, and that it plays this cognitive and epistemic role by combining the analog representational format of imagery with the evidence-sensitive function of belief. (shrink)