Olav Gjelsvik

This paper inquires into some problems for a thesis about the aim of belief, expressed in normative terms along the lines that we ought to have correct or true beliefs. In particular, the paper aims to disarm the important blind-spot objections to such a view. What these objections seek to establish is that there are pretty simple truths we cannot have beliefs about, and since ought implies can, we ought not to have beliefs about these truths. It follows that there cannot be a correct normative property of the sort indicated that characterizes belief. The paper questions this conclusion without questioning the general thesis that ‘ought’ implies ‘can’. It is hoped that the way we disarm the blind-spot objections will exhibit an attractive view on epistemic normativity, as well as a normative property belief might indeed have. It will be the task of another paper to argue that this normative property thus identified characterizes belief essentially.

ABSTRACT This introductory paper raises, partly as a preparation for the other papers in this issue, questions about how philosophy ought to proceed in the light of knowledge we have in surrounding disciplines, with a focus on the case of addiction. It also raises issues about how addiction research might be enlightened by philosophical work. In the background for the paper are two competing approaches to the evidential grounding of philosophical insight. According to a widespread view, philosophical knowledge rests on a set of intuitions. According to another, philosophy has no special evidential grounding. This paper resists the attractions of the first picture, and argues against the separateness of philosophy that it lends support. I try to make plausible that such a picture is harmful both for philosophy and for empirical science. We should replace it with a mild form of unity of science or unity of inquiry, in the spirit of the founder of this journal

This chapter has as its point of departure the criticism of Davidson’s notion of radical interpretation in Ludwig and Lepore (2005), and thus of Davidson’s account of thought. The chapter agrees with them in their criticism of Davidson to this extent: as Davidson conceives of evidence available to the third-person point of view in radical interpretation, we are left with a massive and deeply problematic underdetermination of content. There are further questions, however, about how we ought to conceive of the evidence available to the third-person point of view. Davidson’s mistake, it is argued, lies in his quite standard conception of this evidence and not in his basic methodological assumptions, which really do change the philosophical landscape radically. The paper reaches this conclusion about which conception of evidence we ought to have by focusing on cases of error. It establishes a need to employ factive notions when ascribing mental/intentional states to a person if we are to deal properly with error both in thought and action. An account of thought or action not only needs to allow for the possibility of error, but must also give a correct account of error: that is, an account where the errors which speakers actually make arise as errors according to the account of thought and action. The claims of the paper are briefly these. We need a rich conception of evidence in order to account for error; this rich conception of evidence is here made available, it is not incompatible with Davidson’s basic methodological assumptions, and with this conception of evidence we are no longer vulnerable to the arguments levelled by Lepore and Ludwig against Davidson.

In this paper I discuss Fred Dretske's account of knowledge critically, and try to bring out how his account of informational content leads to cases of extreme epistemic good luck in his treatment of knowledge. My main interest, however, is to establish that the cases of epistemic luck arise because Dretske's account of knowledge in a fundamental way fails to take into account the role our actual recognitional capacities and powers of discrimination play in perceptually based knowledge. This result is, I believe, new. The paper has three sections. In Section 1 I give a short exposition of Dretske's theory, and make some necessary qualifications about how it is to be understood. In Section 2 I discuss in greater detail how the theory actually works, and provide some examples I think are very troublesome for Dretske. In Section 3 I argue that these cases establish my main claim. I also show that there are cases of epistemic bad luck due to Dretske's account of how information causes belief