This paper examines the paradox of revisability. This paradox was proposed by Jerrold Katz as a problem for Quinean naturalised epistemology. Katz employs diagonalisation to demonstrate what he takes to be an inconsistency in the constitutive principles of Quine's epistemology. Specifically, the problem seems to rest with the principle of universal revisability which states that no statement is immune to revision. In this paper it is argued that although there is something odd about employing universal revisability to revise (...) itself, there is nothing paradoxical about this. At least, there is no paradox along the lines suggested by Katz. (shrink)

We trace the genealogy of wisdom to show that its status in epistemological and management discourse has gradually declined since the Scientific Revolution. As the status of wisdom has declined, so the status of rational science has grown. We argue that the effects on the practice of management of the decline of wisdom may impede management practice by clouding judgment, degrading decision making and compromising ethical standards. We show that wisdom combines transcendent intellection and rational process with ethics to provide (...) a balanced and integrated way of knowing, deciding and acting for managers in a complex and uncertain business environment. Finally, we discuss the role and value of wisdom across a range of business functions including knowledge management, strategic management, leadership and international business. (shrink)

We trace the genealogy of wisdom to show that its status in epistemological and management discourse has gradually declined since the Scientific Revolution. As the status of wisdom has declined, so the status of rational science has grown. We argue that the effects on the practice of management of the decline of wisdom may impede management practice by clouding judgment, degrading decision making, and compromising ethical standards. We show that wisdom combines transcendent intellection and rational process with ethics to provide (...) a balanced and integrated way of knowing, deciding, and acting for managers in a complex and uncertain business environment. Finally, we discuss the role and value of wisdom across a range of business functions including knowledge management, strategic management, leadership and international business. (shrink)

The argument from fine tuning is supposed to establish the existence of God from the fact that the evolution of carbon-based life requires the laws of physics and the boundary conditions of the universe to be more or less as they are. We demonstrate that this argument fails. In particular, we focus on problems associated with the role probabilities play in the argument. We show that, even granting the fine tuning of the universe, it does not follow that the universe (...) is improbable, thus no explanation of the fine tuning, theistic or otherwise, is required. (shrink)

Karl Popper defines an ad hoc hypothesis as one that is introduced to immunize a theory from some (or all) refutation but which cannot be tested independently. He has also attempted to explicate ad hocness in terms of certain other allegedly undesirable properties of hypotheses or of the explanations they would provide, but his account is confused and mistaken. The first such property is circularity, which is undesirable; the second such property is reduction in empirical content, which need not be. (...) In the former case, I argue that non-circularity is in any event preferable to non-ad hocness as a necessary condition for a satisfactory explanation or an explanans, as the case may be, and I try to sort out various persistent errors surrounding this comparison. In the latter case, I suggest that Popper is barking up the wrong tree, that important scientific progress sometimes does consist in just such reductions in empirical content as he proscribes. This provides a further reason for not taking ad hoc hypotheses as Popper conceives them to pose the danger for science he believes they do. (shrink)

This book explores the epistemic side of racial and sexual oppression. It elucidates how social insensitivities and imposed silences prevent members of different groups from listening to each other.

Vice epistemology is the philosophical study of the nature, identity, and epistemological significance of intellectual vices. Such vices include gullibility, dogmatism, prejudice, closed-mindedness, and negligence. These are intellectual character vices, that is, intellectual vices that are also character traits. I ask how the notion of an intellectual character vice should be understood, whether such vices exist, and how they might be epistemologically significant. The proposal is that intellectual character vices are intellectual character traits that impede effective and responsible inquiry. (...) I argue that situationist critiques of virtue epistemology pose no significant threat to this proposal. Studies by social psychologists of belief in conspiracy theories suggest that it is sometimes appropriate to explain questionable beliefs by reference to intellectual character vices. Neither ‘regulative’ nor ‘analytic’ epistemology has any good reason to question the epistemological significance of such vices. (shrink)

I review several theoretical and empirical developments relevant to assessing contemporary virtue epistemology’s theory of knowledge. What emerges is a leaner theory of knowledge that is more empirically adequate, better captures the ordinary conception of knowledge, and is ripe for cross-fertilization with cognitive science. I call this view abilism. Along the way I identify several topics for future research.

We suffer from genealogical anxiety when we worry that the contingent origins of our representations, once revealed, will somehow undermine or cast doubt on those representations. Is such anxiety ever rational? Many have apparently thought so, from pre-Socratic critics of Greek theology to contemporary evolutionary debunkers of morality. One strategy for vindicating critical genealogies is to see them as undermining the epistemic standing of our representations—the justification of our beliefs, the aptness of our concepts, and so on. I argue that (...) this strategy is not as promising as it might first seem. Instead, I suggest that critical genealogies can wield a sort of meta-epistemic power; in so far as we wish to resist the genealogical critic, we are under pressure to see ourselves as the beneficiaries of a certain kind of good luck: what I call genealogical luck. But there is also a resolutely non-epistemic way of understanding the power of critical genealogies, one that is essential, I argue, for understanding the genealogical projects of various theorists, including Nietzsche and Catharine MacKinnon. For critical genealogies can reveal what it is that our representations do—and what we, in turn, might do with them. (shrink)

This book is available either individually, or as part of the specially-priced Arguments of the Philosphers Collection.

This paper explores the implications of a technological revolution that many in the industry think is likely soon to come to pass: neuromedia. In particular, the paper is interested in how this will constitute an especially persuasive kind of extended cognition, and thereby will facilitate extended epistemic states. This will in turn have ramifications for how we understand the epistemic goals of education. The paper argues that the challenges posed by neuromedia remind us that the overarching epistemic goal of education (...) is not orientated towards facilitating a body of knowledge (or the development of mere cognitive skills) but rather is concerned with the development of intellectual character, where this in turn essentially involves the cultivation of intellectual virtues, character traits that are not amenable to extended cognition. (shrink)

One of us coined the notion of an “epistemology engine.” The idea is that some particular technology in its workings and use is seen suggestively as a metaphor for the human subject and often for the production of knowledge itself. In this essay, we further develop the conceptand claim that Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological commitments, although suggestive, did not lead him to appreciate the epistemological value of materiality. We also take steps towards establishing how an understanding of this topic can provide (...) the basis for reinterpreting the history of phenomenology. (shrink)

Mainstream and Formal Epistemology provides the first, easily accessible, yet erudite and original analysis of the meeting point between mainstream and formal theories of knowledge. These two strands of thinking have traditionally proceeded in isolation from one another, but in this book, Vincent F. Hendricks brings them together for a systematic comparative treatment. He demonstrates how mainstream and formal epistemology may significantly benefit from one another, paving the way for a new unifying program of 'plethoric' epistemology. His (...) book will both define and further the debate between philosophers from two very different sides of the epistemological spectrum. (shrink)

This paper examines Alvin Goldman's discussion of acceptance and uncertainty in chapter 15 of his book, Epistemology and Cognition. Goldman discusses how acceptance and rejection of beliefs might be understood in terms of "winner-take-all" connectionist networks. The paper answers some of the questions he raises in his epistemic evaluation of connectionist programs. The major tool for doing this is a connectionist model of explanatory coherence judgments (Thagard, Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 1989). Finally, there is a discussion of problems for (...) Goldman's general epistemological project that arise if one adopts a different approach to connectionism based on distributed representations. (shrink)

Epistemology - the theory of knowledge and of justified belief - has always been of central importance in philosophy. Progress in other areas of philosophical research has often depended crucially on epistemological presuppositions. This Companion, with well over 250 articles ranging from summary discussions to major essays on topics of current controversy, is the first complete reference work devoted to the subject. All the main theoretical positions in epistemology are discussed and analysed, tougher with the different categories of (...) knowledge itself - scientific, historical, mathematical, a priori, moral and so on - and the special problems associated with these. There are also many entries covering individual concepts, arguments and problems, short definitions of technical terms, and biographical articles. With its unrivalled coverage of the field, supported by a comprehensive index and an extensive cross-referencing, the Companion is likely to remain the standard reference work in epistemology from undergraduate level upward for the foreseeable future. (shrink)

"Social epistemology" refers here to the work of analytic epistemologists and philosophers of science interested in providing an empirically adequate account of organized knowledge systems, with special emphasis on scientific inquiry. I critically survey the last ten years of this research. Unlike the pragmatist and Continental schools of philosophy, for which knowledge is "always already" social, progress in analytic social epistemology has been plagued by an oversharp distinction between individual and collective cognition; and a failure to query the (...) ends of science in addition to its means. Consequently, most analytic social epistemologists operate with a relatively weak sense of "normativity," one modelled more on taken-for-granted logical principles than legislated policy correctives. (shrink)

Education's Epistemology extends and defends Siegel's "reasons conception" of critical thinking, developing it in both philosophical and educational directions. Of particular note is its emphasis on epistemic quality and epistemic rationality and its concerted defense of "universal" educational and philosophical ideals in the face of multicultural, postmodern, and other challenges.

Evolutionary epistemology has experienced a continuous rise over the last decades. Important new theoretical considerations and novel empirical findings have been integrated into the existing framework. In this paper, I would like to suggest three lines of research that I believe will significantly contribute to further advance EE: ontogenetic considerations, key ideas from cognitive biology, and the framework of the Extended Evolutionary Synthesis. EE, in particular the program of the evolution of epistemological mechanisms, seeks to provide a phylogenetic account (...) of the generation of cognitive processes underlying knowledge creation. Traditionally, EE and EEM have been oriented towards an account of evolutionary theory that mainly drew from the tenets of the Modern Synthesis. The Modern Synthesis largely dismisses ontogenetic processes and considers them irrelevant for evolutionary explanations. If anything, the role of development in evolution is believed to be that of a constraint. There is, however, ample evidence for a tight intertwinement of developmental and evolutionary processes. Organisms employ their cognitive apparatus to interact with the environment in order to achieve a fully functioning perceptual and cognitive nervous system. Also, ontogeny provides generative potentials to enable variations that natural selection can act upon. EEM’s agenda may, therefore, strongly benefit from bringing together ontogenetic and phylogenetic approaches. To grapple with this challenge, an alternative vision of the evolutionary theory termed Extended Evolutionary Synthesis could be used. This extended evolutionary theory explores relationships between the processes of individual development and phenotypic change during evolution and can provide a more suitable framework for EEM to draw from. In recent years, cognitive biology has gained momentum as an independent research field. Cognitive biology builds on the concepts of EEM and understands knowledge as a biogenic phenomenon. Its main objective is also the formulation of substantiated interrelations between cognition and evolution but it focuses on cognitive functionality at all levels of biological organization. It thus employs a “vertical” approach that encompasses nested hierarchies which span from single molecules, cells, and tissues to the organismal level, communities, and societies. In contrast to cognitive biology, EEM is here understood to adopt a “horizontal” approach that focuses on phylogenetic explanations of cognition and knowledge acquisition. Linking EEM with the key ideas of cognitive biology could make EEM’s research program stronger as it can more easily accommodate phylogenetic and ontogenetic questions within a hierarchical, multilevel perspective. This is of particular importance for a more comprehensive account of cognition since living systems are subject to context-dependent causal influences from different organizational levels. In addition to EEM, there is a second program of EE. This program has been labeled evolutionary epistemology of theories and understands the increase in human knowledge, such as scientific theories, as naturalistic accounts of evolution. Both, EEM and EET initially drew from the core concepts of the Modern Synthesis. Several scholars have severely criticized the analogies made between EET and the Neo-Darwinian key processes of evolution. In particular processes of random mutation, the rate of variation, natural selection as the unique driving force, and the adaptationist agenda are believed to reveal disanalogies. In contrast to the Modern Synthesis, the Extended Evolutionary Synthesis not only recognizes developmental processes but also ecological interactions and systems dynamics as well as social and cultural evolutionary reciprocity as important evolutionary processes. Concepts of the Extended Evolutionary Synthesis are therefore expected to be more fruitful for re-conceptualizing parallels between scientific theorizing and biological evolution. (shrink)

A certain conception of the relevance of virtue epistemology to the philosophy of education is set out. On this conception, while the epistemic goal of education might initially be promoting the pupil's cognitive success, it should ultimately move on to the development of the pupil's cognitive agency. A continuum of cognitive agency is described, on which it is ultimately cognitive achievement, and thus understanding, which is the epistemic goal of education. This is contrasted with a view on which knowledge (...) is the epistemic goal. (shrink)

Philosophers’ traditional emphasis on theories, theoretical modeling, and explanation misguides research in philosophy of science. Articulating and applying core theories is part of scientific practice, but it is not the essence of scientific practice. Insofar as science has an essence, it is to systematically investigate and learn about what is not yet understood. This lecture analyzes genetics to articulate a broad-practice-centered approach to philosophy of science. It concludes by arguing that this approach can lead to richer, deeper, and more useful (...) philosophies of science, philosophies that can better inform science policy and the public’s understanding of science. (shrink)

Internalism and Epistemology is a powerful articulation and defense of a classical answer to an enduring question: What is the nature of rational belief? In opposition to prevailing philosophical fashion, the book argues that epistemic externalism leads, not just to skepticism, but to epistemic nihilism - the denial of the very possibility of justification. And it defends a subtle and sophisticated internalism against criticisms that have widely but mistakenly been thought to be decisive. Beginning with an internalist response to (...) the Gettier problem, the authors deal with the problem of the connection to truth, stressing the distinction between success and rationality as critical to its resolution. They develop a metaregress argument against externalism that has devastating consequences for any view according to which epistemic principles are contingent. The same argument does not, they argue, affect the version of internalism they espouse, since its epistemic principles are analytic and knowable a priori. The final chapter addresses the problem of induction and shows that its solution turns critically on the distinction between success and rationality - the very distinction that lies at the heart of the dispute between internalists and externalists. Provocative, probing, and deliberately unfashionable, Internalism and Epistemology is a ringing defense of internalism that will interest specialists and students alike. It is essential reading for anyone who suspects that rumors of the death of traditional epistemology have been greatly exaggerated. (shrink)

An examination of philosophical realism from the standpoint of pragmatic epistemology, this book addresses the core idea of Rescher's work in epistemology: that functional and pragmatic concerns exert a controlling influence on the conduct ...

Might there be knowledge of non‐instrumental values? Arguments are give for two principal claims. One is that if there is such knowledge, it typically will have features that do not entirely match those of other kinds of knowledge. It will have a closer relation to the kind of person one is or becomes, and in the way it combines features of knowing‐how with knowing‐that. There also are problems of indeterminacy of non‐instrumental value which are not commonly found in other things (...) that we can know about. The second claim is that there is a strong prima‐facie case for holding that there is such knowledge, and that the usual arguments against this are all faulty. (shrink)

It is typically thought that some epistemic states are valuable—knowing, truly or accurately believing, understanding. These are states it’s thought good to be in and it’s also said that we aim or want to be in them. It is then sometimes claimed that these sorts of thoughts about epistemic goods or values ground or explain our epistemic norms. For instance, we think subjects should follow their evidence when they form their beliefs. But why should they? Why not believe against the (...) evidence or ignore it completely in deciding what to believe? Here’s a compelling sort of answer: because epistemic subjects are or ought to be trying to know more and following their evidence is a means to that end or to fulfilling that obligation. In this paper I argue that this compelling thought cannot be right. Subjects who are trying to know more will regularly fail to conform to some of our most familiar epistemic norms. (shrink)

This volume draws together a series of thirteen essays on ancient epistemology by Gail Fine. She discusses knowledge, belief, subjectivity, and scepticism in Plato, Aristotle, and the Pyrrhonian sceptics. They consider such questions as: is episteme knowledge? Is doxa belief? Do the ancientshave the notion of subjectivity? Do any of them countenance external world scepticism? Several essays compare these philosophers with one another, as well as with more recent discussions of knowledge, belief, subjectivity, and scepticism, asking how if at (...) all the ancient discussions of these topicsdiffer from more recent ones. In exploring these issues, the essays often make use of the distinction between concepts and conceptions, between an abstract account of something, and more determinate ways of filling it in. Together they compose a rich set of investigations, illuminating ancientperspectives on the central questions in epistemology. (shrink)

For over two decades, something akin to a scientific revolution in philosophy of science has been taking place. So, at any rate, claims Harold I. Brown, in his book Perception, Theory and Commitment: The New Philosophy of Science, in which he chronicles and defends the demise of logical empiricism and offers a new philosophy of science in its stead. The new philosophy of science, drawing on the work of Kuhn, Toulmin, Hanson, Lakatos, Polanyi, and others, but effectively structured, enhanced, and (...) defended by Brown, replaces logical empiricism's fundamental presuppositions of Principia logic and observation-based empiricism with a new approach which emphasizes the theory-ladenness of perception, the unavoidability of paradigmatic presuppositions, conceptual change and scientific revolutions, dialectic (as opposed to algorithmic) reasoning as the model of rational thinking in science, and a sharp rejection of the discovery/justification distinction. Brown develops a new epistemology of science to complement and underlie the new philosophy of science, including alternative conceptions of rationality, scientific knowledge, truth, objectivity, and relativism. Later in this essay I will attempt to recount, and bring to light some flaws in, both the new philosophy and the new epistemology of science Brown defends. First, however, it will be helpful to follow Brown's account of the nature and failings of the logical empiricist research program. (shrink)

Formal epistemology is a growing field of philosophical research. It is also evolving, with the subject matter of formal epistemology papers changing considerably over the past two decades. To quantify the ways in which formal epistemology is changing, I generate a stochastic block topic model of the abstracts of papers classified by PhilPapers.org as pertaining to formal epistemology. This model identifies fourteen salient topics of formal epistemology abstracts at a first level of abstraction, and four (...) topics at a second level of abstraction. I then study diachronic trends in the degree to which formal epistemology abstracts written in a given year are likely to contain words associated with a particular topic, beginning in 2000 and continuing to 2020. My findings suggest that there has been a marked decline in the likelihood of a given formal epistemology abstract being about logical approaches to belief revision. On the other hand, over the past two decades, the salience of probabilistic techniques in formal epistemology has increased, as has the salience of work at the intersection of formal epistemology and some areas of philosophy of science. (shrink)