This essay defends a novel form of virtue epistemology: Modal Virtue Epistemology. It borrows from traditional virtue epistemology the idea that knowledge is a type of skillful performance. But it goes on to understand skillfulness in purely modal terms — that is, in terms of success across a range of counterfactual scenarios. We argue that this approach offers a promising way of synthesizing virtue epistemology with a modal account of knowledge, according to which knowledge is safe belief. In particular, we (...) argue that the modal elements of the view offer important advantages over traditional virtue epistemology, which assigns a central explanatory role to aptness. At the same time, the virtue epistemological elements of the theory reveal new avenues for overcoming obstacles to traditional modal accounts of knowledge. Finally, we highlight the advantages of Modal Virtue Epistemology over alternative syntheses, such as Pritchard's (2012) hybrid approach. (shrink)

This is the introduction to my forthcoming book and the table of contents.

I argue for an analysis of ‘therefore’ as presupposition trigger against the more standard conventional implicature story originally put forward by Grice (1975). I propose that we model the relevant presupposition as “testing” the context in a way that is similar to how, according to some dynamic treatments of epistemic `must', ‘must’ tests the context. But whereas the presupposition analysis is plausible for ‘therefore’, ‘must’ is not plausibly a presupposition trigger. Moreover, whereas ‘must’ can naturally occur under a supposition, the (...) same is not true for ‘therefore’. In the light of these differences, I suggest we distinguish between different sorts of tests on the basis of the mechanisms whereby these expressions test the context (whether through a presupposition or through their core content) and on the basis of whether they can operate only on categorical contexts or on both categorical and hypothetical contexts. (shrink)

According to a rich tradition in philosophy of action, intentional action requires practical knowledge: someone who acts intentionally knows what they are doing while they are doing it. Piñeros Glasscock argues that an anti-luminosity argument, of the sort developed in Williamson, can be readily adapted to provide a reductio of an epistemic condition on intentional action. This paper undertakes a rescue mission on behalf of an epistemic condition on intentional action. We formulate and defend a version of an epistemic condition (...) that is free from any luminosity commitments. While this version of an epistemic condition escapes reductio, it comes with substantive commitments of its own. In particular, we will see that it forces us to deny the existence of any essentially intentional actions. We go on to argue that this consequence should be embraced. On the resulting picture, intentional action is not luminous. But it still entails practical knowledge. (shrink)

Arguments and conditionals are powerful means language provides us to reason about possibilities and to reach conclusions from premises. These two kinds of constructions exhibit several affinities—e.g., they both come in different varieties depending on the mood; they share some of the same connectives (i.e., ‘then’); they allow for similar patterns of modal subordination. In the light of these affinities, it is not surprising that prominent theories of conditionals—old and new suppositionalisms as well as dynamic theories of conditionals—as well as (...) certain reductive theories of arguments tend to semantically assimilate conditionals and arguments. In this paper, I shall marshall some linguistic evidence as well as some theoretical considerations for thinking that, despite these similarities, arguments and conditionals should be given a different semantics and I shall lay out a framework that can capture at least some of their affinities while accounting for their outstanding differences. (shrink)

Aristotle’s use of the term ‘eironeia’ in the Nicomachean Ethics (NE) appears to be inconsistent: first, he attributes the attitude termed ‘eironeia’ to the great-souled man (megalopsychos), who is defined by his virtuousness, then he classifies ‘eironeia’ as one of the two vices which are central to his account of the virtue of truthfulness. Modern attempts to explain and to solve the “riddle of the great-souled eiron” have not been satisfying. This paper argues that the riddle results from Aristotle trying (...) to reconcile aristocratic values with democratic reality. In the process, some insight will be gained on the concept of the megalopsychos in general, on Aristotle’s notion of the virtue of truthfulness and on his depiction of Socrates. Finally, it is argued that Aristotle’s use of the notion of ‘eironeia’ in the NE bears some resemblance to the use of the notion of ‘irony’ in modern political theory. (shrink)

In certain cases, people judge that agents bring about ends intentionally but also that they do not bring about the means that brought about those ends intentionally—even though bringing about the ends and means is just as likely. We call this difference in judgments the Kraemer effect. We offer a novel explanation for this effect: a perceived difference in the extent to which agents know how to bring about the means and the ends explains the Kraemer effect. In several experiments, (...) we replicate the Kraemer effect in a variety of non-moral and moral scenarios, and we find support for our new account. This work accords with a burgeoning area of action theory that identifies an important connection between know-how and intentionality. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Love of Country and Love of God: The Political Uses of Religion in MachiavelliBenedetto Fontana*This paper will discuss the place of religion in Machiavelli’s thought. 1 The traditional and generally accepted interpretation presents Machiavelli’s religion as a belief system whose value is determined by its functional utility to the state. In this he is said to resemble Cicero, 2 Montesquieu, 3 and Tocqueville, 4 among others. This view (...) is based on the proposition—one that is now fundamental to a modern understanding of Machiavelli—that his political theory develops a politics without moral, theological, and religious foundations (what Benedetto Croce 5 calls the “autonomy of politics” and Sheldon Wolin 6 the “autonomy of political theory”). Students of Machiavelli who ascribe to him an instrumentalist theory of religion rest their interpretation on this conception of politics: a distinction is established between religion viewed as religio, and religion conceived as fides, where the former is used to develop and cement social bonds and the latter is a faith based on a transcendent “truth.”A reading of the texts shows that Machiavelli discusses various kinds of religion. He refers, for example, to multiple forms of Christianity, such as “primitive” [End Page 639] or original Christianity, 7 official, medieval Christianity, the ecclesiastical principality of the papacy, as well as to ancient Judaism, 8 paganism, and to Islam. 9 However, it is possible to discern in Machiavelli two principal or distinctive types. One is based on the opposition Machiavelli sees between the religion of the Romans (which instills virtù) and the religion of the post-classical and post-Roman Christian world (which teaches humility and passivity). The other is prophetic religion, in which Machiavelli contrasts the prophet armed to the prophet unarmed. Thus, we have prophetic religion and non-prophetic religion; the former is either armed or unarmed, and the latter is either immanent (natural) or transcendent. 10Machiavelli’s stress on the importance of virtù (whether of the prince or of the people) suggests that religion is not simply religio—that is, a political technique to rule and to control the masses. Rather, it presupposes a concern for a moral fides which, though certainly not transcendent, is nevertheless necessary to the construction of a political order based on virtù. His concern with civil and military virtue links the armed prophetic religion with that of the ancient Romans, such that ancient Judaism, Islam, and a reformed Christianity (a kind of Lutheranism ante litteram) all stand opposed to primitive and post-classical Christianity.Machiavelli anticipates in theory the national, anti-papal, and anti-imperial movements that were later realized in history by the Lutheran and Calvinist Reformations. He attempts to infuse the corrupt and decadent Christian conception of the world with a new, innovating spirit, one opposed to the prevailing medieval and scholastic conception of the world. In the past Christian philosophers and thinkers revised the classical notions of virtus and arete, transforming them into Christian concepts of value. Machiavelli attempts a similar “transvaluation of values” (Nietzsche), but for different ends and in a different direction: he reinterprets the Christian religion in order to assimilate it into his conception of virtù and his vision of a vivere civile.In the first part of this paper the relation Machiavelli establishes between “speaking with God” and the founding and/or reforming of states is explored. Parallels between Christian and pre-Christian (pagan and biblical) rulers reveal a basic ambiguity in Machiavelli’s belief that religion—that is, the claim of having spoken with God—is necessary to effective rule. In the second part [End Page 640] Machiavelli’s teaching (“new ways and methods”) is compared to Christ’s message of the “good news.” The contrast between the two is presented in terms of an opposition between different “ways of living,” each with its specific moral claims and political consequences. The opposition is not, the section argues, between logos and kratos, ethos and kratos, but rather between diverse ways of understanding logos and ethos. The final section argues that Machiavelli uses biblical, pagan, and Christian forms of religious symbols and metaphors in order to reevaluate the concepts of patria and amore. In so doing... (shrink)

Is the ability to speak a language an acquired skill? Leading proponents of the generative approach to human language—notably Chomsky (2000) and Pinker (2003)—have argued that the thesis that language capacities are skills is hopelessly confused and at odds with a range of empirical evidence, which suggests that human language capacities are grounded in a biologically inherited set of language instincts or a Universal Grammar (UG). In this paper, we argue that resistance to the claim that human language capacities are (...) skills has been fostered by naïve and implausible conceptions of the nature of skilled action. Correcting these misconceptions about the nature of skilled action breathes new life into the old idea that human language competences are particular kinds of skills and does so in a way that is fully consistent with appeals to the central importance of UG, broadly construed. More generally, we argue that by taking human language capacities to be skills, we capture what is right about the generative program while at the same time avoiding its most serious pitfalls. (shrink)

Gricean theories analyse meaning in terms of certain complex intentions on the part of the speaker—the intention to produce an effect on the addressee, and the intention to have that intention recognized by the addressee. By drawing an analogy with cases widely discussed in action theory, we propose a novel counterexample where the speaker lacks these intentions, but nonetheless means something, and successfully performs a speech act.

The similarity approach stands as a significant attempt to defend scientific realism from the attack of the pessimistic meta-induction. The strategy behind the similarity approach is to shift from an absolute notion of truth to the more flexible one of truthlikeness. Nonetheless, some authors are not satisfied with this attempt to defend realism and find that the notion of truthlikeness is not fully convincing. The aim of this paper is to analyze and understand the reasons of this dissatisfaction. Our thesis (...) is that the dissatisfaction with the notion of truthlikeness concerns the double role that this notion plays within the similarity approach: This notion plays both a regulative role in the conception of theories and a constitutive one in their selection. (shrink)

Orthodoxy has it that knowledge is absolute—that is, it cannot come in degrees. On the other hand, there seems to be strong evidence for the gradability of know-how. Ascriptions of know-how are gradable, as when we say that one knows in part how to do something, or that one knows how to do something better than somebody else. When coupled with absolutism, the gradability of ascriptions of know-how can be used to mount a powerful argument against intellectualism about know-how—the view (...) that know-how is a species of propositional knowledge. This essay defends intellectualism from the argument of gradability. It is argued that the gradability of ascriptions of know-how should be discounted as a rather superficial linguistic phenomenon, one that can be explained in a way compatible with the absoluteness of the state reported. (shrink)

A good surgeon knows how to perform a surgery; a good architect knows how to design a house. We value their know-how. We ordinarily look for it. What makes it so valuable? A natural response is that know-how is valuable because it explains success. A surgeon’s know-how explains their success at performing a surgery. And an architect’s know-how explains their success at designing houses that stand up. We value know-how because of its special explanatory link to success. But in virtue (...) of what is know-how explanatorily linked to success? This essay provides a novel argument for the thesis that know-how’s special link to success is to be explained at least in part in terms of its being, or involving, a doxastic attitude that is epistemically alike propositional knowledge. It is argued that the role played by know-how in explaining intentional success shows that the epistemic differences between know-how and knowledge, if any, are less than usually thought; and that "revisionary intellectualism", the view that know-how is true belief that might well fall short of knowledge, is not really a stable position. If its explanatory link to success is what makes know-how valuable, an upshot of my argument is that the value of know-how is due, to a considerable extent, to its being, or involving, a kind of propositional knowledge. (shrink)

In their theories of know how, proponents of Intellectualism routinely appeal to ‘practical modes of presentation’. But what are practical modes of presentation? And what makes them distinctively practical? In this essay, I develop a Fregean account of practical modes of presentation: I argue that there are such things as practical senses and I give a theory of what they are. One of the challenges facing the proponent of a distinctively Fregean construal of practical modes of presentation is to provide (...) an account of their nature on which they are plausible qua Fregean senses. I take up this challenge, arguing that we find examples of practical senses in the semantic values assigned to programs by operational semantics for programming languages. By looking at a species of practical senses, we will have taken one important step towards legitimizing the genus. In particular, I show that certain features of operational semantic values can be generalized towards a comprehensive theory of practical senses. The upshot is a full-fledged account of what practical senses are, which can be put to use in an explanatory theory of know how. (shrink)

À partir d’une analyse de la matérialité linguistique, cet article explore les processus de subjectivation et d’identification qui constituent le(s) sujet(s) des différentes pratiques urbaines, par rapport à l’espace de la rue et dans le cadre de disputes visant à l’affirmation d’identités socialement légitimées. Le corpus constitué pour ma recherche est de nature hétérogène, aussi bien dans sa matérialité symbolique que du point de vue de son inscription institutionnelle et de sa circulation sociale.

This idea that what is distinctive of intentional performances (or at least of those intentional performances that amount to skilled actions) is one’s practical knowledge in it —i.e., knowledge of what one is doing while doing it— famously traces back to Anscombe ([]1963] 2000). While many philosophers have theorized about Anscombe’s notion of practical knowledge (e.g., Setiya (2008), Thompson et al. (2011), Schwenkler (2019), O’Brien (2007)), there is a wide disagreement about how to understand it. This paper investigates how best (...) to understand practical knowledge for it to play the desired explanatory role in a reductive theory of intentional action, of intention-in-action, and of control-in-action. I argue that practical knowledge ought to be construed as a dynamic knowledge state and that structured practical senses (Pavese 2015) are needed to model it. (shrink)

According to a standard assumption in epistemology, if one only partially believes that p , then one cannot thereby have knowledge that p. For example, if one only partially believes that that it is raining outside, one cannot know that it is raining outside; and if one only partially believes that it is likely that it will rain outside, one cannot know that it is likely that it will rain outside. Many epistemologists will agree that epistemic agents are capable of (...) partial beliefs in addition to full beliefs and that partial beliefs can be epistemically assessed along some dimensions. However, it has been generally assumed that such doxastic attitudes cannot possibly amount to knowledge. In Probabilistic Knowledge, Moss challenges this standard assumption and provides a formidable defense of the claim that probabilistic beliefs—a class of doxastic attitudes including credences and degrees of beliefs—can amount to knowledge too. Call this the probabilistic knowledge claim . Throughout the book, Moss goes to great lengths to show that probabilistic knowledge can be fruitfully applied to a variety of debates in epistemology and beyond. My goal in this essay is to explore a further application for probabilistic knowledge. I want to look at the role of probabilistic knowledge within a “knowledge-centered” psychology—a kind of psychology that assigns knowledge a central stage in explanations of intentional behavior. My suggestion is that Moss’s notion of probabilistic knowledge considerably helps further both a knowledge-centered psychology and a broadly intellectualist picture of action and know-how that naturally goes along with it. At the same time, though, it raises some interesting issues about the notion of explanation afforded by the resulting psychology. (shrink)

Philosophical questions surrounding skill and expertise can be traced back as far as Ancient Greece, China, and India. In the twentieth century skilled action was an important factor in the work of phenomenologists such as Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty and analytic philosophers including Gilbert Ryle. However, as a subject in its own right it has, until now, remained largely in the background. The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Skill and Expertise is an outstanding reference source and the first major collection of (...) its kind, reflecting the explosion of interest in the topic recent years. Comprising thirty-nine chapters written by leading international contributors, the Handbook is organised into six clear parts: Skill in the History of Philosophy Skill in Epistemology Skill, intelligence, and agency Skill in Perception, Imagination, and Emotion Skill, Language, and, Social Cognition Skill and Expertise in Normative Philosophy. Essential reading for students and researchers in philosophy of mind and psychology, epistemology and ethics, The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Skill and Expertise is also suitable for those in related disciplines such as social psychology and cognitive science. It is also relevant to those who are interested in conceptual issues underlying skill and expertise in fields such as sport, the performing arts, and medicine. (shrink)

1. What is the relation between skilful action and knowledge? According to most philosophers, the two have little in common: practical intelligence and theoretical intelligence are largely separate...

From artistic performances in the visual arts and in music to motor control in gymnastics, from tool use to chess and language, humans excel in a variety of skills. On the plausible assumption that skillful behavior is a visible manifestation of intelligence, a theory of intelligence—whether human or not—should be informed by a theory of skills. More controversial is the question as to whether, in order to theorize about intelligence, we should study certain skills in particular. My target is the (...) view that only a particular class/kind of skill (i.e., ‘theoretical’, or ‘intellectual’ skills, versus ‘practical’, or ‘embodied’ skills) manifests intelligence, or especially does so. I call this view ‘Intelligence Elitism’. Intelligence Elitism is pervasive in popular culture, in academic culture, as well as in psychometrics. It has, arguably, a long pedigree in philosophy (though explicit arguments for it are rare). But it is a substantive view which, if false, can promote unfairness. In this article, I defend Intelligence Socialism—the claim that intelligent behavior is everywhere skillful behavior is. I go on to isolate the best case for the further Elitist claim that, even if all skillful behavior is intelligent in some modest sense of ‘intelligence’, there is a principled difference in intelligence between theoretical, or intellectual, skills, on one side, and practical, or embodied skills, on the other, and I show it wanting. (shrink)

The prequel to this paper has discussed the relation between knowledge and skill and introduced the topic of the relationship between skill and know how. This sequel continues the discussion. First, I survey the recent debate on intellectualism about knowing how (§1-3). Then, I tackle the question as to whether intellectualism (and anti-intellectualism) about skill and intellectualism (and anti-intellectualism) about know how fall or stand together (§4-5).

Knowledge and skill are intimately connected. In this essay, I discuss the question of their relationship and of which (if any) is prior to which in the order of explanation. I review some of the answers that have been given thus far in the literature, with a particular focus on the many foundational issues in epistemology that intersect with the philosophy of skill.

We represent the world in a variety of ways: through percepts, concepts, propositional attitudes, words, numerals, recordings, musical scores, photographs, diagrams, mimetic paintings, etc. Some of these representations are mental. It is customary for philosophers to distinguish two main kinds of mental representations: perceptual representation (e.g., vision, auditory, tactile) and conceptual representation. This essay presupposes a version of this dichotomy and explores the way in which a further kind of representation – procedural representation – represents. It is argued that, in (...) some important respects, procedural representations represent differently from both purely conceptual representations and purely perceptual representations. Although procedural representations, just like conceptual and perceptual representations, involve modes of presentation, their modes of presentation are distinctively practical, in a sense which I will clarify. It is argued that an understanding of this sort of practical representation has important consequences for the debate on the nature of know-how. (shrink)

One can intentionally do something only if one knows what one is doing while they are doing it. For example, one can intentionally kill one’s neighbor by opening their gas stove overnight only if one knows that the gas is likely to kill the neighbor in their sleep. One can intentionally sabotage the victory of one’s rival by putting sleeping drugs in their drink only if one knows that sleeping drugs will harm the rival’s performance. And so on. In a (...) slogan: Intentional action is action guided by knowledge. This essay reviews some motivations for a ‘knowledge-centered psychology’ — a psychology where knowledge enters center stage in an explanation of intentional action (§2). Then it outlines a novel argument for the claim that knowledge is required for intentional action (§3) and discusses some of its consequences (§§4-5). (shrink)

Happiness is a much-debated topic in both ancient and contemporary philosophy. The aim of this paper is twofold: first, to establish what are the necessary and sufficient conditions of eudaimonia for Aristotle in Book I of Nicomachean Ethics; and second, to show how Aristotle’s theory is also a good answer to the questions of the contemporary common sense about what happiness is and how to achieve it. In this way, I would suggest new arguments to give a new voice to (...) Aristotle in the contemporary philosophical debate on this issue. My paper is therefore only tangentially a contribution to this debate and remains essentially anessay on the philosophy of Aristotle. (shrink)

This essay is divided into two parts. In the first part (§2), I introduce the idea of practical meaning by looking at a certain kind of procedural systems — the motor system — that play a central role in computational explanations of motor behavior. I argue that in order to give a satisfactory account of the content of the representations computed by motor systems (motor commands), we need to appeal to a distinctively practical kind of meaning. Defending the explanatory relevance (...) of semantic properties in a computationalist explanation of motor behavior, my argument concludes that practical meanings play a central role in an adequate psychological theory of motor skill. In the second part of this essay (§3), I generalize and clarify the notion of practical meaning, and I defend the intelligibility of practical meanings against an important objection. (shrink)

This paper reexamines the case for mentality — the thesis that knowledge is a mental state in its own right, and not only derivatively, simply by virtue of being composed out of mental states or by virtue of being a property of mental states — and explores a novel argument for it. I argue that a certain property singled out by psychologists and philosophers of cognitive science as distinctive of skillful behavior (agentive control) is best understood in terms of knowledge. (...) While psychological theories of agentive control that appeal to monitoring mechanisms, such as attention, have been proposed, these theories cannot account for the full scope of controlled action. By contrast, I argue that an epistemic theory of agentive control that invokes knowledge is extensionally adequate. It is when it comes to understanding the hallmarks of skillful performance that the theoretical benefits of thinking of knowledge as mental can be fully appreciated. (shrink)

Can we think of a task in a distinctively practical way? Can there be practical concepts? In recent years, epistemologists, philosophers of mind, as well as philosophers of psychology have appealed to practical concepts in characterizing the content of know-how or in explaining certain features of skilled action. However, reasons for positing practical concepts are rarely discussed in a systematic fashion. This paper advances a novel argument for the psychological reality of practical concepts that relies on evidence for a distinctively (...) productive kind of reasoning. (shrink)

Arguments have always played a central role within logic and philosophy. But little attention has been paid to arguments as a distinctive kind of discourse, with its own semantics and pragmatics. The goal of this essay is to study the mechanisms by means of which we make arguments in discourse, starting from the semantics of argument connectives such as `therefore'. While some proposals have been made in the literature, they fail to account for the distinctive anaphoric behavior of `therefore', as (...) well as uses of argument connectives in complex arguments, suppositional arguments, arguments with non-declarative conclusions, as well as arguments with parenthetical remarks. A comprehensive account of arguments requires imposing a distinctive tree-like structure on contexts. We show how to extend our account to accommodate modal subordination and and di fferent flavors of `therefore'. (shrink)

In this essay, I provide a new argument for Intellectualism about knowing how, one that does not rest on controversial assumptions about how knowing how is ascribed in English. In particular, I argue that the distinctive intentionality of the manifestations of knowing how ought to be explained in terms of a propositional attitude of belief about how to perform an action.

This essay argues that the main lesson of Lewis Carroll's Regress is that arguments are constitutively presuppositional.

In artificial intelligence (AI), a number of criticisms were raised against the use of probability for dealing with uncertainty. All these criticisms, except what in this article we call the non-adequacy claim, have been eventually confuted. The non-adequacy claim is an exception because, unlike the other criticisms, it is exquisitely philosophical and, possibly for this reason, it was not discussed in the technical literature. A lack of clarity and understanding of this claim had a major impact on AI. Indeed, mostly (...) leaning on this claim, some scientists developed an alternative research direction and, as a result, the AI community split in two schools: a probabilistic and an alternative one. In this article, we argue that the non-adequacy claim has a strongly metaphysical character and, as such, should not be accepted as a conclusive argument against the adequacy of probability. (shrink)

Il testo prende in esame lo spazio domestico e le relazioni che lo caratterizzano attraverso il tentativo di leggerli come un’infrastruttura sociale. Pensare la casa come infrastruttura significa anche ampliare la concezione di cosa sia un’infrastruttura e riflettere sulla relazione tra politica e intimità per mettere in discussione i confini tra pubblico e privato. Inoltre, osservare la casa attraverso la dimensione infrastrutturale permette di mettere la centro il lavoro riproduttivo non solo come lavoro ma anche come elemento centrale per l’infrastruttura (...) sociale. (shrink)

A inizio estate del 2018 l’editore Les Belles Lettres di Parigi ha pubblicato una nuova «édition bilingue commentée» dello Ione platonico, la prima opera di filosofia greca antica a essere ospitata nella collana Commentario. Si tratta di un lavoro a quattro mani a cura del filologo italiano Lorenzo Ferroni e del filosofo francese Arnaud Macé, che presenta una chiara divisione dei compiti: oltre all’introduzione, alla traduzione e a un commento del dialogo (a cura di Macé), come previsto dalla...