18 found
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  1. Memory, Knowledge, and Epistemic Luck.Changsheng Lai - 2022 - Philosophical Quarterly 72 (4):896-917.
    Does ‘remembering that p’ entail ‘knowing that p’? The widely-accepted epistemic theory of memory answers affirmatively. This paper purports to reveal the tension between ETM and the prevailing anti-luck epistemology. Central to my argument is the fact that we often ‘vaguely remember’ a fact, of which one plausible interpretation is that our true memory-based beliefs formed in this way could easily have been false. Drawing on prominent theories of misremembering in philosophy of psychology, I will construct cases where the subject (...)
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  2. Remembering is not a kind of knowing.Changsheng Lai - 2022 - Synthese 200 (4):333.
    This paper purports to disprove an orthodox view in contemporary epistemology that I call ‘the epistemic conception of memory’, which sees remembering as a kind of epistemic success, in particular, a kind of knowing. This conception is embodied in a cluster of platitudes in epistemology, including ‘remembering entails knowing’, ‘remembering is a way of knowing’, and ‘remembering is sufficiently analogous to knowing’. I will argue that this epistemic conception of memory, as a whole, should be rejected insofar as we take (...)
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  3. Against epistemic absolutism.Changsheng Lai - 2021 - Synthese 199 (1-2):3945-3967.
    Epistemic absolutism is an orthodox view that propositional knowledge is an ungradable concept. Absolutism is primarily grounded in our ungradable uses of “knows” in ordinary language. This paper advances a thorough objection to the linguistic argument for absolutism. My objection consists of two parts. Firstly, arguments for absolutism provided by Jason Stanley and Julien Dutant will be refuted respectively. After that, two more general refutation-strategies will be proposed: counterevidence against absolutism can be found in both English and non-English languages; the (...)
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  4.  68
    Memory belief is weak.Changsheng Lai - 2023 - Ratio 36 (3):204-214.
    Recently there has been extensive debate over whether “belief is weak”, viz, whether the epistemic standard for belief is lower than for assertion or knowledge. While most current studies focus on notions such as “ordinary belief” and “outright belief”, this paper purports to advance this debate by investigating a specific type of belief; memory belief. It is argued that (outright) beliefs formed on the basis of episodic memories are “weak” due to two forms of “entitlement inequality”. My key argument is (...)
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  5.  15
    Relearning and remembering: A gradualist account.Changsheng Lai - 2024 - Philosophy and the Mind Sciences 5.
    Relearning and remembering are usually seen as two distinct cognitive processes in contemporary philosophy of memory. In particular, relearning is sometimes regarded as a kind of memory error. This paper aims to address two questions. First, is relearning a kind of memory error? Second, how to draw a distinction (if any) properly between relearning and remembering? My answer to the first question is a conditional ‘yes’—it depends on whether relearning can be falsidical and whether metacognitive monitoring counts as a part (...)
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  6. The Self-Hollowing Problem of the Radical Sceptical Paradox.Changsheng Lai - 2020 - Erkenntnis 85 (5):1269-1288.
    The purpose of this paper is to provide a new solution to the radical sceptical paradox. A sceptical paradox purports to indicate the inconsistency within our fundamental epistemological commitments that are all seemingly plausible. Typically, sceptics employ an intuitively appealing epistemic principle (e.g., the closure principle, the underdetermination principle) to derive the sceptical conclusion. This paper will reveal a dilemma intrinsic to the sceptical paradox, which I refer to as the self-hollowing problem of radical scepticism. That is, on the one (...)
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  7. Epistemic Gradualism Versus Epistemic Absolutism.Changsheng Lai - 2021 - Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 103 (1):186-207.
    Epistemic absolutism holds that knowledge‐that is ungradable, while epistemic gradualism argues the opposite. This paper purports to remodel the gradualism/absolutism debate. The current model initiated by Stephen Hetherington fails to capture the genuine divergence between the two views, which makes the debate equivocal, and the gradualist side lacks appeal. I propose that the remodeled debate should focus on whether knowledge‐that is a ‘threshold concept’ or a ‘spectrum concept’. That is, whether there is a threshold distinguishing knowledge from non‐knowledge. The reconstructed (...)
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  8.  74
    The Third Type of Epistemic Luck.Changsheng Lai - 2021 - Studies in Dialectics of Nature 7 (37):14-20.
    The core thesis of anti-luck epistemology is the incompatibility thesis, that is, knowledge is incompatible with veritic epistemic luck. Traditionally, anti-luck epistemologists hold that there are two distinct types of veritic epistemic luck, viz, intervening luck and environmental luck. The former occurs when something luckily intervenes between the subject’s belief and the target fact, which renders the subject’s belief luckily true. The latter can be found in cases where the subject’s belief is luckily true when she is in an unfriendly (...)
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  9. Remembering requires no reliability.Changsheng Lai - 2023 - Philosophical Studies (1):1-21.
    I argue against mnemic reliabilism, an influential view that successful remembering must be produced by a reliable memory process. Drawing on empirical evidence from psychology and neuroscience, I refute mnemic reliabilism by demonstrating that: (1) patients with memory impairments (e.g., Alzheimer’s disease) can also successfully remember the past despite the unreliability of their corresponding memory processes; (2) some reliability-affecting factors (e.g., stress, divided attention, and insufficient encoding time) can render the memory processes of healthy individuals unreliable without preventing them from (...)
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  10.  21
    Is ‘Remembering’ a Normative Concept?Changsheng Lai - forthcoming - International Journal of Philosophical Studies:1-24.
    There is a substantial disagreement in the literature over whether ‘remembering’ is a normative concept. Some philosophers have attempted to defend the normativity of ‘remembering’ by highlighting its normative importance or its conceptual affinities with ‘knowing’ or ‘duties’. This paper will first reveal defects of these existing normativist arguments. After that, I will propose and defend a new normativist argument, according to which the concept ‘remembering’ is partly constituted by a paradigmatically normative concept, namely ‘rational’. To be more specific, I (...)
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  11.  31
    Memory Scepticism: Demystified and Defanged.Changsheng Lai - 2024 - Studies in Philosophy of Science and Technology 41 (2):26-32.
    Memory is ordinarily taken to be one of the most fundamental sources of knowledge. However, memory sceptics argue that memory is unable to provide us with knowledge about the past. In the existing literature, there are two most discussed forms of memory sceptical arguments, namely, the argument from memory reliability and the argument from underdetermination. Correspondingly, the two most representative anti-sceptical proposals nowadays attempt to disarm the two sceptical arguments by employing explanationism and disjunctivism respectively. This paper will first illustrate (...)
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  12.  54
    Epistemic Gradualism's Argument from Components.Changsheng Lai - 2023 - Studies in Dialectics of Nature 39 (5):40-46.
    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 (...)
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  13.  48
    Memory scepticism and the Pritchardean solution.Changsheng Lai - 2023 - Asian Journal of Philosophy 2 (1):1-20.
    A large portion of our knowledge seems to rest on our memories, while memory scepticism poses challenges to our memory knowledge. This paper will delve into different forms of memory scepticism. The goal of this paper is twofold: First, drawing on Moon (2017) and Frise (2022), I compare and criticize various forms of sceptical arguments provided by them. Meanwhile, the two most threatening arguments are picked out: the Russellian argument and the argument from doubtful reliability. Second, I demonstrate that the (...)
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  14. Is ‘Knowing that P’ Identical with ‘Knowing that “P” Is True’?Changsheng Lai - 2021 - Philosophia 48 (3):1075-1092.
    It is epistemological orthodoxy that the object of propositional knowledge is the truth of propositions. This traditional view is based on what I call the ‘KT-schema’, viz, ‘S knows that p, iff, S knows that “p” is true’. The purpose of this paper is to reject the KT-schema. By showing the paradoxical upshot of the KT-schema and providing counterexamples to the KT-schema, this paper argues that ‘knowing that p’ is more than ‘knowing that “p” is true’. Consequently, we shall rethink (...)
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  15.  93
    My Ordinary Anti-Sceptical Beliefs Are Not Insensitive.Changsheng Lai - 2019 - Frontiers of Philosophy in China 14 (3):469-489.
    An orthodox sceptical hypothesis claims that one’s belief that “I am not a brain-in-a-vat (BIV)” (or any other ordinary anti-sceptical belief) is insensitive. A form of sensitivity-based scepticism, can thus be constructed by combining this orthodox hypothesis with the sensitivity principle and the closure principle. Unlike traditional solutions to the sensitivity-based sceptical problem, this paper will propose a new solution—one which does not reject either closure or sensitivity. Instead, I argue that sceptics’ assumption that one’s ordinary anti-sceptical beliefs are insensitive (...)
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  16.  68
    The Basis Problem of Epistemological Disjunctivism and Paradigmatic Cases.Changsheng Lai - 2020 - Journal of Dialectics of Nature 42 (11):17-24.
    Epistemological disjunctivism argues that one can have perceptual knowledge that p in virtue of being in possession of factive and reflectively accessible rational support, e.g., one’s ‘seeing that p’. A well-known challenge to this view is the so-called basis problem of epistemological disjunctivism, which argues that one’s ‘seeing that p’ cannot constitute the rational support for one’s knowledge that p, as ‘seeing that p’ is just a way of ‘knowing that p’. The basis problem is taken to be based on (...)
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  17.  64
    Concept of gradable knowledge.Changsheng Lai - 2019 - Dissertation, University of Edinburgh
    An orthodox view in epistemology holds that propositional knowledge is an absolute ‘yes or no’ affair, viz, propositional knowledge is ungradable. Call this view epistemic absolutism. This thesis purports to challenge this absolutist orthodoxy and develop an underexplored position—epistemic gradualism, which was initially proposed by Stephen Hetherington. As opposed to epistemic absolutism, epistemic gradualism argues that propositional knowledge can come in degrees. This thesis will examine motivations for endorsing absolutism and then, drawing on Hetherington’s original objections to absolutism, prove that (...)
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  18. Scepticism and the Self-Hollowing Problem: A Dichotomous Solution to Sceptical Paradox.Changsheng Lai - 2016 - Dissertation,
     
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