Based on a 12-year bibliographic record collected from the Web of Science database, the present study aims to provide a macroscopic overview of the knowledge domain in financial decision making. A scientometric and bibliometric analysis was conducted on the literature published in the field from 2010 to 2021, using the CiteSpace software. The analysis focuses on the co-occurring categories, the geographic distributions, the vital references, the distribution of topics, as well as the research fronts and emerging trends of financial (...) related decision making. The steady increase of papers published year by year demonstrated the increasing interest on this topic at the international level. The scientometric analysis of the literature showed that financial decision, investment decision, and financing decision stood out of the crowd of the research on FDM, suggesting their important role in FDM and its research. The results of citation burst analysis predicted the focus of topics, i.e., the impact of individual differences such as financial literacy, gender and age on FDM in the coming years. Different from the traditional approach of literature review, this bibliometric analysis offers a scientometric approach to reveal the status quo and the development trend of FDM by macro and quantitative means. In addition, future research directions for the field are recommended. (shrink)

A common view holds that consciousness is needed for knowledge acquired in one domain to be applied in a novel domain. We present evidence for the opposite; where the transfer of knowledge is achieved only in the absence of conscious awareness. Knowledge of artificial grammars was examined where training and testing occurred in different vocabularies or modalities. In all conditions grammaticality judgments attributed to random selection showed above-chance accuracy , while those attributed to conscious decisions did not. (...) Participants also rated each string’s familiarity and performed a perceptual task assessing fluency. Familiarity was predicted by repetition structure and was thus related to grammaticality. Fluency, though increasing familiarity, was unrelated to grammaticality. While familiarity predicted all judgments only those attributed to random selection showed a significant additional contribution of grammaticality, deriving primarily from chunk novelty. In knowledge transfer, as in visual perception , the unconscious may outperform the conscious. (shrink)

This essay asks whether and how a Reformational epistemology should distinguish different types of knowledge within a unified conception of knowledge as a whole. I begin with the thesis that knowledge, in its deepest meaning, is not a thing to possess but a complex relationship to inhabit. It encompasses human knowers, practices of knowing, the knowable, known results, guiding principles, and procedures of confirmation. Within this complex relationship, humans achieve insight of various sorts. After briefly distinguishing artistic (...) from scientific knowledge, I examine two other social domains of knowledge, namely, technology and religion. Taking issue with Hendrik Hart, I then argue for the religious legitimacy of propositional beliefs, provided they support genuinely religious knowledge, which is post-propositional. Knowledge, I conclude, takes on distinct contours within different social domains; some of them, like art and technology, provide pre-propositional insight, and others, like religion, offer insight that is post-propositional. (shrink)

Domain analysis is useful for examination of individual spheres of intellectual activity, both academic and otherwise, and has been used in the knowledge organization (KO) literature to explore specific communities and uses, including web pornography (Beaudoin and Ménard 2015), virtual online worlds (Sköld, Olle 2015), gourmet cooking (Hartel 2010), healthy eating (McTavish 2015), art studies (Ørom 2003), the Knowledge Organization journal (Guimarães et al. 2013), and domain analysis itself (Smiraglia 2015). The results of domain analyses are useful for (...) the development of controlled vocabularies, taxonomies, ontologies, metadata schemas, and other systems for the documentation, description, and discovery of resources, as well as for knowledge discovery in general (Smiraglia 2015; Hjørland 2017). This research describes a methodology for the elucidation of knowledge organization systems (KOS) currently in use on image websites that document graffiti, graffiti art, and street art around the world. (shrink)

ABSTRACT One major problem in the process of knowledge assimilation is how to deal with inconsistency of new knowledge and the existing knowledge base. In this paper we present a formal, provably correct and yet computational methodology for assimilation of new knowledge into knowledge bases about actions and changes based on the slogan: what is believed is what is explained. Technically, we employ Gelfond and Lifschitz' action description language A to describe domains of actions. (...) The knowledge bases on domains of actions are defined and obtained by a new translation from domain descriptions in A into abductive normal logic programs, where a time dimension is incorporated. The knowledge bases are shown to be both sound and complete with respect to their domain descriptions. In particular, we propose a possible causes approach (PCA) to knowledge assimilation about evolving domains of actions, in contrast to Ginsberg's possible worlds approach (PWA) and Winslett's possible models approach (PMA). A possible cause of new knowledge consists of abduced occurrences of actions and value propositions about the initial state of the domain of actions, that would allow to derive the new knowledge. We show how to compute possible causes with abductive logic programming, and present some techniques to improve search efficiency. We use examples to compare our possible causes approach with syntax-based approaches, such as Ginsberg's possible worlds approach, and semantics-based approaches, such as Winslett's possible models approach, to belief revision/update. (shrink)

ABSTRACT This is a continuing attempt in a series of papers [KM 93, Mur 93, Mur 96] to show how computer-represented knowledge can be arranged as elements of an effectively represented semantic (or algebraic) domain in the sense of [GS 90]. We present a direct deductive description of the domain, which was defined semantically in [KM 93], via the Scott's notion of information system. Also, the internal structure of the continuous ampliative operations coordinated with the domain's effective basis is (...) established. Though we always remain in the paradigm of the toleration of contradictory information described in [Bel 75, Bel 76], the approach in question could be extended to include domains for consistency knowledge bases. (shrink)

Differences in difficulty between isomorphs of the Tower of Hanoi are generally explained in terms of differences in processing loads required by the different versions Kotovsky & Fallside, 1989 . Our claim is that the general knowledge about an action, activated by the context, is what guides the elaboration of problem representation. To test this hypothesis, we manipulated the context using four isomorphs. The results support the hypothesis: the selection of the adequate point of view on the action depends (...) on the context, and is a crucial step in the elaboration of problem representation. The more difficult versions are those that require abandoning the first point of view and selecting a new one. (shrink)

We initially describe a feature-rich discriminative Conditional Random Field (CRF) model for Information Extraction in the workshop announcements domain, which offers good baseline performance in the PASCAL shared task. We then propose a method for leveraging domain knowledge in Information Extraction tasks, scoring candidate document labellings as one-value-per-field templates according to domain feasibility after generating sample labellings from a trained sequence classifier. Our relational models evaluate these templates according to our intuitions about agreement in the domain: workshop acronyms should (...) resemble their names, workshop dates occur after paper submission dates. These methods see a 5% f-score improvement in fields retrieved when sampling labellings from a Maximum-Entropy Markov Model, however we do not observe improvement over a CRF model. We discuss reasons for this, including the problem of recovering all field instances from a best template, and propose future work in adapting such a model to the CRF, a better standalone system. (shrink)

Research FocusThe promotion of domain-specific knowledge is a central goal of higher education and, in the field of medicine, it is particularly essential to promote global health. Domain-specific knowledge on its own is not exhaustive; confidence regarding the factual truth of this knowledge content is also required. An increase in both knowledge and confidence is considered a necessary prerequisite for making professional decisions in the clinical context. Especially the knowledge of human physiology is fundamental and (...) simultaneously critical to medical decision-making. However, numerous studies have shown difficulties in understanding and misconceptions in this area of knowledge. Therefore, we investigate how preclinical medical students acquire knowledge in physiology over the course of their studies and simultaneously gain confidence in the correctness of this knowledge as well as the interrelations between these variables, and how they affect the development of domain-specific knowledge.MethodIn a pre–post study, 169 medical students’ development of physiology knowledge and their confidence related to this knowledge were assessed via paper-pencil questionnaires before and after attending physiology seminars for one semester. Data from a longitudinal sample of n = 97 students were analyzed using mean comparisons, regression analyses, and latent class analyses. In addition, four types of item responses were formed based on confidence and correctness in the knowledge test.ResultsWe found a significant and large increase in the students’ physiology knowledge, with task-related confidence being the strongest predictor. Moreover, a significantly higher level of confidence at t2 was confirmed, with the level of prior confidence being a strong predictor. Furthermore, based on the students’ development of knowledge and confidence levels between measurement points, three empirically distinct groups were distinguished: knowledge gainers, confidence gainers, and overall gainers. The students whose confidence in incorrect knowledge increased constituted one particularly striking group. Therefore, the training of both knowledge and the ability to critically reflect on one’s knowledge and skills as well as an assessment of their development in education is required, especially in professions such as medicine, where knowledge-based decisions made with confidence are of vital importance. (shrink)

Since time immemorial, organization and visualization has emerged as the pre-eminent natural combination through which abstract concepts in a domain can be understood, imbibed and communicated. In the present era of big data and information explosion, domains are becoming increasingly intricate and facetized, often leaving traditional approaches of know­ledge organization functionally inefficient in dynamically depicting intellectual landscapes. The paper attempts to present, ab initio, a step-by-step conceptual domain development methodology using know­ledge graphs, rooted in the rudiments of interdisciplinary know­ledge (...) organization and know­ledge cartography. It briefly highlights the implementation of the proposed methodology on business domain data, and considers its research ramifications, originality and limitations from multiple perspectives. The paper concludes by summarizing observations on the entire work and particularizing future lines of research. (shrink)

When we affirm that someone knows something, we are making a value judgment of sorts - we are claiming that there is something superior about that person's opinion, or their evidence, or perhaps about them. A central task of the theory of knowledge is to investigate the sort of evaluation at issue. This is the first book to make 'epistemic normativity,' or the normative dimension of knowledge and knowledge ascriptions, its central focus. John Greco argues that (...) class='Hi'>knowledge is a kind of achievement, as opposed to mere lucky success. This locates knowledge within a broader, familiar normative domain. By reflecting on our thinking and practices in this domain, it is argued, we gain insight into what knowledge is and what kind of value it has for us. (shrink)

Hypertext and knowledge based systems can be viewed as complementary technologies, which if combined into a composite system may be able to yield a whole which is greater than the sum of the parts. To gain the maximum benefits, however, we need to think about how to harness this potential synergy. This will mean devising new styles of system, rather than merely seeking to enhance the old models.In this paper we describe our model for coupling hypertext and a (...) class='Hi'>knowledge based system, and then go on to describe two prototype systems which attempt to exploit this composite framework. The first application concerns animated hypertext which accords the text a central role whilst giving access to all the advantages of a knowledge based system. The second suggests how we can augment the hypertext by providing links which reflect the conceptual model of a knowledge based system in the domain, so as to provide a more structured traversal of the text. (shrink)

The dissociation between the domains of knowledge continues to perpetuate the fragmentation of people’s health and healing experiences. Of particular significance are the polarities that have been created between the objective, subjective and spiritual dimensions of knowledge and human experience. This paper offers a consideration of how faith might serve as a pragmatic avenue towards assuaging the polarities between knowledges and enhancing nurses’ ability to attend to the complex and mulitdimensional nature of health and healing processes.

Competence in scientific reasoning is one of the most valued outcomes of secondary and higher education. However, there is a need for a deeper understanding of and further research into the roles of domain-general and domain-specific knowledge in such reasoning. This book explores the functions and limitations of domain-general conceptions of reasoning and argumentation, the substantial differences that exist between the disciplines, and the role of domain-specific knowledge and epistemologies. Featuring chapters and commentaries by widely cited experts in (...) the learning sciences, educational psychology, science education, history education, and cognitive science, Scientific Reasoning and Argumentation presents new perspectives on a decades-long debate about the role of domain-specific knowledge and its contribution to the development of more general reasoning abilities. (shrink)

As an alternative dispute resolution procedure, Domain Name Arbitration addresses not only contentions regarding the ownership of web pages, but also infringements of the Intellectual Property law such as cyber squatting or Internet piracy. In this spirit, panelists of the World Intellectual Property Organization enact law in accordance with what the involved parties provide them as burden of proof. Following this line of thought, we can assume that one party may remain unrepresented when it is not able to accomplish legal (...) procedures successfully. Nevertheless, does this kind of asymmetry always function in the way that we presume? This paper sets out to study how WIPO panelists tackle knowledge asymmetries when being manifested in Domain Name Arbitration. In particular, this paper concentrates on comparing two Domain Name Arbitration processes in which knowledge asymmetries play a significant role in the panelist’s final-and legally binding- decision. This analysis also examines how specific text-internal features give us a hint of unbalanced relationships between the Complainant and the Respondent of a Domain Name Arbitration process. It endeavors, thus, to understand how lexical, rhetorical-grammatical and discursive features work within discourse and may reach to influence the communicative act itself. Following Vijay K. Bhatia’s critical discourse analysis as main theoretical framework, this paper tries to comprehend the role asymmetries play in enacting Domain Name law. (shrink)

Ludwig Wittgenstein’s practical incursions on the domain of art were many and well known. It is worth drawing attention to the design that he did together with Paul Engelmann for his sister Margarethe Stonborough-Wittgenstein’s house and the bust he made for, and was inspired by, the sculptor Michael Drobil. To attribute just an anecdotal character to Wittgenstein’s few artistic projects is a misunderstanding. The Austrian philosopher devoted himself to them with the fervor and rigor that characterize his philosophical writings. He (...) took care of every detail in his sister’s house, which sometimes ended up in difficult changes, although quite minimal (as when he had the ceilings lowered a few centimeters just before .. (shrink)

We argue that a comprehensive theory of reciprocals must rely on a general taxonomy of restrictions on the interpretation of relational expressions. Developing such a taxonomy, we propose a new principle for interpreting reciprocals that relies on the interpretation of the relation in their scope. This principle, the Maximal Interpretation Hypothesis (MIH), analyzes reciprocals as partial polyadic quantifiers. According to the MIH, the partial quantifier denoted by a reciprocal requires the relational expression REL in its scope to denote a maximal (...) relation in REL’s interpretation domain. In this way the MIH avoids a priori assumptions on the available readings of reciprocal expressions, which are necessary in previous accounts. Relying extensively on the work of Dalrymple et al. (Ling Philos 21:159–210, 1998), we show that the MIH also exhibits some observational improvements over Dalrymple et al.’s Strongest Meaning Hypothesis (SMH). In addition to deriving some attested reciprocal interpretations that are not expected by the SMH, the MIH offers a more restrictive account of the way context affects the interpretation of reciprocals through its influence on relational domains. Further, the MIH generates a reciprocal interpretation at the predicate level, which is argued to be advantageous to Dalrymple et al.’s propositional selection of reciprocal meanings. More generally, we argue that by focusing on restrictions on relational domains, the MIH opens the way for a more systematic study of the ways in which lexical meaning, world knowledge and contextual information interact with the interpretation of quantificational expressions. (shrink)

The dissociation between the domains of knowledge continues to perpetuate the fragmentation of people’s health and healing experiences. Of particular significance are the polarities that have been created between the objective, subjective and spiritual dimensions of knowledge and human experience. This paper offers a consideration of how faith might serve as a pragmatic avenue towards assuaging the polarities between knowledges and enhancing nurses’ ability to attend to the complex and mulitdimensional nature of health and healing processes.

This article presents a set of principles for knowledge modeling in knowledge organization systems in specific domains. It discusses the representational problem, comparing the abstraction mechanisms present in the theories related to representation in concept systems, taken from foundational authors of information science, computer science, and terminology approaches. Parallel to this context, several representational possibilities arise to assist the modeler in the activity of elaborating models of representation. It describes the application of theoretical and methodological principles when (...) organizing, representing, and managing navigation on learning paths in the corporate education field. As a concept proof, it exposes a conceptual model of learning paths and discusses a literature review on this subject to verify to what extent these principles are being applied. It concludes that we can consider the principles discussed in this study as relevant, since they expand the modelers’ freedom, not making him hostage to a specific model. (shrink)

The moral domain is broader than the empathy and justice concerns assessed by existing measures of moral competence, and it is not just a subset of the values assessed by value inventories. To fill the need for reliable and theoretically grounded measurement of the full range of moral concerns, we developed the Moral Foundations Questionnaire on the basis of a theoretical model of 5 universally available sets of moral intuitions: Harm/Care, Fairness/Reciprocity, Ingroup/Loyalty, Authority/Respect, and Purity/Sanctity. We present evidence for the (...) internal and external validity of the scale and the model, and in doing so we present new findings about morality: Comparative model fitting of confirmatory factor analyses provides empirical justification for a 5-factor structure of moral concerns; convergent/discriminant validity evidence suggests that moral concerns predict personality features and social group attitudes not previously considered morally relevant; and we establish pragmatic validity of the measure in providing new knowledge and research opportunities concerning demographic and cultural differences in moral intuitions. These analyses provide evidence for the usefulness of Moral Foundations Theory in simultaneously increasing the scope and sharpening the resolution of psychological views of morality. (shrink)

This case study aims to preserve and disseminate cultural heritage information about the North American community folk dance tradition of contra dance through development of a thesaurus of choreographic terms and a domain ontology. A survey of dance resources was conducted, reviewing historic and modern examples of contra dance choreography notation and instructions, records of dance events, and recordings of dance performances. Domain and content analysis were performed on the resources to collect and organize concepts and themes regarding choreographic components (...) and their relationships, the structure and function of cultural works, their creative expressions, and the evidence of those expressions in documents and recordings. Vocabulary used in the description of contra dance choreography was identified, classified, and notated to build a thesaurus, which was used as the basis of a domain ontology. Ontology building methodology and existing conceptual models for cultural heritage domains guided the ontology development and revision phases. The study also seeks to safeguard an intangible cultural heritage by applying knowledge organization and semantic approaches to folk dance in order to model such challenges as multiple, simultaneous modes of communication and forms of representation, modular conceptual components, descriptive sequences, differing levels of structured information, and complex cultural networks found at various levels of domain discourse. (shrink)

This book is about normativity and reasons.

The contributions to this special issue on cognitive development collectively propose ways in which learning involves developing constraints that shape subsequent learning. A learning system must be constrained to learn efficiently, but some of these constraints are themselves learnable. To know how something will behave, a learner must know what kind of thing it is. Although this has led previous researchers to argue for domain-specific constraints that are tied to different kinds/domains, an exciting possibility is that kinds/domains themselves (...) can be learned. General cognitive constraints, when combined with rich inputs, can establish domains, rather than these domains necessarily preexisting prior to learning. Knowledge is structured and richly differentiated, but its “skeleton” must not always be preestablished. Instead, the skeleton may be adapted to fit patterns of co-occurrence, task requirements, and goals. Finally, we argue that for models of development to demonstrate genuine cognitive novelty, it will be helpful for them to move beyond highly preprocessed and symbolic encodings that limit flexibility. We consider two physical models that learn to make tone discriminations. They are mechanistic models that preserve rich spatial, perceptual, dynamic, and concrete information, allowing them to form surprising new classes of hypotheses and encodings. (shrink)

domains as rareiied as a cardiologistRi7;s knowledge of arrhythmia to those as commonplace as everyday folk psychology. Domains can vary from the highly concrete causally rich relations in a naive mechanics of physical objects to the highly abstract noncausal relations of mathematics or natural language syntax. Lumping together all of these different sorts of domains so as to have similar effects on cognitive development is likely to be misleading and un· informative. In this chapter, I consider (...) some distinctions and their implications.. (shrink)

The contribution deals with knowledge of what to do, and how, where, when and why to do it, as it is found in a multitude of plans, rules, procedures, maxims, and other instructions. It is argued that while this knowledge is conceptual and propositional, it is still irreducible to theoretical knowledge of what is the case and why it is the case. It is knowledge of goals, of ends and means, rather than of facts. It is (...) knowledge-to that is irreducibly practical in having world to mind direction of fit and the essential function of guiding as yet uncompleted action. While practical knowledge is fundamentally different from theoretical knowledge in terms of mind-world relations, the practical and theoretical domains are still parallel in terms of justificatory and inferential relations, they are like mirror images of one another. It is shown that if this view of practical knowledge is accepted, convincing Gettier cases for practical knowledge can be constructed. An extensive analysis of these cases demonstrates the usefulness of the notions of practical deduction, abduction, and induction. (shrink)

Knowledge is a productive resource having successful applications in almost every field and domain of human activities. With unprecedented growth in knowledge resources and explosion in data, such informative resources need effective organization for storage and efficient retrieval for future uses. The entire process involving organization, storage, and dissemination of knowledge falls under the auspices of knowledge management. Thus, Knowledge Management is an organizational practice. In this research paper, we provide a general outline of some (...) of the tools and technologies deployed in managing knowledge across organizations. -/- We believe that the practice of knowledge management - though considered to be a process - it is also a "method" by which organizations are able to management their knowledge and human resources. On this regard, this paper contributes to our further understanding of what organizational knowledge is, and how they should be proficiently managed that would contribute to organizational success. (shrink)

Ludwig Wittgenstein gave priority to aesthetics over other disciplines due to its invaluable capacities for revealing certain aspects of the nature of human understanding and for guiding our actions toward an ethical life. Although Wittgenstein did not focus on these issues in a systematic way, these worries were present in his philosophy during his lifetime. That is why I use a very wide range of his writings, from the Tractatus to letters and diaries. Aesthetic inquiries can throw light upon the (...) existence of an intransitive understanding–that is, a kind of knowledge that cannot be expressed by language shared by all competent users of a language. I also discuss Wittgenstein’s conception of ethics in order to explain the close relationship that he proposed between ethics and aesthetics. I hope this will clarify why he believed there was so much to learn from paintings, films, music, poems, or novels. I compare works of art and religious belief and how the former can help us to guide our lives as the latter does. I do this while extending the scope and claiming the importance of aesthetic education, given that it can help us to deal with our nature and with our history. (shrink)

Domain-general mechanisms are evolutionarily ancient, resulting from the evolution of affective cues signaling the attainment of evolutionary goals. Explicit processing is a particularly important set of domain-general mechanisms for constructing human groups – enabling ideologies specifying future goal states and rationalizing group aims, enabling knowledge of others' reputations essential to cooperation, understanding the rights and obligations of group membership, monitoring group members, and providing appropriate punishments to those who deviate from group aims.

In this study, we intend to examine information retrieval behaviors from a psychological point of view using a search engine on the World Wide Web (WWW). We investigated information retrieving behaviors in detail based on both the recorded data of retrievers’ web browsing actions and their thinking processes by the “think aloud” method. We focused on selected keywords for retrieving and compared them between retrievers who had enough knowledge about their task and those who did not. Our goal was (...) to learn about the literacy needed for finding required information efficiently on the WWW. (shrink)

The use of case-based reasoning in teaching professional ethics has come of age. The fields of medicine, engineering, and business all have incorporated ethics case studies into leading textbooks and journal articles, as well as undergraduate and graduate professional ethics courses. The most recent guidelines from the National Institutes of Health recognize case studies and face-to-face discussion as best practices to be included in training programs for the Responsible Conduct of Research. While there is a general consensus that case studies (...) play a central role in the teaching of professional ethics, there is still much to be learned regarding how professionals learn ethics using case-based reasoning. Cases take many forms, and there are a variety of ways to write them and use them in teaching. This paper reports the results of a study designed to investigate one of the issues in teaching case-based ethics: the role of one’s professional knowledge in learning methods of moral reasoning. Using a novel assessment instrument, we compared case studies written and analyzed by three groups of students whom we classified as: Experts in a research domain in bioengineering. Novices in a research domain in bioengineering. The non-research group—students using an engineering domain in which they were interested but had no in-depth knowledge. This study demonstrates that a student’s level of understanding of a professional knowledge domain plays a significant role in learning moral reasoning skills. (shrink)

As engineering applications require management of ever larger volumes of data, ontologies offer the potential to capture, manage, and augment data with the capability for automated reasoning and semantic querying. Unfortunately, considerable barriers hinder wider deployment of ontologies in engineering. Key among these is lack of a shared top-level ontology to unify and organise disparate aspects of the field and coordinate co-development of orthogonal ontologies. As a result, many engineering ontologies are limited to their scope, and functionally difficult to extend (...) or interoperate with other engineering ontologies. This paper demonstrates how the use of a top-level ontology, specifically the Basic Formal Ontology (BFO), greatly facilitates interoperability of multiple engineering-related ontologies. We constructed a system of formal linked ontologies by re-engineering legacy ontologies to be conformant with BFO and developing new BFO-conformant ontologies to capture knowledge in the engineering design, enterprise, human factors, manufacturing, and application domain of additive manufacturing. The resulting Integrated Framework for Additively Manufactured Products (IFAMP), including the body knowledge instantiated on its basis, serve as the basis for a proposed Design with Additive Manufacturing Method (DWAM), which we believe can support the design of innovative products with semantically enhanced ideation tools and enhanced access to application domain knowledge. The method and its facilitation through the ontological framework are demonstrated using a case study in medicine. (shrink)

We examine two leading theories of rational belief, the Lockean view and the explanationist view. The first is appealing because it fits with some independently plausible claims about the ways that rational persons pursue their aims. The second is appealing because it seems to account for intuitions that cause trouble for the Lockean view. While fitting the intuitive data is desirable, we are troubled that the explanationist view seems to clash with our theoretical beliefs about what rationality must be like. (...) We think that upon further examination, the intuitive appeal of the explanationist view starts to diminish. We also think that these further intuitions that spell trouble for the explanationist spell trouble for any theory that is not expectationist. We propose a novel expectationist theory of rational belief that improves upon the Lockean and the explanationist views. We think that recent defences of the Lockean view contain an important insight. A substantive theory of rational response should be based on a suitable theory of prizes and a suitable theory of how we should pursue prizes in the face of uncertainty. Most theories of rational belief typically take for granted a truth-centred picture of epistemic prizes (e.g., that epistemic desirability and undesirability can be fully understood in terms of accuracy) and then differ in terms of how they recommend pursuing prizes so understood. We think the Lockeans embrace plausible principles of how prizes should be pursued. We trace the difficulties that this view faces to veritistic assumptions about prizes. We suggest that some prizes are epistemically loaded in that a complete description of the prize will itself make reference to our epistemic states or standards. We argue that knowledge matters to rational belief and choice because in the epistemic domain, knowledge is the prize. We see this in practical domains, too. In some choice settings, what's desired is desired, in part, because it involves a kind of connection to reality only knowledge provides. (shrink)

Drawing on the puzzling behavior of ordinary knowledge ascriptions that embed an epistemic (im)possibility claim, we tentatively conclude that it is untenable to jointly endorse (i) an unfettered classical logic for epistemic language, (ii) the general veridicality of knowledge ascription, and (iii) an intuitive ‘negative transparency’ thesis that reduces knowledge of a simple negated ‘might’ claim to an epistemic claim without modal content. We motivate a strategic trade-off: preserve veridicality and (generalized) negative transparency, while abandoning the general (...) validity of contraposition. We criticize various approaches to incorporating veridicality into domain semantics, a paradigmatic ‘information-sensitive’ framework for capturing negative transparency and, more generally, the non-classical behavior of sentences with epistemic modals. We then present a novel information-sensitive semantics that successfully executes our favored strategy: stable acceptance semantics, extending a vanilla bilateral state-based semantics for epistemic modals with a knowledge operator loosely inspired by the defeasibility theory of knowledge. (shrink)

Intuitively, the knowledge of one’s own intentional actions is different from the knowledge of actions of other sorts, including those of other people and unintentional actions of one's own. But how are we to understand this phenomenon? Does it pertain to all actions, under every description under which they are known? If so, then how is this possible? If not, then how should we think about cases that are exceptions to this principle? This paper is a critical survey (...) of recent attempts to answer these questions. I consider views under three headings: "special source" views, which hold that the knowledge of one's intentional actions has a non-perceptual source; "special domain" views, which hold that some but not all aspects of one's intentional actions are known in a special way; and "special character" views, which hold that the knowledge of intentional actions is special not because of where it comes from, but because of some other respect in which it is different in kind from the knowledge of other things. (shrink)