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| Epistemic Virtue and Value | | |
Epistemic Virtue and Value
June 1st - June 6th, 2009
Monday, June 1st
(All talks will take place in the combined room Grajska-Triglavska)
9:45-10:00 Welcoming Remarks
10:00-11:00 Christian Piller, “Aptness and Epistemic Normativity”
11:00-12:00 Adam Morton, “Paradoxical Virtues”
12:00-2:00
2:00-3:00 Klemens Kappel, “Epistemic Expressivism and the Value of Knowledge”
3:00-4:00 Sarah Wright, “Internalist Virtues and Knowledge”
4:00-4:15
4:15-5:15 Matjaž Potrè & Terry Horgan, “The Epistemic Relevance of Morphological Content”
5:15-6:15 Wayne Riggs, “What is Epistemic Value, Anyway?”
Tuesday, June 2nd
9:00-10:00
Tim Chappell, “On not proportioning your belief to the evidence,” (Grajska)
Mikael Janvid, “The Value of Lesser Goods: The Epistemic Value of Entitlement,” (Triglavska)
10:00-11:00
Uriah Kriegel, “Two Notions of Mental Representation” (Grajska)
Baron Reed, “Who Knows?” (Triglavska)
11:00-11:15
11:15-12:15 Jennifer Lackey, “Acting on Knowledge” (Grajska-Triglavska)
12:15-2:15
2:15-3:05 Anne Baril, “A new approach to the problem of significant truths”, (Grajska-Triglavska)
3:05-3:55 Nenad Mišèeviæ, “Reflective Virtue”
3:55-4:45 Marko Weilguny, “The Bliss of Ignorance?” (Grajska-Triglavska)
4:45-5:00
5:00-6:00 Valerie Tiberius, “Wisdom and Wide Reflective Equilibrium” (Grajska-Triglavska)
Wednesday, June 3rd
9:00-10:00
Igal Kvart, “Cognitive Norms, Cognitive Virtues and Embedded Knowledge” (Grajska)
Michael Brady, “Curiosity and Intellectual Virtue” (Triglavska)
10:05-11:05
Friderik Klampfer, “Luck, Moral and Epistemic” (Grajska)
Boran Bercic, “Epistemic Luck and the Lottery Paradox” (Triglavska)
11:10-12:10
Jason Kawall, “Testimony, Epistemic Egoism, and Epistemic Success” (Grajska)
Declan Smithies, “Moore’s Paradox and the Accessibility of Justification” (Triglavska)
Thursday, June 4th
9:00-10:00
Mark Kaplan, “Why We Care What We Know and Why That Matters” (Jezerska)
Peter Graham, “Epistemic Virtues: Dispositions or Design?” (Riklijeva)
10:00-11:00
Matthew Chrisman, “Why Knowledge is Better” (Jezerska)
Stephen Grimm, “Knowledge, Practical Interests, and Rising Tides” (Riklijeva)
11:00-11:15
11:15-12:15 Alan Millar, “What is it that Cognitive Competences are Competences at Doing?” (Jezerska)
12:15-2:15
2:15-3:15
Jack Lyons, “Perception and Virtue Reliabilism” (Jezerska)
Erik Olsson, “The Value of Reliabilist Knowledge: Repeatability and Stability” (Riklijeva)
3:15-4:15
Daniel Breyer, “Reflective Luck and Belief Ownership” (Riklijeva)
4:15-4:30
4:30-5:30 Ernest Sosa, “Intuitions: What Are They? What Do They Prove?” (Jezerska)
Friday, June 5th
(All talks will take place in the combined room Grajska-Triglavska)
9:00-10:00 Sandford Goldberg, “The Social Virtues: Two Accounts”
10:00-11:00 Christopher Lepock, “Metacognition and Intellectual Virtue”
11:00-11:15
11:15-12:15 Juan Comesana, “Proportional Weight and Total Evidence in the Epistemology of Disagreement”
12:15-2:15
2:15-3:15 Danilo Šuster, “Circles of Argumentation, Circles of Justification”
3:15-4:15 J. Adam Carter, “Sosa on Skepticism, Circularity and Moore’s Proof”
4:15-4:30
4:30-5:30 Terry Horgan & David Henderson, “Epistemic Superpositions and Easy Knowledge”
Saturday, June 6th
(All talks will take place in Jezerska)
9:00-10:00 Michael Ridge, “Getting Lost on the Road to Larissa”
10:05-11:05 Guy Axtell, “Epistemic Value and Diachronic Rationality”
11:10-12:10 Joshua Orozco, “I Can Trust You Now, But Not Later”
12:15-12:30 Closing Remarks
| Abstracts | | | Guy Axtell // Radford University, USA <guya AT unr.edu>
Epistemic Value and Diachronic Rationality
This
paper challenges and rebuts attempts by internalist evidentialists to
treat only “synchronic rationality” as properly epistemic, and
“diachronic rationality” as ‘merely’ moral or pragmatic. From the
evidentialist standpoint advocated by E. Conee and R. Feldman, it is
solely the relationship, at a given time, between one’s evidence and a
target proposition that is of epistemic importance and the source of
properly epistemic norms. Such accounts are quintessentially
belief-based and leave little or no central epistemic role for
inquiry-guiding intellectual virtues or active choices among
problem-solving strategies. I examine and reject these authors’ account
of epistemic normativity and what it means to maximize epistemic value.
Inquiry-focused versions of virtue epistemology, by contrast with
internalist evidentialism, allow us to recognize the value of
diachronic epistemic rationality, and the needed balance that this
brings to an account of the nature and sources of epistemic value. They
allow recognition that an agent’s reliability, synchronic epistemic
rationality, and diachronic epistemic rationality are each
indispensable sources of epistemic value. I argue that virtue
responsibilism of the inquiry pragmatist sort has important further
benefits with respect to understanding the source of norms to inform a
philosophically sound “ethics of belief” and “epistemology of peer
disagreement”: Whereas the account of Conee and Feldman that derives
epistemic obligations only from consideration of whether an agent
continuously maximizes synchronic epistemic rationality will tend to
undermine a) the possibility of reasonable disagreement among
evidence-sharing epistemic peers, and b) the thesis of “reasonable
pluralism” among peers/citizens that is crucial to John Rawls and to
theories of deliberative democracy (for example, Gutmann, Misak,
Talisse), the inquiry pragmatist approach I argue is well-able to
support both of these important and advantageous theses.
Anne Baril // University of Arizona, USA <baril AT email.arizona.edu> //(grad student)
A new approach to the problem of significant truths
Appealing
to apparently non-epistemic considerations to solve problems in
epistemology may seem…well, unappealing. Yet if we allow such appeals
we make possible some very natural and plausible solutions to some
stubborn problems in epistemology. In this talk I explain one such
solution to one such problem. I propose a eudaimonist solution to the
problem of significant truths: the problem of explaining why some
truths are more significant than others. I argue that an appeal to a
conception of human flourishing can be part of a solution to the
problem of significant truths without an objectionable reduction of the
epistemic to the non-epistemic.
Boran Berèiæ // University of Rijeka, Croatia <boran.bercic AT ri.t-com.hr>
Epistemic Luck and Lottery Paradox
If
belief is true by chance it is not knowledge. If justified belief is
true by chance it is still not knowledge. (A guy beliefs it is 22oC
because thermostat shows 22oC, it is 22oC, but thermostat is blocked at
22oC. A guy beliefs he has 1/2 tank of gas because fuel indicator shows
1/2 tank, he has half tank of gas, but fuel indicator is blocked at
1/2.) However, even cases of genuine knowledge contain element of luck.
(Another guy beliefs it is 22oC because thermostat shows 22oC, it is
22oC, and thermostat is fully operational. Another guy beliefs he has
1/2 tank of gas because fuel indicator shows 1/2 tank, he has half tank
of gas, and fuel indicator is fully operational.) What is the
difference between fist two guys and other two? First two guys do not
know, while other two guys do know! How is that possible? Internally
there is no difference between them, the epistemically relevant
difference is external. First two guys have bad epistemic luck, while
second two guys have good epistemic luck. Although there are several
different senses of epistemic luck, we can define relevant sense of
epistemic luck in terms of epistemic duties: A subject has good
epistemic luck iff after (because) he performs all of his epistemic
duties to find out whether p, he knows that p. A subject has bad
epistemic luck iff after (because) he performs all of his epistemic
duties to find out whether p, he still does not know that p. In the
Lottery case: first guy knows that his ticket will not win, second guy
knows that his ticket will not win, ... nth guy does not know that his
ticket will not win because his ticket will win. The nth guy has bad
epistemic luck, but he compensates it with good financial luck. This
shows that even when we know, we cannot know that we know.
Michael Brady // University of Glasgow, UK <m.brady AT philosophy.arts.gla.ac.uk>
Curiosity and Intellectual Virtue
Sometimes
we desire to know the truth on some question or issue, not for any
ulterior purpose, but simply for the sake of knowing the truth. This is
a desire that is grounded in our intellectual interest or curiosity. If
we think (following Hurka) that virtue involves having a favourable
attitude towards what is intrinsically valuable, or (following Adams)
that virtue involves being for what is intrinsically good, then we
might regard curiosity as an intellectual virtue. For being curious
about the truth for its own sake would seem to be a way in which we
favour, or are for, something of intrinsic value.
In this
paper I’ll raise doubts about this purported connection between
intellectual curiosity and intellectual virtue, on the grounds that
what rightly attracts our interest or curiosity can diverge from what
we rightly find epistemically important, significant, or valuable. In
order to make this argument, I claim first that curiosity is an
emotional response, and therefore involves a certain pattern of
appraisal. I then propose that the appraisal structure of curiosity or
interest does not involve an appraisal of importance or significance,
which suggests that we are often curious about or interested in
acquiring truths that we don’t regard as epistemically valuable. If so,
however, intellectual curiosity does not necessarily involve loving the
good. If the general account of virtue proposed by Hurka and Adams is
correct, it follows that intellectual curiosity is not necessarily a
virtue.
Daniel Breyer // Illinois State University, USA <dbreyer AT ilstu.edu>
Reflective Luck and Belief Ownership
A
belief is reflectively lucky if it is a matter of luck that the belief
is true, given what a subject is reflectively aware of. As
epistemologists have discovered, reflective luck is difficult (if not
impossible) to eliminate. Yet, it seems desirable to eliminate it, as
various thought-experiments purport to show. As a result, it seems
that we face an epistemic crisis, what Duncan Pritchard calls epistemic
angst: although we recognize that reflective luck cannot be
eliminated, we nonetheless yearn to eliminate it. My paper argues that
we need not feel any anxiety over reflective luck, because the
arguments that purport to show that we must eliminate it don’t
obviously motivate that conclusion. To show this, I first distinguish
between two kinds of reflective luck arguments in the literature:
local arguments and global arguments. I then show that local arguments
are best interpreted as demanding, not that one be reflectively aware
of the reliability of the sources of one’s beliefs, but that one’s
beliefs be attributable to one as one’s own. Next, I argue that global
reflective luck arguments make illegitimate demands on epistemologists
and knowers, because they require that knowers be ultimately answerable
for their beliefs. In the end, then, my view is that what we should
really be interested in is epistemic attributability, rather than
ultimate answerability. This is an important shift in focus, because
it allows epistemologists to ignore many traditional problems
(including some challenging skeptical puzzles) and to spend their
energy, instead, exploring neglected dimensions of cognitive agency and
epistemic normativity.
J. Adam Carter // University of Edinburgh, UK //(grad student)
Sosa on Skepticism, Circularity and Moore's Proof
Tim Chappell // The Open University Ethics Centre, UK <t.chappell AT open.ac.uk>
On not proportioning your belief to the evidence
Evidentialism
says, following David Hume, that "a wise man proportions his belief to
the evidence": our level of confidence in any proposition should be
proportionate the strength of support that that proposition gets from
the evidence for it. Supporters of evidentialism have suggested
numerous ways of spelling out the ideas of "levels of confidence",
"proportionality", "support", and "evidence", making evidentialism a
sophisticated family including a very wide range of possible positions.
Critics of evidentialism have pointed to:
1. the possibility of
forgetting the evidence that originally justified one's belief; 2. the
impossibility of choosing to believe (even to believe in proportion to
the evidence); 3. the bad prudential consequences of some
well-evidenced beliefs;
4. our natural tendency to adopt the
epistemic attitude, to some propositions, of default belief in them-we
believe them unless we find (decisive) evidence against them, not
because we have (decisive) evidence for them; 5. the obvious problems
involved in trying to 'operationalise' epistemology by giving any kind
of numerical or Bayesian account, of the kind favoured by some though
not all evidentialists, of what it is to proportion belief to evidence,
or to try to measure degrees of credence/ confidence or weight/
quantity of evidence.
I shall have something to say about how we
should define evidentialism (briefly: the issue is verbal; what matters
is to understand the distinctions that are being made), and about these
critical lines of thought (briefly: some of them refute no worthwhile
form of evidentialism, and none of them refutes every form of
evidentialism-not that this latter failure matters too much, since as I
say, we shouldn't get too obsessed with the word 'evidentialism').
I
will then focus will be on a different kind of objection to
evidentialism, of which, it seems to me, not enough has been made in
the literature. One very good reason for not proportioning our belief
to the evidence in any very direct way comes from our research
investment in particular epistemic programmes. Suppose we have a
programme of inquiry up and running, which we set up for good reasons
and at substantial cost (sometimes literal financial cost). In such a
case, it seems clear that we are entitled (both prudentially and
epistemically) to stick with that programme even when the weight of the
evidence begins to turn against it. Of course there is a tipping-point:
we are not epistemically entitled to persist with an evidentially
embattled research programme indefinitely. But we are entitled to
persist with it for a while. (If epistemology in general can't be
operationalised, as it surely can't, there probably aren't any clear
rules about how long this 'while' should be.) And this alone is enough
to raise a serious doubt about the basic idea of evidentialism, the
idea of proportioning our belief directly to the evidence. If
evidentialism is a theory that leaves out the importance of research
investment in justifying our beliefs or non-beliefs, then it misses
something of crucial importance in normative epistemology.
The
application of this point about the importance of research investment
to scientific knowledge-claims is obvious, and I shall spell it out a
little. What may be less obvious is that the point can also be made
relevant to other sorts of knowledge-claims: historical, for instance,
and-more controversially!-religious. Towards the end of my paper I
shall apply the point so as to propose what I take to be a significant
and philosophically interesting conception of religious faith. On this
the religious believer is (often) evidentially embattled, but sticks to
his beliefs, not because he is epistemically obtuse or irresponsible,
but because he has an epistemically validated research investment in a
certain world-view, and rightly takes the counter-evidence now coming
his way to be insufficient to push him past the 'tipping point' at
which epistemic rationality says that he should write off that research
investment. This kind of persistence (or even, to paraphrase C.S.Lewis,
obstinacy in belief is not necessarily an epistemic vice in the
religious believer, any more than it is in the research scientist. Such
faith in your research investment is clearly not blind or unquestioning
faith; but it is not necessarily belief proportionate to the evidence,
either.
Matthew Chrisman // University of Edinburgh, UK <matthew.chrisman AT ed.ac.uk>
Why Knowledge is Better
Many
people think that knowledge is better than mere true belief. Two
strategies for explaining this can be called "action-guiding accounts"
and "achievement accounts". The action-guiding account accounts hold,
roughly, that that knowledge can better guide our action. The goal of
believing may be truth, but this goal is embedded within our more
general practical goals, and often it seems that believing
knowledgeably will better serve our practical ends over the long run
than having a mere true belief. By contrast, the achievement accounts
hold, roughly, the following three ideas. (a) While some things are
merely instrumentally valuable, others are finally valuable. (b) One
of the things that is finally valuable is achievements. (c) Knowledge
is a cognitive kind of achievement. These explain why knowledge is
better than mere true belief: knowledge, unlike mere true belief, has a
special kind of value – final value – since it is an achievement, and
achievements have final value. I think both accounts are
unsuccessful. In this paper, I argue against them and seek an
alternative.
Juan Comesana // University of Wisconsin-Madison, USA < jmcomesana AT wisc.edu>
Proportional Weight and Total Evidence in the Epistemology of Disagreement
How
should you react to disagreement with another subject? According to
what I shall call the "Proportional Weight" view, you should change
your opinion in accordance with your previous degree of trust in that
subject. According to what I shall call the "Total Evidence" view, you
should, in addition, take into account the nature of the evidence on
the basis of which you formed your opinion prior to the disagreement.
In this paper I argue that the Proportional Weight view and the Total
Evidence view, far from being competitors, are equivalent.
Sandford Goldberg // Northwestern University, USA <s-goldberg AT northwestern.edu>
The Social Virtues: Two Accounts
The
topic of this paper is the social (epistemic) virtues – those virtues
bound up with our attempts at knowledge acquisition when these attempts
involve social routes to knowledge. (Testimony is one example of such a
route, but it is not the only one.) I will offer two distinct accounts
of these virtues. One is what I call an /individualistic/ account of
the social virtues, according to which (1) we can fully characterize
the nature of such virtues independent of the sort of social factors
that are typically in play when these virtues are exemplified, and (2)
even when a subject’s route to knowledge is social, the only epistemic
virtues that are relevant to her acquisition of knowledge are those she
herself possesses. The other account is what I call a social (or
anti-individualistic) account of the social virtues: the strongest
version denies both (1) and (2), but a weaker version is available
which accepts (1) but denies (2). I will offer some reasons for
thinking that the individualistic account is not acceptable, and that
one or the other social account provides a better understanding of the
sort of virtues that are at issue. My arguments are not fully decisive,
but they strongly suggest that the social dimension of social epistemic
virtues is not fully characterizable in individualistic terms.
Peter Graham // University of California, Riverside, USA <peter.graham AT ucr.edu>
Epistemic Virtues: Disposition or Design?
Warrants
ground or support belief. Justification and entitlement are two kinds
of warrant. Reliability theories of entitlement are now commonly
couched in terms of cognitive virtues or faculties of the believing
subject. I argue two kinds of entitlement arise when a belief-forming
virtue, faculty or process has the etiological function of forming true
beliefs reliably. Entitlement thus depends on the history of the
faculty, and relies on teleological notions. I go on to critically
examine Ernest Sosa's account which relies on ahistorical dispositions
to form true beliefs reliably in certain circumstances. I suggest that
the account is not obviously entitled to its use of teleological
notions. And I explore two possible advantages: a better account of the
intension of entitlement, and a better account of the new evil demon
case.
Stephen Grimm // Fordham University, USA <sgrimm AT fordham.edu>
Knowledge, Practical Interests, and Rising Tides
We
can think of intellectualism in epistemology as the view that whether a
true belief amounts to knowledge depends exclusively on truth-related
factors, and we can think of practicalism in epistemology as the view
that whether a given true belief amounts to knowledge depends on the
satisfaction of certain non-truth related factors—in particular (it
seems), that it depends on whether or not the belief is appropriately
responsive to the practical costs of being wrong about the question at
issue. Defenders of practicalism need to address two main problems.
First, practicalism seems to imply that knowledge might come and go
quite easily—in particular, that it might come and go along with our
variable practical interests. But knowledge does not seem to come and
go in this way. Instead, the thresholds relevant to knowledge seem
remarkably stable and robust; even with respect to questions that we
could care less about, knowledge still requires a high degree of
reliability, etc. We can call this the stability problem for
practicalism.
Second, there seems to be no fully satisfying way
of explaining whose practical interests matter. To say, in a vague
way, that knowledge is tied to “our” practical concerns and interests
is one thing, but recent attempts to be more precise about the extent
of this “our” have all met with serious problems. Thus Hawthorne and
Stanley, for example, are quite clear that their “subject-e” view needs
to adopt an error-theoretic explanation of at least some of the
recalcitrant cases, and they are quick to say that “attributor-e” views
are in the same boat. We can call this the “whose stakes?” problem for
practicalism.
In my paper I will argue that both problems can be
addressed in roughly the same terms. More exactly, I will suggest that
by first clarifying the whose stakes? problem an answer to the
stability problem naturally falls out.
David Henderson &
Terry Horgan // University of Nebraska-Lincoln, <dhenderson2 AT
unl.edu> and University of Arizona, USA <thorgan AT
email.arizona.edu>
Epistemic Superpositions and Easy Knowledge
Stewart
Cohen has posed a problem which is said to plague any epistemological
position that posits basic knowledge. The problem of easy knowledge
takes two forms—here we focus on the bootstrapping version of the
problem. We draw on several ideas that we have developed elsewhere.
First
is the idea that, in managing well one’s epistemic chores, one
typically makes use of rich information that has been acquired in the
course of one’s life—information that one may possess, and to which one
may be e, without explicitly representing it. Yet it can be
accommodated in cognitive processing in a way that subserves two
epistemic functions: (1) it can be accommodated so as to condition what
belief comes to be generated by the process (for example, in an
episode, it can condition whether one forms a perceptual belief, and
just what perceptual belief is formed), and (2) it can be accommodated
in a way that gives one a sense for the confidence one should have in a
belief so generated in the circumstances obtaining. This is functional
superpositioning.
We readily admit that one’s cognitive
system cannot come to have information bearing on the reliability of
its processes without some form of bootstrapping. Drawing on ideas in
Glymour’s venerable bootstrapping model of confirmation in the
sciences, we argue that the form of bootstrapping exhibited in the
training up of the human perceptual system is more than benign, it is
wonderful!
However, one may wonder whether our response
changes the subject, no longer having to do an epistemology positing
basic knowledge. We intend our account to make sense of the default
entitlement structure that Burge thinks is fitting in connection with
perception, memory, and testimony. Pryor’s dogmatism also seems to
suggest such a structure. The default entitlement they envision
certainly seems to fit Cohen’s characterization of “basic knowledge.”
Mikael Janvid // Stockholm University, Sweden <mikael.janvid AT philosophy.su.se>
The Value of Lesser Goods: The Epistemic Value of Entitlement
The
notion of entitlement plays an important role in some influential
epistemologies. Often the epistemological motive for introducing the
concept is to accommodate certain externalist intuitions within an
internalist framework or, conversely, to incorporate internalist traits
into an externalist framework. In this paper two prominent philosophers
will be used as examples: Tyler Burge as a representative of the first
option and Fred Dretske as one of the latter. However, even on the
assumption that the notion of entitlement is sufficiently clarified,
accomplishing these results is easier said than done – especially if we
also want to ascribe epistemic value to entitlement. It will be shown
that the epistemic value of entitlement is either granted at the
expense of the epistemic value of justification or the value ends up
below the level of value that epistemologists employing the concept of
entitlement are aiming at.
Mark Kaplan // Indiana University, USA <kaplanm AT indiana.edu>
Why We Care What We Know and How that Matters
Much
epistemology proceeds on the assumption that all that is really
essential to S’s knowing that P—and so all that an epistemology needs
to concern itself with insofar as it is concerned with propositional
knowledge—is P’s being true and S’s being suitably positioned with
respect to P. The assumption is that it is by appeal, and only by
appeal, to considerations having to do with what it takes for a person
to be so positioned with respect to a true proposition, that we can
determine what general constraints might govern propositional
knowledge. I want to suggest otherwise. I want to suggest that, if we
but take seriously enough why, as inquirers, we care which propositions
we know to be true and which we don’t, we will see that there is
something else essential to propositional knowledge—something our
epistemology can exploit to its gain. By way of illustration, I mean
to show how attention to this feature of knowledge makes it possible to
see how one might coherently (i) hold the view that you don’t need to
know that what you just saw was not simply a hologram in order to know
it was a goldfinch, yet (ii) recognize in a thoroughgoing way the
impropriety of your saying of yourself (or anyone’s saying of you) the
following version of what Keith DeRose has labeled “The Abominable
Conjunction”: that you know that it was a goldfinch but, for all that,
don’t know that it was not merely a hologram.
Jason Kawall // Colgate University, USA <jkawall AT mail.colgate.edu>
Testimony, Epistemic Egoism, and Epistemic Success
It
is generally acknowledged that testifiers play creditable roles in the
production of knowledge in others. But is such credit a form of
epistemic credit (rather than merely moral credit, for example), and is
an agent more successful qua epistemic agent insofar as she is a
successful testifier? I argue that, with some minor qualifications,
agents deserve equal epistemic credit for their role in producing
knowledge (or other valuable epistemic states) in others to that which
they would receive for a similarly salient role in acquiring such
knowledge for themselves. I respond to a number of objections to the
proposal, and in the closing section of the paper I consider more
general implications of the proposal for our assessment of epistemic
agents.
Klemens Kappel // University of Copenhagen, Denmark <kappel AT hum.ku.dk>
Epistemic Expressivism and the Value of Knowledge
Friderik Klampfer // University of Maribor, Slovenia <friderik.klampfer AT uni-mb.si>
Luck, Moral and Epistemic
The
paper explores possible connections between moral and epistemic luck.
These have been the focus of philosophers' attention for a while.
Nagel's and William's original treatment of the phenomenon of moral
luck seems to have been motivated by concerns over the threat that the
very possibility of veritic luck poses to our ordinary claims to
knowledge. If knowledge is incompatible with genuine veritic luck, the
worry goes, then moral assessment of agents will also be jeopardized by
the role luck plays in the formation of our characters and the shaping
of circumstances and outcomes of our choices. Other authors (Greco, for
example) have identified structural similarities between the two,
without claiming priority for one of them over the other. Still others
(Rescher, Richards, Thomson) have offered accounts of moral luck which
effectively explain it away as a subspecies of epistemic luck.
So,
how far does the analogy between moral and epistemic luck stretch? Does
luck play pretty much the same or a somewhat different role in our
respective accounts of knowledge and moral responsibility (desert,
merit, and so on)? What, in the light of this, can we conclude about
the prospects for finding a single, universal cure for this disease? In
particular, how plausible is the view that luck can never affect the
agent’s initial moral standing, all it can do is provide further, more
compelling evidence for (or against) it? I attend to these questions by
way of deploying some of the distinctions that other authors have drawn
between different types of luck and control. I specify the kind of
moral judgment that I believe is most susceptible to the adverse
effects of luck. Finally, I present my own version of the epistemic
reductionist account of moral luck and defend it against some recent
objections.
Uriah Kriegel // University of Arizona, USA <theuriah AT gmail.com>
Two Notions of Mental Representation
In
this paper, I argue that there are two notions of mental representation
(which I call objective and subjective), that distinctively
philosophical interest in both is well grounded, and that while
familiar theories of mental representation are more naturally
interpreted as concerned with one notion, our understanding of the
other lags behind.
Igal Kvart // Hebrew University Jerusalem, Israel <mskvart AT pluto.huji.ac.il>
Probabilistic Knowledge, Cognitive Modeling, Cognitive Assertability, and 2nd Order Knowledge
In
this talk I present a chance-based analysis of knowledge ascriptions
for perceptual and memory-based knowledge as well as for embedded
knowledge ascriptions. The main insight regarding this analysis is that
knowledge is, at the core, a matter of high token indicativity. When it
comes to perceptual knowledge, an additional element, discriminability,
is present. Yet, the condition I present for indicativity is implied by
the discriminability condition. I will also briefly present a
conception of philosophical analysis (such as the above) in terms of
cognitive modeling, and in particular cognitive simulation. I will
briefly address what I call the cognitive norm of assertion, which is a
derivative of a weak version of Moore's paradox. The processing of
terms such as 'know' requires cognitive responsibility, or
accountability, calling for distinct norms – cognitive norms -- which
are neither epistemic nor pragmatic, but are rather conferred by the
pertinent competence. The analysis of embedded knowledge ascriptions
will be a natural extension of the indicativity condition, keeping in
mind the simulation modeling and the requisite cognitive norms.
In
the last part I extend this analysis to embedded knowledge (of such 1st
order knowledge). That is, I offer chance-based conditions for knowing
that one knows. The main thrust is a 2nd order indicativity condition,
which reflects adequate 2nd order monitoring of the 1st order
processing.
Jennifer Lackey // Northwestern University, USA <j-lackey AT northwestern.edu>
Acting on Knowledge
A
common view in the recent philosophical literature is that knowledge is
sufficient for practical rationality. More precisely, it is frequently
argued that if one knows that p, then it is epistemically appropriate
for one to use the proposition that p in practical reasoning, to act as
if p, and to act on p. This thesis not only has intuitive plausibility
and theoretical power, it is also said to explain the value or
distinctive importance of knowledge. In this paper, I argue that this
thesis is false. In particular, I show that there are cases in which
an agent clearly knows that p and yet does not have the proper
epistemic authority to use the proposition that p in practical
reasoning, to act as if p, or to act on p. Knowledge is not always
epistemically sufficient for practical rationality and thus this
sufficiency claim fails to capture what is valuable or distinctively
important about knowledge. I then offer a diagnosis of what is salient
in the cases challenging this claim and suggest a broad feature that
needs to be accounted for in any view of the norm governing practical
rationality.
Chris Lepock // University of Alberta, Canada <clepock AT ualberta.ca>
Metacognition and Intellectual Virtue
I
propose that intellectual virtues are capacities for metacognitive
control, the monitoring and regulation of one’s own cognitive
processes. This approach allows us to explain why not all possible
reliable processes yield knowledge. It also provides a general
structure uniting many different types of putative intellectual
virtues. What constitutes effective metacognitive control can be
determined by a combination of reflection and empirical observation,
and I briefly outline how this can be done.
Alan Millar // University of Sterling, UK <alan.millar AT stir.ac.uk>
What is it that Cognitive Competences are Competences at Doing?
The
discussion is in a framework in which it is assumed that an adequate
account of propositional knowledge should have a central place for a
notion of cognitive competence. On some conceptions of cognitive
competence, as, for instance, in Ernest Sosa’s work, it is held that a
competence can be manifested when knowledge is not acquired and that,
accordingly, to acquire knowledge the implicated true belief must be
sufficiently due to the manifestation of relevant competence. I outline
a conception of some cognitive competences on which they are nothing
less than abilities to acquire knowledge and their exercise is the
acquisition of knowledge. Such an ability amounts to mastery of a way
of telling that something of a certain sort is so. I argue that this
conception can be developed in a way that is philosophically
illuminating, in keeping with common sense, and preferable to accounts
on which the manifestation of a cognitive competence is not an
acquisition of knowledge.
Lack Lyons // University of Arkansas, USA <jclyons AT uark.edu>
Perception and Virtue Reliabilism
Nenad Mišèeviæ // University of Maribor, Slovenia & CEU, Hungary <VISMISCEVIC AT ceu.hu>
Reflective Virtue
Adam Morton // University of Alberta, Canada <adam.morton AT ualberta.ca>
Paradoxical Virtues
Many
virtues can also be described so they sound like vices. Courage is
knowing when not to fight, too, and there is a lot to be said for
knowing when to run away. There are virtues of cowardice, panic,
laziness, inattention to detail. Or at any rate there are virtues which
we can describe in these terms. I shall defend the existence of such
paradoxical virtues, and the value of their vicious labels. And I
shall argue that a large class of intellectual virtues are particularly
susceptible to this labeling.
Erik Olsson // Lund University, Sweden, <Erik_J.Olsson AT fil.lu.se>
The Value of Reliabilist Knowledge: Repeatability and Stability
Reliabilism
is essentially the view that knowledge amounts to true belief acquired
through a reliable process. According to the swamping objection,
reliabilism cannot explain the extra value pertaining to knowledge in
contrast to mere true belief. In the paper, I provide and defend two
arguments to the effect that reliabilism is in fact not vulnerable to
the swamping objection. One argument, referred to as the “conditional
probability solution” in Goldman and Olsson (2009), focuses on the
prospect of acquiring further true beliefs by repeated application of
the same reliable process. The other argument, which was proposed in
Olsson (2007), states that a true belief that is reliably acquired
thereby becomes more stable. The two arguments are compatible and
complementary.
Josh Orozco // Rutgers University, USA <orozco AT philosophy.rutgers.edu> //(grad student)
I Can Trust You Now … But Not Later
Children
learn and come to know things about the world at a very young age
through the testimony of their caregivers. The challenge comes in
explaining how children acquire such knowledge. The reason is that
children come to know things about the world from testimony despite
having gullible characters, and most accounts of knowledge require that
a belief be reliably formed. Since children indiscriminately receive
testimony, their testimony-based beliefs seem unreliable, and,
consequently, should fail to qualify as knowledge. Greco formulates the
problem as a triad of inconsistent propositions:
1. Young children can learn from the testimony of their caregivers; i.e. they can come to know through such testimony.
2.
Testimonial knowledge requires a reliable consumer of testimony; i.e.
the hearer can reliably discriminate between reliable and unreliable
sources of testimony.
3. Young children are not reliable consumers of testimony.
If
we want to retain the intuition that children acquire testimonial
knowledge, then we either have to reject either 2 or 3. In this paper I
discuss some attempted solutions by Sandy Goldberg and John Greco that
reject 3. I argue that their solutions fail. I go on to suggest that
what generates the problem is a hidden assumption supporting 2, that
the standards for testimonial knowledge should be invariant between
children and cognitively mature adults. I propose that in order to
adequately explain how children acquire testimonial knowledge we should
reject this hidden assumption. I then argue that understanding
knowledge in terms of intellectual skills gives us a plausible
framework to do so.
Christian Piller // University of York, UK <cjp7 AT york.ac.uk>
Aptness and Epistemic Normativity
I
will investigate one or both of the following two ideas. First, if by
doing something I achieve my aim and if the way I have done what I did
shows that I have done it well, then nothing seems to be missing. Sosa,
however, introduces a further category of normative and/or evaluative
significance, namely aptness, i.e. the causal connection between the
exercise of one’s abilities and success. I will investigate whether
such a category is important in the evaluation of performances.
Secondly, I will discuss whether Sosa’s account of epistemic
normativity, which, in my view, rests on an attributive theory of
goodness, is a plausible basis for understanding epistemic normativity.
Matjaž Potrè & Terry Horgan // University of Arizona, USA
<thorgan AT email.arizona.edu> and University of Ljubljana,
Slovenia <matjaz.potrc AT guest.arnes.si>
The Epistemic Relevance of Morphological Content
Morphological
content is information that is implicitly embodied in the standing
structure of a cognitive system (the system’s morphology) rather than
in the form of an explicit representation, and is automatically
accommodated during cognitive processing without first becoming
explicit (cf. T. Horgan and J. Tienson, Connectionism and the
Philosophy of Psychology, MIT, 1996). We maintain that much
belief-formation in human cognition is essentially morphological: it
draws heavily on large amounts of morphological content, and must do so
in order to tractably accommodate the holistic evidential relevance of
the background information possessed by the cognitive agent. We also
advocate a form of experiential evidentialism concerning epistemic
justification—roughly, the view that the justification-status of an
agent’s belief depends upon the character of the agent’s conscious
experience. (The thesis of essentially morphological belief-formation
and a version of experiential evidentialism are both defended in D.
Henderson, T. Horgan, and M. Potrè, “Transglobal
Evidentialism-Reliabilism,” Acta Analytica 22 (2007), 281-300.)
In
this talk we explain how experiential evidentialism can be smoothly and
plausibly combined with the thesis that much of the cognitive
processing that generates justified beliefs is essentially
morphological. The leading idea is this: even though epistemically
relevant morphological content does not get explicitly represented
during the process of belief-generation, nevertheless the implicit
accommodation of morphological content affects the character of
conscious experience. For instance, typically the resulting occurrent
belief is experienced as being “evidentially fitting” rather than as
“popping into one’s mind out of nowhere”; also, typically the belief is
accompanied by the conscious sense that one has the ability, if called
upon, to bring explicitly to mind pertinent justificatory
considerations that support the belief and contribute to its
fittingness.
Baron Reed // Northern Illinois University, USA < breed AT niu.edu>
Who Knows?
Michael Ridge // University of Edinburgh, USA <mridge AT staffmail.ed.ac.uk>
Getting Lost on the Road to Larissa
I
examine the arguments that epistemologists need to satisfy a set of
value constraints in analyzing key epistemic concepts. I argue that
properly understood the only ex ante constraints in this area are
extremely weak. The key point here is to distinguish attributive and
predicative readings of value predicates. I then explore what I take to
be the best arguments for and against the distinctive epistemic value
of knowledge and the understanding, with special attention to
'pointless truths'.
Wayne Riggs // University of Oklahoma, USA <wriggs AT ou.edu>
What is Epistemic Value, Anyway?
Declan Smithies // Ohio State University, USA <smithies.2 AT osu.edu>
Moore’s Paradox and the Accessibility of Justification
This
paper defends a classical form of internalism, according to which one
has a special kind of epistemic access to facts about which
propositions one has justification to believe. I begin in part one by
arguing that the accessibility of justification is best understood as
an epistemic thesis, rather than a psychological thesis, which I go on
to defend against various objections. In part two, I argue that anyone
who denies the accessibility of justification is thereby faced with an
epistemic version of Moore’s paradox. In part three, I employ this
version of Moore’s paradox in order to diagnose the intuitions prompted
by BonJour’s (1985) clairvoyance cases and to explain what is wrong
with the kind of externalist treatment of these cases given by Goldman
(1986). In part four, I propose a deeper theoretical rationale for the
internalist commitment to the accessibility of justification by arguing
that it is crucial for understanding the role of justification in the
practice of critical reflection. In part five, I conclude with some
brief discussion of the way in which the accessibility of justification
imposes substantial constraints on a theory of the nature of
justification.
Ernest Sosa // Rutgers University, USA <Ernest_Sosa AT Brown.edu>
Intuitions: What Are They? What Do They Prove?
The
first main topic is the nature of intuitions and their place in our
cognitive economy. The paper then turns to whether all intuitions have
proper epistemic standing. If not all do, finally, we then consider
what distinguishes those that do from those that do not.
Danilo Šuster // University of Maribor, Slovenia <danilo.suster AT uni-mb.si>
Circles of Knowledge
The
paper is about Ernest Sosa's latest book ("Reflective knowledge").
According to Sosa a threat of circle or regress is a main problematic,
perhaps the main problematic of epistemology. He argues that some
circles are unavoidable, but not all are vicious. I agree with his
general stance with respect to the desire for a fully general,
legitimating, philosophical understanding of all our knowledge. But I
have problems with specific solutions. Sosa's Neo-Moorean argument for
the reliabilty of perception seems to have the same structure as
certain problematic and circular arguments (Bootstrapping, Moorean
arguments, Easy knowledge ...) so it is difficult to see how to defend
Sosa's preferred solutions.
Valerie Tiberius // University of Minnesota, USA <tiberius AT umn.edu>
Wisdom and Wide Reflective Equilibrium: A Case Study In Methodology For Normative Theorizing
Reflective
equilibrium has been the default method for philosophers working in
ethics for decades. The method is coherentist; it seeks to reach an
equilibrium among our considered judgments (intuitions) and
principles. But reflective equilibrium is not without problems.
Concerns about the possibility of coherent but erroneous systems of
moral judgments were raised early on. Recently, the concern that our
intuitions are unreliable, unstable, and subject to manipulation has
taken center stage. It has been suggested that to solve some of the
problems for RE, we ought to seek a wide reflective equilibrium, that
is, one that includes background theories in the mix. It may be true
that paying attention to background theories (including empirical
psychological theories) will help meet objections to reflective
equilibrium, but as of yet little work has been done to show just how a
truly wide reflective equilibrium (WRE) would work. Our aim in this
paper is to articulate a specific version of wide reflective
equilibrium using the virtue of practical wisdom as a case study. In
explicating this method, we aim to show that WRE is not just the method
we’re stuck with because we don’t have anything better in normative
theory. Instead, WRE (or at least a suitably precisified version of
it) has a positive advantage, namely, that it helps to capture the
normativity of ethical notions such as wisdom. This is so because, as
we will argue, our method connects the philosophical analysis of wisdom
to norms and ideals that people already care about.
Marko Weilguny // University of Ljubljana, Slovenia <marko.weilguny AT gmail.com> //(grad student)
The Bliss of Ignorance?
The
main attention of this paper is dedicated to the question of knowledge
in possession of the absolute truth. Can knowledge ever be in
possession of the total truth? Can there be knowledge at all? Could
knowledge possibly in some instances be absolved of this ubiquitous
demand? Are there more kinds of knowledge?
These questions are
regarded through the prism of the theories of E. Sosa and T. Horgan
& D. Henderson. Virtue epistemology and transglobal reliabilism
lend their apparatus to the investigation of the necessity of truth in
founding knowledge. And the way that matters evolve in this paper is a
way towards a knowledge with less rigorously determined requirements.
As to the bliss of ignorance – it certainly has its charms and it
certainly has its pitfalls.
Sarah Wright // University of Georgia, USA <sawright AT uga.edu>
Internalist Virtues and Knowledge
What
role can intellectual virtues play in an account of knowledge when we
interpret those virtues internalistically, as depending only on states
of the cognizer? Though it has been argued that internalist virtues
are ill suited to play a role in an account of knowledge, I will show
that, on the contrary, internalist virtues can play an important role
in recent accounts of knowledge developed to utilize externalist
virtues. The virtue account of knowledge developed by Linda Zagzebski
is intended to be supplemented by her version of the intellectual
virtues which require an external success component. However I show
that internalist virtues are just as effective as a component of
Zagzebski’s definition of knowledge. I then turn to the credit
accounts of knowledge developed by John Greco and Wayne Riggs. The
concept of credit involved in these accounts can be explained in terms
of virtues. But what sort of virtues can play this role? Although
Greco explains credit in terms of externalist virtues, I show that
internalist virtues can do this job as well. Thus, although
internalist virtues’ do not require a reliable connection to truth,
they can still play an important role in defining the truth-requiring
concept of knowledge.
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