False belief tasks have enjoyed a monopoly in the research on children’s development of a theory of mind. They have been granted this status because they promise to deliver an unambiguous assessment of children’s understanding of the representational nature of mental states. Their poor cousins, true belief tasks, have been relegated to occasional service as control tasks. That this is their only role has been due to the universal assumption that correct answers on true belief (...) tasks are inherently ambiguous regarding the level of the child’s understanding of mental states. It has also been due to the universal assumption that nothing in the child’s developing theory of mind would lead to systematically incorrect answers on true belief tasks. We review new findings that 4- and 5-year-olds do err, systematically and profoundly, on the true belief versions of all the extant belief tasks. This reveals an intermediate level of understanding in the development of children’s theory of mind. Researchers have been unaware of this intermediate level because it produces correct answers in false belief tasks. A simple two-task battery—one true belief task and one false belief task—is sufficient to remove the ambiguity from each task. The new findings show that children do not acquire an understanding of beliefs, and hence a representational theory of mind, until after 6 years of age, or 2 years later than most developmental psychologists have concluded. This raises the question of how to interpret other new findings that infants are able to pass false belief tasks. We review these new infant studies, as well as recent studies on chimpanzees, in light of older children’s failure on true belief tasks, and end with some speculation about how all of these new findings might be reconciled. (shrink)

It has been generally assumed in the Theory of Mind literature of the past 30 years that young children fail standard false-belief tasks because they attribute their own knowledge to the protagonist. Contrary to the traditional view, we have recently proposed that the children's bias is task induced. This alternative view was supported by studies showing that 3 year olds are able to pass a false-belief task that allows them to focus on the protagonist, without drawing (...) their attention to the target object in the test phase. For a more accurate comparison of these two accounts, the present study tested the true-belief default with adults. Four experiments measuring eye movements and response inhibition revealed that adults do not have an automatic tendency to respond to the false-belief question according to their own knowledge and the true-belief response need not be inhibited in order to correctly predict the protagonist's actions. The positive results observed in the control conditions confirm the accuracy of the various measures used. I conclude that the results of this study undermine the true-belief default view and those models that posit mechanisms of response inhibition in false-belief reasoning. Alternatively, the present study with adults and recent studies with children suggest that participants' focus of attention in false-belief tasks may be key to their performance. (shrink)

The litmus test for the development of a metarepresentational Theory of Mind is the false belief task in which children have to represent how another agent misrepresents the world. Children typically start mastering this task around age four. Recently, however, a puzzling finding has emerged: Once children master the FB task, they begin to fail true belief control tasks. Pragmatic accounts assume that the TB task is pragmatically confusing because it poses a trivial (...) academic test question about a rational agent’s perspective; and we do not normally engage in such discourse about subjective mental perspectives unless there is at least the possibility of error or deviance. The lack of such an obvious possibility in the TB task implicates that there might be some hidden perspective difference and thus makes the task confusing. In the present study, we test the pragmatic account by administering to 3- to 6-year-olds TB and FB tasks and structurally analogous true and false sign tasks. The belief and sign tasks are matched in terms of representational and metarepresentational complexity; the crucial difference is that TS tasks do not implicate an alternative non-mental perspective and should thus be less pragmatically confusing than TB tasks. The results show parallel and correlated development in FB and FS tasks, replicate the puzzling performance pattern in TB tasks, but show no trace of this in TS tasks. Taken together, these results speak in favor of the pragmatic performance account. (shrink)

Recent studies reveal spontaneous implicit false-belief understanding in infancy. But is this early ability genuine theory-of-mind? Spontaneous tasks may allow early success by eliminating the selection-response bias thought to underlie later failure on standard tasks. However, using anticipatory eye gaze, we find the same bias in non-verbal tasks in both preschoolers and adults. We argue that the bias arises from theory-of-mind competence itself and takes the form of a rational prior to attribute one's own belief to others. Our (...) discussion then draws attention to a number of other inferential hallmarks of early belief-desire reasoning that together suggest it is the real deal. (shrink)

We introduce the Relational Responding Task (RRT) as a tool for capturing beliefs at the implicit level. Flemish participants were asked to respond as if they believed that Flemish people are more intelligent than immigrants (e.g., respond “true” to the statement “Flemish people are wiser than immigrants”) or to respond as if they believed that immigrants are more intelligent than Flemish people (e.g., respond “true” to the statement “Flemish people are dumber than immigrants”). The difference in performance (...) between these two tasks correlated with ratings of the extent to which participants explicitly endorsed the belief that Flemish people are more intelligent than immigrants and with questionnaire measures of subtle and blatant racism. The current study provides a first step towards validating RRT effects as a viable measure of implicit beliefs. (shrink)

For decades, philosophers and psychologists have assumed that children understand other people’s behavior on the basis of Belief Reasoning (BR) at latest by age 5 when they pass the false belief task. Furthermore, children’s use of BR in the true belief task has been regarded as being ontogenetically prior. Recent findings from developmental studies challenge this view and indicate that 4- to 5-year-old children make use of a reasoning strategy, which is cognitively less demanding (...) than BR and called perceptual access reasoning (PAR), in true belief tasks. I appeal to research on fluency to explain these findings. On my account, 4- to 5- year-old children understand other people’s behavior by means of BR if they experience cognitive strain (such as in false belief tasks) but they revert to simpler heuristics PAR when such an experience is missing (such as in true belief tasks). (shrink)

To investigate whether people can implicitly learn regularities in a social context, we developed a new implicit sequence learning task combining elements from classic false belief and serial reaction time tasks. Participants learned that protagonists were offered flowers at four locations. The protagonists' beliefs concerning the flowers were true or false, depending on their orientation, respectively, toward the scene or away from it. Unbeknown to the participants, there was a fixed belief-related sequence involving three dimensions. Participants (...) had to indicate as fast as possible where the flowers were located, or how many flowers were given according to the protagonists. Experiment 1 combined perceptual and motor processes, whereas Experiment 2 unconfounded the sequence and motor responses, allowing to investigate pure perceptual implicit learning. For reasons of comparison, two non-social conditions were created in Experiment 2 by replacing the protagonists with two non-social objects—colored cameras or shapes. Results revealed significant implicit sequence learning of all belief-related dimensions in Experiment 1, and of true-false belief orientation in Experiment 2, even without a motor confound. Importantly, there were faster reaction times and stronger sequence learning effects in the social than in the non-social conditions. The present findings demonstrate for the first time that people are able to implicitly learn belief-related sequences. (shrink)

John Gibbons presents an original account of epistemic normativity. Belief seems to come with a built-in set of standards or norms. One task is to say where these standards come from. But the more basic task is to say what those standards are. In some sense, beliefs are supposed to be true. Perhaps they’re supposed to constitute knowledge. And in some sense, they really ought to be reasonable. Which, if any of these is the fundamental norm (...) of belief? The book argues against the teleological or instrumentalist conception of rationality that sees being reasonable as a means to our more objective aims, either knowledge or truth. And it tries to explain both the norms of knowledge and of truth in terms of the fundamental norm, the one that tells you to be reasonable. The importance of being reasonable is not explained in terms of what it will get you, or what you think it will get you, or what it would get you if only things were different. The requirement to be reasonable comes from the very idea of what a genuine requirement is. That’s where the built-in standards governing belief come from, and that’s what they are. (shrink)

It is said that reality is stronger than any description we can make of it, and we must admit that atrocities, when we see them, go beyond any idea we may have had of them. On the other hand, when it is a question of values and beliefs, the contrary is true: reality is much less than its representation and the ideas it professes. This loss of energy is called indifference. Madame Bovary believed that in Naples happiness was as (...) firmly rooted as the orange trees and as strong as stone. The wisdom of nations knows that that is not the case: “We hope for Paradise but as late as possible,” affirms a Christian proverb. This indifference poses a problem or an entire series of problems (Georg Simmel's work could be considered from that point of view) unless it arises from all our errors, spontaneous or scientific, concerning man and society. I do not know where I read, or dreamed, the story of a young ethnologist who went to study a tribe that was said to believe that the world would come to an end if the priests let the sacred fire go out. He assumed that the priests were as anxious as though they controlled the detonator of an atomic bomb. Admitted into the temple of the fire, he saw the peaceful religious going about routine tasks. Reality is rarely emphatic. Rites and customs, for example, reflect the beliefs of a society. Paintings and sculptures show what the society believes or serve to make it believe what it sees. Sculpture in cathedrals were the bible of the illiterate. Is that really certain? We notice that most often people perform the rites without believing in their significance and, in any case, without interest in them, because the liturgy is not a means of communication giving information. They do not look at the images. (How many Parisians have looked at the Napoleonic bas-reliefs on the Vendôme column?) and if they tried to do so, they would not be able to decipher their iconography or even see them: placed too high, the images are often undecipherable. So it is necessary to sketch out a sociology of art in which the art work, far from conveying an iconography and an ideology, is a decor that we do not even look at, that we can hardly see and that is however very important. The study of all these insufficiencies would be a vast program. Here we will confine ourselves to art. (shrink)

It has been argued that infants possess a rich, sophisticated theory of mind that is only revealed with tasks based on spontaneous responses. A mature theory of mind implies the understanding that mental states are person-specific. Previous studies on infants’ understanding of motivational mental states such as goals and preferences have revealed that, by 9 months of age, infants do not generalize these motivational mental states across agents. However, it remains to be determined if infants also perceive epistemic states as (...) person-specific. Therefore, the goal of the present study was to use a switch agent paradigm with the classic false belief violation-of-expectation task. Results revealed that 16-month-old infants attributed true and false beliefs to a naïve agent—they did not perceive beliefs as person-specific. These findings indicate that infants’ understanding of beliefs is not as sophisticated as the rich mentalistic view suggests. (shrink)

I defend a Mengzian version of the Social Intelligence Hypothesis, according to which humans think about one another’s beliefs and desires—and reasons for action—in order to solve our social living problems through cooperation, rather than through competition and deception, as the more familiar Machiavellian version has it. Given this framework, and a corresponding view about the function of belief attribution, I argue that while apes need not attribute propositional attitudes to pass the “false belief task,” we should (...) not conclude that apes may be behaviorists. Rather, the Mengzian Social Intelligence Hypothesis perspective offers another interpretation of ape behavior, intermediate between behaviorist and propositional attitude schemas. I argue that the false belief task can be solved by individuals who have an agency schema which takes others to be minded beings who have goals, emotions, and perceptions, but who fail to consider propositional attitudes or reasons for behavior. I then argue that a true test of belief attribution in great apes would be one that shows they seek explanations in terms of reasons for behavior. However, no such test yet exists. (shrink)

Given the significant exculpatory power that ignorance has when it comes to moral, legal, and epistemic transgressions, it is important to have an accurate understanding of the concept of ignorance. According to the Standard View of factual ignorance, a person is ignorant that p whenever they do not know that p, while on the New View, a person is ignorant that p whenever they do not truly believe that p. On their own though, neither of these accounts explains how ignorance (...) can often be a degreed notion—how we can sometimes be slightly ignorant, quite ignorant, or completely ignorant that p. In this paper, I will argue that there is a route for advocates of the Standard View and the New View to accommodate the gradability of ignorance. On the view I defend, ‘ignorant’ picks out everyone that is ignorant to some degree, making it possible that ignorance can be both degreed and characterized as a lack of knowledge or true belief. Even though we can be ignorant to a greater or lesser extent, the only way to avoid being ignorant that p is to know or truly believe. (shrink)

Here’s a problem that any reliability theory must face, whether it’s one that holds that beliefs are justified just when they’re products of belief-forming mechanisms with the potential of having good records of yielding true beliefs, or one that holds that a belief meets the standards for knowledge if and only if its causal basis rules out any relevant chance of mistake. The problem is made evident when cast in probabilistic terms. Let r be S’s reason for (...) tokening the true belief that p under conditions c. Then, according to reliabilism, Sis justified in believing that p under c iff r makes it sufficiently probable that p, whileS knows that p iff the conditional probability that p on r and c is unity. But how do we specify the belief context c to be counted as epistemically relevant? As urged recently by John Pollock, on the face of it there seems to be no principled reason for excluding mention of the truth value of the proposition believed. As he says, ‘The only obvious way to construct an objective non-epistemic kind of definite probability is to make it conditional on everything that is true [at the belief’s tokening]’ ; and, as he notes, ‘one feature of the present circumstances is a characterization of the belief as a belief in [p ], and another feature is the truth value of [p]’. But if we allow both the belief token and its truth value membership in the relevant belief context, we then have the hopeless task of explaining how the probability of the token’s being true can be anything but one or zero, one if what is believed is true, and zero if it’s false. This in tum would commit reliabilism to the foolish doctrines that a belief’s truth is sufficient for knowledge, while no false belief is ever even justified. No wonder, then, that Pollock says ‘there is no way to construct an intelligible notion of reliability which does the job required by the reliabilist’. And he is surely right in this: Neither knowledge nor justification can be explained as the chance of a belief’s being true if the relevant belief context is required to mention both the belief tokened and its truth value. We would be engaged in a comparably pointless task were we to try to explain the likelihood of a wager’s being a good bet on a horse race when we had to include among the givens both which horse was picked and its finish, or were we to try to make sense of the assertion that a theory’s predictions have a good chance of being true when both what the theory predicts and its outcome had to be included among the givens. (shrink)

In Hume's True Scepticism, I offer a new interpretation of David Hume's epistemology and philosophy of mind as presented in A Treatise of Human Nature.1 I approach this task by developing what I take to be the first comprehensive2 investigation of Part 4 of Book 1. The arguments Hume offers there have frequently been addressed by the secondary literature in a piecemeal fashion, especially his account of personal identity and of our belief in the external world. But (...) I argue in HTS that they should be read as a sustained investigation of the human temptation to form philosophical systems. Consider its title: "Of the sceptical and other systems of philosophy". Hume, I suggest, is... (shrink)

continent. 1.4 (2011): 279—285. Concerning its Transitive Nature, the Conversion of Native Americans of Spanish Colonial California, Indoctrinated Catholicism, & the Creation There’s no direct archaeological evidence that Jesus ever existed. 1 I memorized the Act of Contrition. I don’t remember it now, except the beginning: Forgive me Father for I have sinned . . . This was in preparation for the Sacrament of Holy Reconciliation, where in a confessional I confessed my sins to Father Scott, who looked like Jesus, (...) at least in Western cultural representations of Jesus since the middle ages, and if Jesus put on a few pounds. Father Scott was long-haired, redheaded, bearded, chubby, and tall. When he left church with the procession of altar servers and Eucharistic ministers, yelling, “Sing a Good Song Unto the Lord,” he smiled, hands folded, and he gazed over his parishioners, and bounced along. For four months every year he lived among the Crow Nation in Montana, where towards the end of his tenure at Our Lady of Refuge, they adopted him as an honorary member of their tribe. * This is the prayer we chanted, holding hands, every night before dinner: Bless us oh Lord, for these our gifts, which we are about to receive, our bounty through Christ, our Lord, Amen. Then we all said, God bless the cook! When we were with my grandparents, Grandpa said, God bless Chicky, and Holly, and Harvey, and Boots—all the dead dogs. * My sister tells me that she sits next to a handsome man on a flight across the country. After chitchat, she withdraws her book. She’s reading Kevin Sampsell’s A Common Pornography . After a few moments, the handsome man also reads from his book—his leather-bound Bible. Sister thinks, Oh, Jesus—too bad. She falls asleep. Later, settled in Nashville, she opens her volume and out falls a Jesus-covered card that reads, You can still find God and Salvation! Because that handsome God-fearing young man saw that word— pornography . * I suppose Father Jim’s dark hair, beard, and glasses made me think doctoral-ly of him. He called while I was in the midst of a breakup, after I’d twice attempted suicide, and my mother was desperate for help. She somehow found and phoned him. And Jim, now years out of Our Lady of Refuge’s parish, twenty years since my baptism, years even since he’d left the priesthood and the Catholic faith, still made the effort to bring me back into the fold. He said, “Have you seen a priest?” I did not respond, as I was more shocked to hear his voice than anything, so I said, “How are you, Father Jim? Sorry, I guess I shouldn’t call you ‘Father.’” And I said, “Why did you leave the priesthood? Do you have a girlfriend?” He said that I should call him just “Jim.” He said, “Do you need someone to talk to?” I said, “Not really.” He said, “Call your mother; she’s worried about you.” That was the last time I talked to Father Jim. * Mother let me know just how disappointed Jesus was. I cried and cried, and said I was sorry. Into my hands she placed my missal, ordered forty Rosaries. She said next Saturday I would go to confession. I hated confession. Who wouldn’t? * I realize, of course, that this page is a kind of confessional. * The Kumeyaay, Ipai, Tipai, Chumash, Esselen, Rumsen—all Native Americans of Alta California—shared similarities in their religions. Southern Californian tribes made use of Datura, or jimpson weed, a hallucinogen, for religious rituals. In the creation, God made brother sky and sister earth. Brother and sister mated, and sister gave birth to all things on Earth, including people, but it was difficult to distinguish people from all other aspects of Earth because everything was alive: granite and obsidian, the Pacific and its waves, the San Diego and Los Angeles Rivers. Wiyot—a hero—was very powerful, born from lightning, the son of the Creator and a virgin. When Wiyot thought that human women’s legs were more beautiful than Frog’s, Frog became jealous and poisoned Wiyot. The dying Wiyot went to all the people’s villages, and he distributed his power among them. He said, “When I die, I should be cremated.” The people built the fire and funeral pyre. When the fire was ready, and the people about to place Wiyot’s body upon it, Coyote came and snatched away Wiyot’s heart. * My friend Nick told me once how he ate some jimpson weed and that he hallucinated for three days. His family took a road trip and, while driving over the Sierra Nevada mountains, he kept seeing dinosaurs roaming the open meadows and charging down snowy slopes. So it’s no wonder that Native Americans who ingested this plant would have developed religion. * Walking Castroville’s streets after school I got into fights but mostly watched other boys scrabbling on the asphalt. I went to Burger King for Whoppers. Me and my friends cussed. Antonio admonished me when I said, “damn,” while strutting a sidewalk alongside the church. He said, “Jaime”—pronounced Hi-May, which was what all the Mexicans called me—“you’re crazy, eh. Don’t cuss at the church.” He meant while at church, as in, within its vicinity. I said, “We’re not in church.” Once we’d crossed the street, Tony said, “Damn dude, you’re fuckin crazy!” * Blessed Father Fray Junípero Serra raised the Eucharistic goblet to his lips, and candlelight danced on the blood’s tiny waves. Incense clouded the church so completely that some of the Pame natives grew nauseous. So, too, felt Blessed Father Fray Junípero Serra later that night, as he bent over a ceramic bowl and vomited blood, not only the Lord’s, but his own, for poison had laced the sacred vessel into which he poured the sacrament. The physician tending to the sick prelate urged him to take the remedy he’d prepared. But Blessed Father Fray Junípero Serra refused, said that he would pray, for he had never taken any medicine in his life, and he never would. * The Chumash of El Valle de Los Osos called themselves the Stishni, separating themselves from Chumash of other regions, those varying tribes of the central California coast that spoke mutually unintelligible dialects of their Hokan language. This made learning their languages impossible for the Spanish friars, to say nothing of translating the Doctrina. Thus the priests baptized few natives, despite the help that the tribes offered the fledgling settlements in the form of meat and acorn meal, which the Spaniards found repugnant. Some from these cultures, feeling threatened by the newcomers, shot flaming arrows into the thatched roofs of the mission structures. And why wouldn’t they feel threatened when priests chastised them for performing, for example, their Coyote Dance, wherein a man donning a coyote-skin-and-skull costume dances while a singer sings his tale, which laments the human feces strewn imaginatively about the Earth? Coyote, meantime, tries to get an onlooker to lick his genitals, and finally engages in public sexual intercourse with a female tribe member or two, then ends the dance by defecating. Though the Franciscans called such forbidden acts devilry , the Chumash maintained their Datura cult religion, along with the enforced Christianity. For the Chumash, the Earth was made of two enormous snakes that caused earthquakes when they slithered past one another—a vast reptilian tectonics. In the 20th century, long after Blessed Father Fray Junípero Serra and his cohorts had died, when asked by an anthropologist about religious contradictions, conflating the Datura and Christian cults, a Chumash man replied, incredulous: “But these are two different religions.” * When Portolá ordered that if by March 19th, the feast day of St. Joseph, the San Antonio had not arrived in San Diego Bay to relieve them, the Sacred Expedition to Nueva California would be abandoned, Blessed Father Fray Junípero Serra prayed a novena for San José’s intercession. And lo, a lookout sighted the San Antonio ’s sails—what seemed to the priest a miracle—that very Saint’s feast day. Europeans would stay in California, and Blessed Father Fray Junípero Serra would continue to reap a great harvest of souls for the Lord. By the end of mission secularization in 1836—sixty-six years after the San Antonio rescued the Spaniards—Native American populations in California had declined by seventy-three percent. * When Peter the Aleut would not renounce his Eastern Orthodox faith the padre of San Francisco had a toe severed from each foot with each refusal, totaling ten. The native Ohlones employed in this gruesome task—their obsidian chiseled knives tearing through skin and grinding bone—continued as per their orders, and cut off also each of Peter’s fingers (equals a total of twenty refusals). They quartered the martyr, spilled his bowels, as if from bear attack, attack by a bear in the shape of a Catholic. * Blessed Father Fray Junípero Serra absolutely believed that the slow rate of conversion for the native people was due to the influence of the Devil, who had been outraged by the coming of the Catholics to California, this region that he had long held in his dominion. * In his reception speech for the Nobel Prize for Literature, John Steinbeck said, “Man himself has become our greatest hazard and our only hope. So that today, St. John the Apostle may well be paraphrased: In the end is the Word, and the Word is Man—and the Word is with Men.” * In 1602, when Sebastián Vizcaíno and his friars sang mass on Catalina Island, as many as a hundred Pimungans witnessed the rite, asking by signs what it was about. According to Vizcaíno’s records, the Californians marveled not a little at the idea of Heaven and at the image of Jesus crucified. * Vizcaíno was brought to a prairie on Santa Catalina Island where the Pimungans worshipped their sun god. Upon the prairie they had placed an icon, a headless figure with horns protruding from the body, a figure that Vizcaíno predictably described as a demon. The Pimungans urged Vizcaíno not to approach the image of their deity, but he ignored them. He placed his crucifix against the wooden figurine and prayed the Our Father. Vizcaíno told the natives that his prayer was from Heaven, and that their god was the Devil. Vizcaíno held out his crucifix, encouraging the Pimungans to touch it and receive Jesus. He pointed at the sky and indicated Heaven. The Pimungans worshipped a sun deity, so they were impressed with this white man and his description of his god, for their gods seemed to be one and the same. It’s no wonder then that Vizcaíno’s diary reports the natives being pleased with this exchange. “Surely,” the diary says, “they will be converted to our Holy Faith.” * The Miwok women wailed and scratched at their faces when their men consorted with Sir Francis Drake and the other Englishmen who had landed on California’s coast in the summer of 1579. “The blood streaming downe along their brests, besides despoiling the upper parts of their bodies of those single coverings . . .they would with furie cast themselves upon the ground . . . on hard stones, knobby hillocks, stocks of wood, and pricking bushes.” Drake and his men fell themselves to their knees in prayer, their eyes Heavenward, so that the natives might see they prayed to God and they too might worship God then their eyes that had been so blinded by the deceiver might be opened. * Father Fray Antonio de la Ascención—Carmelite friar in Vizcaíno’s party—writes that the Indians of California can “easily and with very little labor be taught our Holy Catholic faith, and that they would receive it well and lovingly.” He calls for two hundred older and honorable soldiers to ensure brotherhood during the conquest, so that peace and love—the best tools to pacify pagans—should reign. The religious, the friar says, should likewise be wise and loving to easily quell animosities between Spaniards and the heathen, and therefore avoid war. The Spaniards should bring with them trinkets—beads, mirrors, knives—to distribute amongst the gentiles, so that they might come to love the Christians, and see “that they are coming to their lands to give them that of which they bring, and not to take away the Indians’ possessions, and may understand that they are seeking the good of their souls.” No women are to accompany the conquest, says Father Fray Antonio, “to avoid offenses to God.” * In 1955 Wallace Stevens admitted himself to St. Francis Hospital in Hartford, Connecticut. There, it’s rumored he converted to Catholicism before dying of stomach cancer, exclaiming to his priest after the baptism, “Now I am in the fold.” Stevens’s late-career poems seem less cynical, more in awe of being and death (read “Metaphor as Degeneration” from The Auroras of Autumn ). He could have chosen from at least three secular hospitals in Hartford at the time. * I was reading Stevens’s Collected Poems when I joined eHarmony and listed that as my “currently reading” book among the “more than twelve” books a year that I would read. I fell in love with my wife when she said, “Are you sending your work out to literary journals?” Prior to this, the first girl I talked to on the phone, when I explained my doctoral exams, said, “So, you’re like, reading Stephen King and stuff?” When I said not exactly she responded defensively: “He must be doing something right, since he makes all that money.” * Mom walked me, my brother, and sister, through the Stations of the Cross. We did this on Ash Wednesdays, or whenever she thought we needed extra God after church. It might’ve happened before church, though that’s unlikely because we were always late. Anyway, it’s easiest to walk the Stations of the Cross when there’s no one else around. To walk the actual Stations means one goes to Jerusalem and walks the Via Dolorosa to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. So the Stations elsewhere—usually paintings, or low-relief sculptures upon church walls—serve as a kind of virtual Dolorosa. Mom held our hands and started from the rear of Our Lady of Refuge: the First Station. Mom said we should say a prayer at each Station and to think of all the pain Jesus went through so that we could go to Heaven. It was hard to keep thinking about that one thing for so long. My mind went to that Saturday’s little league game, to the donut and chocolate milk (our after-church reward from Castroville Bakery), and as I grew older I thought about girls. When you’re thirteen you can’t not think about the girl’s butt in the pew in front of yours as she kneels and stands to pray throughout mass. * It grew increasingly juvenile to lie awake at night daring myself to utter a simple sentence. Even if I said I didn’t believe in God, wouldn’t He know the truth? He was omniscient, like a narrator. Even the idea of Him as a him ceased making sense. Not only did this come with a budding realization of my paternalistic culture, but due to the simple question of why? If God was everything, everywhere, all knowing, then why would he be a man? There’s that question: If God is a man then God must have a penis, and if so, what for? * The Catholic Church incorporates some modern scientific research into its dogma concerning the formation of the Universe, Solar System, and Earth, as well as evolution. According to Catholic doctrine, in approximately the fifth millennia BCE, humans began to worship the one true God. Those humans were Adam and Eve, though the Church says humans had been around for thousands of years prior to Adam and Eve. The Church claims to be infallible. Every time the Church changes its doctrine it remains infallible. * One Catholic writer, Tom Meagher, writes that “Modernism[—]the idea that we come to our beliefs individually through emotional or personal experiences[—]has crept into our Catholic schools.” * Catholics believe that evil spirits, given power through Original Sin, can imbue ordinary inanimate objects of everyday use. Thus, such objects should be blessed in order to induce in them the desire to serve the good. Such objects are not limited to, but include, “new ships and boats, railways and trains, bridges, fountains, wells, cornmills, limekilns, smelting furnaces, telegrams, steam engines, and machines for providing electricity.” * In The Sound of Music Julie Andrews and Christopher Plummer sing together: “Nothing comes from nothing, nothing ever could...” * To explain competing theories on the very early universe, and pre-verse would be another book. What was the inflaton? Did (mem)branes collide, initiating the Big Bang, as opposed to Lemaître’s primordial atom, a singularity? Without a unified theory there’s gravity hanging out there, fucking everything up. We cannot make sense of the mechanics of the Planck Epoch—0-10-34 seconds into the Universe’s creation—named for Max Planck, who stumbled into the discovery of quantum mechanics in the early twentieth century. * My students often ask if I believe in God, since I espouse evolution, the Big Bang, Science, reject a strictly biblical or creationist theory of the Universe. I tell them that yes, I believe in God, though not the God that they imagine one must believe in. * When questioned regarding the rumor that, before his death, founder of quantum mechanics Max Planck had converted to Catholicism, he replied that he did not believe “in a personal God, let alone a Christian God.” * Physicist and Catholic priest George Lemaître, who formulated the theory and wrote the 1946 book The Primeval Atom Hypothesis , was made a household name by then-detractor Fred Hoyle, who pejoratively referred to the idea as a “Big Bang.” * Suicide is a mortal sin. To end one’s own life one must have despair, which is to lose hope, which is to lose faith, and to disbelieve in God. * Archaeology has uncovered graffiti in all of California’s missions—Indian pictographs inscribed into the adobe, covered with layers of whitewash. Native deities and depictions of cultural practices show that tribespeople never fully gave up their native traditions even after baptism and coming to the missions. There was something inside Native Californians that would never die. (shrink)

In contrast with the two dominant views in Theory of Mind development, the Perceptual Access Reasoning hypothesis of Fabricius and colleagues is that children don’t understand the mental state of belief until around 6 years of age. Evidence for this includes data that many children ages 4 and 5, who pass the standard 2-location false belief task, nonetheless fail the true belief task, and often fail a 3-location false belief task by choosing (...) the irrelevant option. These findings can be explained by the PAR hypothesis but pose challenges for the two dominant views. I argue against an alternate hypothesis which is proposed by Anika Fiebich in a recent paper. According to Fiebich, PAR is not a distinct transitional stage in children’s theory of mind development, but is a fast and frugal System 1 heuristic which fades once children become fluent in social reasoning. However, I point out a number of problems with Fiebich’s proposal and argue for the superiority of the PAR hypothesis. I also present five reasons to be skeptical about the findings of Perner and Horn which purportedly show that 4- and 5-year-olds can pass the 3-location false belief task when suitably modified. This is a further difficulty for Fiebich’s proposal, since she relies on these findings in her fluency theory. Finally, I sketch a dual systems theory of mind account based upon the PAR hypothesis which is different from Fiebich’s. (shrink)

A key factor that affects whether and at what age children can demonstrate an understanding of false belief and complement‐clause constructions is the type of task used (whether it is implicit/indirect or explicit/direct). In the current study, we investigate, in an implicit/indirect way, whether children understand that a story character's belief can be true or false, and whether this understanding affects children's choice of linguistic structure to describe the character's belief or to explain the character's (...) belief‐based action. We also measured children's understanding of false belief in explicit false‐belief tasks. English‐ and German‐speaking young 4‐ and 5‐year‐olds as well as English‐ and German‐speaking adult controls heard complement‐clause constructions in a story context where the belief mentioned in the complement clause (e.g., “He thinks thatshe's not feeling well”) turned out to be false, true, or was left open. After hearing the test question (“Why does he not play with her?”), all age groups were most likely to repeat the whole complement‐clause construction when the belief turned out to be false. That is, they tended to explicitly refer to the character's perspective and say “He thinks…” When the belief turned out to be true, participants often reverted to a simple clause (“She's not feeling well”). Furthermore, children with better short‐term memory were more likely to repeat the whole complement‐clause construction. However, children's performance in explicit false‐belief tasks showed no relation to their performance in our novel, more implicit/indirect, task. Whether or not the complement clause was introduced by athatcomplementizer only had a small effect on the German adults’ responses, where leaving out the complementizer also changes the word order of the complement clause. Overall, our results suggest that task characteristics and individual differences in short‐term memory affect children's ability to demonstrate false‐belief understanding and to express this understanding linguistically. (shrink)

Philosophers commonly define knowledge as justified true beliefs. A heated debate exists, however, about what makes a belief justified. In this article, we examine the question of belief justification from a psychological perspective, focusing on the subjective confidence in a belief that the person has just formed. Participants decided whether to accept or reject a proposition depicting a social belief, and indicated their confidence in their choice. The task was repeated six times, and choice (...) latency was measured. The results were analyzed within a Self-Consistency Model of subjective confidence. According to SCM, the decision to accept or reject a proposition is based on the on-line sampling of representations from a pool of representations associated with the proposition. Respondents behave like intuitive statisticians who infer the central tendency of a population based on a small sample. Confidence depends on the consistency with which the belief was supported across the sampled representations, and reflects the likelihood that a new sample will yield the same decision. The results supported the assumption of a commonly shared population of representations associated with each proposition. Based on this assumption, analyses of within-person consistency and cross-person consensus provided support for the model. As expected, choices that deviated from the person’s own modal judgment or from the consensually held judgment took relatively longer to form and were associated with relatively lower confidence, presumably because they were based on non-representative samples. The results were discussed in relation to major epistemological theories – foundationalism, coherentism and reliabilism. (shrink)

This article proposes that the foundations of Hegel’s contribution to social criticism are compatible with, and enriched by, his meta-theology. His social critique is grounded in his belief that normative ideas – and especially the idea of freedom – are necessarily experiential and historical. Often regarded as a recipe for an authoritarian reconciliation with the status quo, Hegel’s philosophy has been dismissed by some unsympathetic commentators from the left as inimical to the task of social criticism. Much of (...) the reason for this has been the opinion that his systematic approach to philosophy is one underpinned by either a highly unorthodox theism or, more commonly, pantheism. Even scholars who wish to defend Hegel as a social critic have tended to abandon or at least massively downplay his meta-theology. In this article, I argue that it is precisely the emphasis on his original theo-metaphysics that offers a powerful and relevant contribution to social criticism. Hegel then becomes an important contributor, from the tradition of social criticism, to the growing trend in academia and wider society of rethinking the relationship between the religious and the secular, known as post-secularism. The proposition at the centre of his system – that human history and society are necessary moments in the process of divine self-understanding – is not new. But the specifics of Hegel’s concept of God that I am proposing – and, moreover, their implications for his political thought – are new. I propose that Hegel was neither a theist nor a pantheist but, rather, a dialectical panentheist. According to panentheism, God is neither straightforwardly transcendent to nature and history nor immanently identifiable with nature and history, but rather is dynamically and dialectically immanent in the ongoing processes of self-transcendence that are nature and history. If such an interpretation of Hegel’s system is valid then the proposition that his political thought is an exercise in dialectical panentheistic theology is one that is worth making and defending because it has important things to say about his social critique. (shrink)

Edmund Gettier is Professor Emeritus at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. This short piece, published in 1963, seemed to many decisively to refute an otherwise attractive analysis of knowledge. It stimulated a renewed effort, still ongoing, to clarify exactly what knowledge comprises.

This paper reconstructs the origins of Gettier-style epistemology, highlighting the philosophical and methodological debates that led to its development in the 1960s. Though present-day epistemologists assume that the search for necessary and sufficient conditions for knowledge began with Gettier’s 1963 argument against the JTB-definition, I show that this research program can be traced back to British discussions about knowledge and analysis in the 1940s and 1950s. I discuss work of, among others, Bertrand Russell, G. E. Moore, A. J. Ayer, Norman (...) Malcom, and A. D. Woozley, showing how exchanges between different schools of analytic philosophy gave rise to new ideas about the nature of knowledge and analysis. Finally, I turn to Gettier's intellectual development and argue that his paper was influenced by some of these debates, suggesting that even his interpretation of Plato’s definition of knowledge can be traced back to discussions in this period. (shrink)

Reasoning about mental states and processes is important in various subareas of the legal domain. A trial lawyer might need to reason and the beliefs, reasoning and other mental states and processes of members of a jury; a police officer might need to reason about the conjectured beliefs and reasoning of perpetrators; a judge may need to consider a defendant's mental states and processes for the purposes of sentencing and so on. Further, the mental states in question may themselves be (...) about the mental states and processes of other people. Therefore, if AI systems are to assist with reasoning tasks in law, they may need to be able to reason about mental states and processes. Such reasoning is riddled with uncertainty, and this is true in particular in the legal domain. The article discusses how various different types of uncertainty arise, and shows how they greatly complicate the task of reasoning about mental states and processes. The article concentrates on the special case of states of belief and processes of reasoning, and sketches an implemented, prototype computer program (ATT-Meta) that copes with the various types of uncertainty in reasoning about beliefs and reasoning. In particular, the article outlines the system's facilities for handling conflict between different lines of argument, especially when these lie within the reasoning of different people. The system's approach is illustrated by application to a real-life mugging example. [NB: The date on the archived preprint avail via this Phil* page has an incorrect date, 2011, on it. The correct date is 2001.]. (shrink)

There is a traditional picture of belief, according to which someone's having a belief is that person's standing in a certain relation to an abstract object, a proposition. My dissertation examines the metaphysical demands that two problems for this picture of belief make on these abstract objects. The first problem comes to us from Frege's "On Sense and Reference," and the second concerns a certain sort of one's beliefs about oneself, which I call "indexical beliefs." ;Frege notes (...) that someone can believe that Hesperus is Hesperus without believing that Hesperus is Phosphorus. It is but a short step from Frege's observation to the claim that the sentence "A believes that Hesperus is Hesperus" could be true while "A believes that Hesperus is Phosphorus" is false. Quine has insisted that we cannot address this problem by taking either of these sentences to express a predication of the referent of both names, the planet Venus, as then both sentences would express the same predication of the same object, and this stands in evident tension with the fact that they can differ in truth value. In a recent response to Frege's problem, Mark Richard has taken exactly the route Quine has warned against. In my first chapter, I show that Richard's response is unsuccessful. I then consider the implications of the failure of his response on his proposed semantics for belief and the philosophical motivation he provides for it. I argue that his semantics for belief ascriptions stands in serious tension with its purported philosophical motivation. ;In the second and third chapters, I turn to the problem about indexical belief. The task of the second chapter is to identify this problem. To this end, I consider three of John Perry's arguments that the traditional picture of belief cannot accommodate indexical belief. I show that even if these arguments are sound, they give us no reason to think that the problem about indexical belief is in any way unique. I then suggest that there is a special problem about indexical belief, despite the failure of these three arguments to isolate it. Special difficulties attend an account of what it is to retain a tensed belief over time, and I suggest that the special problem about indexical belief is, in brief, a generalization of this problem about retention of tensed belief. ;In the third chapter, I raise the problem about indexical belief in a new way, as arising from a tension between several intuitively plausible claims about the relationship between beliefs and desires, on the one hand, and actions, on the other. This presentation of the problem brings out how the problem is special. I survey several solutions to this problem, including one due to Perry. I then argue that Perry's solution cannot characterize the specific kind of similarity between the beliefs of two different people who share an indexical belief. It allows too much to count as shared indexical belief. Thus Perry's solution inadequately addresses what I have suggested is the unique problem about indexical belief. Finally, I suggest that Frege's response to the problem I raise points the way towards an emendation of Perry's account that will enable it to suitably characterize the special way in which different people can share an indexical belief. (shrink)

We argue that the most plausible characterisation of the norm of truth—it is permissible to believe that p if and only if p is true—is unable to explain Transparency in doxastic deliberation, a task for which it is claimed to be equipped. In addition, the failure of the norm to do this work undermines the most plausible account of how the norm guides belief formation at all. Those attracted to normativism about belief for its perceived explanatory (...) credentials had better look elsewhere. (shrink)

The most important questions in life are questions about what we should do and what we should believe. The first kind of question has received considerable attention by normative ethicists, who search for a complete systematic account of right action. This book is about the second kind of question. Right Belief and True Belief starts by defining a new field of inquiry named 'normative epistemology' that mirrors normative ethics in searching for a systematic account of right (...) class='Hi'>belief. The book then lays out and defends a deeply truth-centric account of right belief called `truth-loving epistemic consequentialism.' Truth-loving epistemic consequentialists say that what we should believe (and what credences we should have) can be understood in terms of what conduces to us having the most accurate beliefs (credences). The view straight-forwardly vindicates the popular intuition that epistemic norms are about getting true beliefs and avoiding false beliefs, and it coheres well with how scientists, engineers, and statisticians think about what we should believe. Many epistemologists have rejected similar views in response to several persuasive objections, most famously including trade-off and counting-blades-of-grass objections. Right Belief and True Belief shows how a simple truth-based consequentialist account of epistemic norms can avoid these objections and argues that truth-loving epistemic consequentialism can undergird a general truth-centric approach to many questions in epistemology. (shrink)

Russian translation of Gettier E. L. Is Justified True Belief Knowledge? // Analysis, vol. 23, 1963. Translated by Lev Lamberov with kind permission of the author.

ABSTRACTIn this paper, I question the orthodox position that true belief is a fundamental epistemic value. I begin by raising a particularly epistemic version of the so-called “value problem of knowledge” in order to set up the basic explanandum and to motivate some of the claims to follow. In the second section, I take aim at what I call “bottom-up approaches” to this value problem, views that attempt to explain the added epistemic value of knowledge in terms of (...) its relation to a more fundamental value of true belief. The final section is a presentation of a value-theoretic alternative, one that explains the value problem presented in the first section while also doing justice to intuitions that may cause us to worry about bottom-up approaches. In short, knowledge and not mere true belief is a fundamental epistemic value as it is the constitutive goal of propositional inquiry. (shrink)

This paper assumes that success on false-belief tasks requires a kind of folk psychological know-how, i.e. gradable knowledge how to perform skilful social cognitive acts. Following Ryle, it argues the folk psychological know-how required for success on a false-belief task cannot be reduced to conceptual knowledge as this would lead to an infinite regress. Within the skilled performance literature, Intellectualists have attempted to solve Ryle’s regress by appealing to automatic mechanisms similar in kind to some Theory-of-Mind explanations (...) of folk psychology. Exploring this similarity, the paper examines the epistemic commitments of two recent pragmatic Theory-of-Mind accounts of cross-cultural false-belief task data. By drawing on Fridland’s argument against Intellectualist explanations of know-how, it is argued that neither of these pragmatic Theory-of-Mind accounts can adequately explain gradable folk psychological know-how and escape Ryle’s infinite regress objection if these accounts are indeed committed to Intellectualism. The paper ends by supplementing Fenici’s account with the enactive framework to both bolster Fenici’s explanation of false-belief task know-how and avoid Ryle’s regress objection. (shrink)

In this paper, I respond to Pierre Le Morvan’s critique of my thesis that ignorance is lack of true belief rather than absence of knowledge. I argue that the distinction between dispositional and non-dispositional accounts of belief, as I made it in a previous paper, is correct as it stands. Also, I criticize the viability and the importance of Le Morvan’s distinction between propositional and factive ignorance. Finally, I provide two arguments in favor of the thesis that (...) ignorance is lack of true belief rather than absence of knowledge. (shrink)

After almost a decade, the discussion initiated by Professor Edmund Gettier's provocative paper “Is Justified True Belief Knowledge?” continues. The most recent contribution to this discussion is Professor John Turk Saunders' attempt to counter Professor Irving Thalberg's claim that a principle that Gettier employs in reaching his notorious negative conclusion is unjustified. I am moved to add to the discussion at this time because it seems to me that the principle in question is unjustified. But more fundamentally, Gettier's (...) argument fails because the putative counter-examples on which it rests fail to make their intended point. I shall discuss these claims in turn.The epistemic principle which I consider unjustified is the one which Thalberg has called the Principle of Deducibility for Justification and which Gettier formulates as follows: “for any proposition P, if S is justified in believing P, and P entails Q, and S deduces Q from P and accepts Q as a result of this deduction, then S is justified in believing Q.”. (shrink)

Is knowledge justified true belief? Most philosophers believe that the answer is clearly ‘no’, as demonstrated by Gettier cases. But Gettier cases don’t obviously refute the traditional view that knowledge is justified true belief (JTB). There are ways of resisting Gettier cases, at least one of which is partly successful. Nevertheless, when properly understood, Gettier cases point to a flaw in JTB, though it takes some work to appreciate just what it is. The nature of the (...) flaw helps us better understand the nature of knowledge and epistemic justification. I propose a crucial improvement to the traditional view, relying on an intuitive and independently plausible metaphysical distinction pertaining to the manifestation of intellectual powers, which supplements the traditional components of justification, truth and belief. (shrink)

The use of new paradigms of false belief tasks allowed to reduce the age of children who pass the test from the previous 4 years in the standard version to only 15 months or even a striking 6 months in the nonverbal modification. These results are often taken as evidence that infants already possess an—at least implicit—theory of mind. We criticize this inferential leap on the grounds that inferring a ToM from the predictive success on a false belief (...) task requires to assume as premise that a belief reasoning is a necessary condition for correct action prediction. It is argued that the FBT does not satisfactorily constrain the predictive means, leaving room for the use of belief-independent inferences. These heuristics, when applied to the FBT, can achieve the same predictive success of a belief-based inference because information provided by the test stimulus allows the recognition of particular situations that can be subsumed by their ‘laws’. Instead of solving this issue by designing a single experimentum crucis that would render unfeasible the use of non-representational inferences, we suggest the application of a set of tests in which, although individually they can support inferences dissociated from a ToM, only an inference that makes use of false beliefs is able to correctly predict all the outcomes. (shrink)

This paper argues against the almost universally held view that truth is an instrumentally valuable property of beliefs. For truth to be instrumentally valuable in the way usually supposed, it must play a causal role in the satisfaction of our desires. As it happens, truth can play no such role, because it is screened off from causal relevance by some of the truth-like properties first discussed by Stephen Stich. Because it is not causally relevant to the success of our actions, (...) truth is not instrumentally valuable in the way usually supposed. (shrink)

The recently offered, Purported counter-Examples to justified, True belief analyses of knowledge are looked at with some care and all found to be either incoherent or inconclusive. It is argued that justified, True belief analyses are based on sound insight into the concept of knowledge. The distinction between having been justified in claiming to know something and actually having known it is used in an effort to get the discussion of knowledge back on the right track.

The Proper Functionist account of warrant – like many otherexternalist accounts – is vulnerable to certain Gettier-style counterexamples involving accidentally true beliefs. In this paper, I briefly survey the development of the account, noting the way it was altered in response to such counterexamples. I then argue that Alvin Plantinga's latest amendment to the account is flawed insofar as it rules out cases of true beliefs which do intuitively strike us as knowledge, and that a conjecture recently put (...) forward by Thomas Crisp is also defective. I conclude by presenting my own suggestion as to how the account can be made less vulnerable to counterexamples involving accidentally true beliefs. Although I stay within the confines of Proper Functionism here, I think that my proposal (modulo a few details) could be attached to other externalist accounts of warrant as well. -/- . (shrink)

This paper examines a passage in the Theaetetus where Plato distinguishes knowledge from true belief by appealing to the example of a jury hearing a case. While the jurors may have true belief, Socrates puts forward two reasons why they cannot achieve knowledge. The reasons for this nescience have typically been taken to be in tension with each other . This paper proposes a solution to the putative difficulty by arguing that what links the two cases (...) of nescience is that in neither case do the jurors act from an epistemic virtue and that doing so is a necessary condition of knowledge. Appreciating that it is a necessary condition of knowledge that it be the result of an epistemic agent's agency in a distinctive way provides a satisfying solution to the difficulty Burnyeat detected and also does justice to an otherwise neglected aspect of Plato's epistemology: his talk of cognitive capacities and virtues and his focus on what it is that is active and passive in epistemic processes. (shrink)

Suppose that knowledge and ignorance are complements in the sense of being mutually exclusive: for person S and fact p, either S knows that p or is ignorant that p. Understood in this way, ignorance amounts to a lack or absence of knowledge: S is ignorant that p if and only if it is not the case that S knows that p. Let us call the thesis that knowledge and ignorance are opposites the “Complement Thesis”. In this article, I discuss (...) its deployment in an ingenious new argument advanced by Alvin Goldman and Erik Olsson (2009) which, if sound, establishes that there is a kind of knowledge that amounts to nothing more than true belief. I rebut their argument and in doing so delineate some important epistemological lessons brought to light by the contrast between ignorance and knowledge. (shrink)

The poor performances of typically developing children younger than 4 in the first-order false-belief task “Maxi and the chocolate” is analyzed from the perspective of conversational pragmatics. An ambiguous question asked by an adult experimenter (perceived as a teacher) can receive different interpretations based on a search for relevance, by which children according to their age attribute different intentions to the questioner, within the limits of their own meta-cognitive knowledge. The adult experimenter tells the child the following story (...) of object-transfer: “Maxi puts his chocolate into the green cupboard before going out to play. In his absence, his mother moves the chocolate from the green cupboard to the blue one.” The child must then predict where Maxi will pick up the chocolate when he returns. To the child, the question from an adult (a knowledgeable person) may seem surprising and can be understood as a question of his own knowledge of the world, rather than on Maxi's mental representations. In our study, without any modification of the initial task, we disambiguate the context of the question by (1) replacing the adult experimenter with a humanoid robot presented as “ignorant” and “slow” but trying to learn and (2) placing the child in the role of a “mentor” (the knowledgeable person). Sixty-two typical children of 3 years-old completed the first-order false belief task “Maxi and the chocolate,” either with a human or with a robot. Results revealed a significantly higher success rate in the robot condition than in the human condition. Thus, young children seem to fail because of the pragmatic difficulty of the first-order task, which causes a difference of interpretation between the young child and the experimenter. (shrink)

Jill de Villiers has argued that children's mastery of sentential complements plays a crucial role in enabling them to succeed at false-belief tasks. Josef Perner has disputed that and has argued that mastery of false-belief tasks requires an understanding of the multiplicity of perspectives. This paper attempts to resolve the debate by explicating attributions of desires and beliefs as extensions of the linguistic practices of making commands and assertions, respectively. In terms of these linguistic practices one can explain (...) why desire-talk will precede belief-talk and why even older children will have difficulty attributing incompatible desires. (shrink)

Distinguishing sense and referent in true belief that is not knowledge and true belief that is knowledge implies scepticism as regards facts. That is because it falsely reduces knowledge to mere true belief To remove the scepticism, it might be held that sense and referent are the same in both. But this over-correction makes the opposite mistake of reducing mere true belief to knowledge. It also implies either assimilating false belief to (...) true belief or saying, counterintuitively, that the sense of a belief varies with the truth-value of the belief The way out is to take the middle path of distinguishing sense and referent in true belief that is not knowledge and identifying sense and referent in true belief that is knowledge. (shrink)

Distinguishing sense and referent in true belief that is not knowledge and true belief that is knowledge implies scepticism as regards facts. That is because it falsely reduces knowledge to mere true belief To remove the scepticism, it might be held that sense and referent are the same in both. But this over-correction makes the opposite mistake of reducing mere true belief to knowledge. It also implies either assimilating false belief to (...) true belief or saying, counterintuitively, that the sense of a belief varies with the truth-value of the belief The way out is to take the middle path of distinguishing sense and referent in true belief that is not knowledge and identifying sense and referent in true belief that is knowledge. (shrink)

In recent years Russell´s view that there are singular propositions, namely propositions that contain the individuals they are about, has gained followers. As a response to a number of puzzles about attitude ascriptions several Russellians (as I will call those who accept the view that proper names and indexicals only contribute their referents to the propositions expressed by the sentences in which they occur), including David Kaplan and Nathan Salmon, have drawn a distinction between what proposition is believed and how (...) it is believed.1 While it is generally agreed upon among Russellians that this distinction needs to be drawn there is considerable disagreement as to what exactly the distinction amounts to and what role the what and the how should play. The most plausible option seems to be to not assign a semantic value to the cognitive role played by the name or indexical in the sentence assented to. But recently Mark Richard2 has attempted to make the cognitive role affect truth values by building it into the truth conditions of belief reports.3 I will argue that Richard’s attempt fails to satisfy our pretheoretical intuitions about the sharing of beliefs. Furthermore, and more surprisingly, I will argue that Richard’s theory makes it virtually impossible for us to judge whether or not most belief reports are true or false, since doing so would involve what I call RAM probing, which would require viewing elements that are essentially private. (shrink)

In recent years Russell’s view that there are singular propositions, namely propositions that contain the individuals they are about, has gained followers. As a response to a number of puzzles about attitude ascriptions several Russellians (as I will call those who accept the view that proper names and indexicals only contribute their referents to the propositions expressed by the sentences in which they occur), including David Kaplan and Nathan Salmon, have drawn a distinction between what proposition is believed and how (...) it is believed. While it is generally agreed upon among Russellians that this distinction needs to be drawn there is considerable disagreement as to what exactly the distinction amounts to and what role the what and the how should play. The most plausible option seems to be to not assign a semantic value to the cognitive role played by the name or indexical in the sentence assented to. But recently Mark Richard has attempted to make the cognitive role affect truth values by building it into the truth conditions of belief reports. I will argue that Richard’s attempt fails to satisfy our pretheoretical intuitions about the sharing of beliefs. Furthermore, and more surprisingly, I will argue that Richard’s theory makes it virtually impossible for us to judge whether or not most belief reports are true or faIse, since doing so would involve what I call RAM probing, which would require viewing elements that are essentially private. (shrink)

The paper begins by reviewing two problems for fallibilism: the lottery problem, or the problem of explaining why fallible evidence, though otherwise excellent, is not enough to know that one will lose the lottery, and Gettier problems. It is then argued that both problems can be resolved if we note an important illocutionary force of knowledge attributions: namely, that when we attribute knowledge to someone we mean to give the person credit for getting things right. Alternatively, to say that a (...) person knows is to say that she got things right due to her own abilities, efforts and actions, rather than due to dumb luck, or blind chance, or something else. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Drawing inspiration from Fred Dretske, L. S. Carrier, John A. Barker, and Robert Nozick, we develop a tracking analysis of knowing according to which a true belief constitutes knowledge if and only if it is based on reasons that are sensitive to the fact that makes it true, that is, reasons that wouldn’t obtain if the belief weren’t true. We show that our sensitivity analysis handles numerous Gettier-type cases and lottery problems, blocks pathways leading (...) to skepticism, and validates the epistemic closure thesis that correct inferences from known premises yield knowledge of the conclusions. We discuss the plausible views of Ted Warfield and Branden Fitelson regarding cases of knowledge acquired via inference from false premises, and we show how our sensitivity analysis can account for such cases. We present arguments designed to discredit putative counterexamples to sensitivity analyses recently proffered by Tristan Haze, John Williams and Neil Sinhababu, which involve true statements made by untrustworthy informants and strange clocks that sometimes display the correct time while running backwards. Finally, we show that in virtue of employing the paradox-free subjunctive conditionals codified by Relevance Logic theorists instead of the paradox-laden subjunctive conditionals codified by Robert Stalnaker and David Lewis. (shrink)