Matthew McGrath

According to epistemic instrumentalism, epistemic reasons are a species of a familiar and unmysterious type of reason: instrumental or means‐end reasons. Believing that p is the means to some relevant cognitive end. If this view is correct, then whether one has an epistemic reason to believe p isn't merely a matter of having evidence for p; one must also have (or have reason to have) the relevant cognitive end. In this article, I raise a challenge for the view, one concerned with its implications concerning basing beliefs on epistemic reasons. We regularly base our beliefs on epistemic reasons. I see the pouring raining and conclude that the planned picnic will be canceled; the realtor checks the client's financial statements and concludes that they won't be able to afford a certain house. In such cases, one doesn't merely have good epistemic reasons to believe a certain proposition; one believes the proposition for those reasons; and this might be part of the explanation of how one comes to have an epistemically justified belief or knowledge. I argue that the instrumentalist does a poor job of accommodating the phenomenon of basing belief on epistemic reasons.

This chapter addresses concerns that pragmatic encroachers are committed to problematic knowledge variance. It first replies to Charity Anderson and John Hawthorne’s new putative problem cases, which purport to show that pragmatic encroachment is committed to problematic variations in knowledge depending on what choices are available to the potential knower. It argues that the new cases do not provide any new reasons to be concerned about the pragmatic encroacher’s commitment to knowledge-variance. The chapter further argues that concerns about knowledge-variance are not limited to the pragmatic encroacher, but come up for traditional purist invariantism as well.

The thesis of pragmatic encroachment about knowledge holds that whether a subject knows that p can vary due to differences in practical stakes, holding fixed the strength of the subject’s epistemic position with respect to p. Accepting pragmatic encroachment about knowledge brings with it a significant explanatory burden: if knowledge varies with the stakes, why does knowledge show so many signs of staying fixed with variations in the stakes? This chapter argues that explanatory burdens of this general kind are harder to avoid than is commonly thought: even if you deny the stakes-sensitivity of knowledge, you will be stuck accepting the stakes-sensitivity of other statuses which, like knowledge, show the same signs of staying fixed with variations in the stakes. The chapter discusses two such statuses: reason-worthiness and emotion-worthiness. If the arguments succeed, then, the problems of pragmatic encroachment are everyone’s problems.

According to epistemic instrumentalism, epistemic reasons are a species of a familiar and unmysterious type of reason: instrumental or means-end reasons. Believing that p is the means to some relevant cognitive end. If this view is correct, then whether one has an epistemic reason to believe p isn’t merely a matter of having evidence for p; one must also have (or have reason to have) the relevant cognitive end. In this paper, I raise a challenge for the view, one concerned with its implications concerning basing beliefs on epistemic reasons. We regularly base our beliefs on epistemic reasons. I see the pouring raining and conclude that the planned picnic will be canceled; the realtor checks the client’s financial statements and concludes they won’t be able to afford a certain house. In such cases, one doesn’t merely have good epistemic reasons to believe a certain proposition; one believes the proposition for those reasons; and this might be part of the explanation of how one comes to have an epistemically justified belief or knowledge. I argue that the instrumentalist does a poor job of accommodating the phenomenon of basing belief on epistemic reasons.

In Belief as Emotion, Miriam Schleifer-McCormick argues that the standard view of belief, which understands it in terms of evidence-responsiveness, founders in accounting for “problematic states” such as delusions, implicit bias, political opinions, and trust. If we view belief as an emotion, we get a much more plausible account of these states. She gives additional arguments for the plausibility of the belief-as-emotion thesis. In this piece, I cast doubt on her claims about the limitations of the standard view as well as on the plausibility of the view that belief is an emotion.

_New and thoroughly updated, _Epistemology: An Anthology_ continues to represent the most comprehensive and authoritative collection of canonical readings in the theory of knowledge._ Concentrates on the central topics of the field, such as skepticism and the Pyrrhonian problematic, the definition of knowledge, and the structure of epistemic justification Offers coverage of more specific topics, such as foundationalism vs coherentism, and virtue epistemology Presents wholly new sections on 'Testimony, Memory, and Perception' and 'The Value of Knowledge' Features modified sections on 'The Structure of Knowledge and Justification', 'The Non-Epistemic in Epistemology', and 'The Nature of the Epistemic' Includes many of the most important contributions made in recent decades by several outstanding authors.

This paper examines the prospects of a prima facie attractive response to Fantl and McGrath’s argument for pragmatic encroachment. The response concedes that if one knows a proposition to be true then that proposition is warranted enough for one to have it as a reason for action. But it denies pragmatic encroachment, insofar as it denies that whether one knows a proposition to be true can vary with the practical stakes, holding fixed strength of warrant. This paper explores two ways to allow knowledge-reason links without pragmatic encroachment, both of which appeal to defeat. The first appeals to defeaters of reasons. If you know the bank is open tomorrow, what you know is available as a reason, but it may be defeated by considerations concerning the stakes. The second appeals to defeaters which do not defeat reasons but which nonetheless do something similar: they make the action recommended by those reasons vicious. In a high stakes case performing the “risky” action would be vicious even if it is justified in the sense of being supported by undefeated reasons. What is defeated is a virtue-based epistemic status rather than reasons or justification. I argue that neither proposal halts the march from a knowledge-reason link to pragmatic encroachment.

Here I present a challenge for evidentialists, one I argue they cannot meet. The challenge is to explain the crucial notion of having supporting evidence in a way that is not only acceptable on its own, but acceptable when conjoined with evidentialism. This challenge asks the evidentialist to go beyond just sounding right. In Sect. 3.1, I consider the prospects for answering the challenge by taking what I call the evidence-first approach. Under this approach, having evidence supporting a proposition is explained in terms of there being evidence supporting the proposition. I argue that evidentialists taking this approach face a dilemma: embrace regress or embrace self-support, both of which I argue are seriously problematic. In Sect. 3.2, I consider the options for evidentialists if they abandon the evidence-first approach. I argue that it is more difficult than might initially appear to avoid the “regress or self-support” dilemma, and that the price for avoiding it is depriving oneself of the ability to explain how cases of both immediate and mediate justification involve the same unitary phenomenon of having supporting evidence.

Many epistemologists agree that there are things we epistemically shouldn’t believe, i.e., that we have negative epistemic duties. But it is a matter of controversy whether we have any positive epistemic duties, i.e., whether we epistemically should have certain beliefs. In this paper, I argue that, in certain cases in which one acquires counterevidence against what one believes (p), one epistemically should give up one's belief by reasoning in a way that involves forming a belief in its negation (in not-p). In these cases, one epistemically should believe not-p and thus has a positive epistemic duty. I reinforce this argument by showing how our negative epistemic duties depend on our facts about how we should reason. I go on to argue for positive epistemic duties in other cases, including ones in which one trying to make up one’s mind.

This chapter follows Edward Craig’s (1990) advice: ask what the concept of knowledge does for us and use our findings as clues about its application conditions. What a concept does for us is a matter of what we can do with it, and what we do with concepts is deploy them in thought and language. So, the chapter examines the purposes we have in _attributing_ knowledge. This chapter examines two such purposes, agent-evaluation and informant-suggestion, and brings the results to bear on an important debate about the application conditions of the concept of knowledge—the debate between contextualists and their rivals.

In Sect. 1 of this chapter, Matthew McGrath examines Sosa's work on the nature of truth. Sosa's chief purpose is to determine what sort of theory of truth is appropriate for truth-centered epistemology -- an epistemology that takes truth to be the goal of inquiry and which explains key epistemic notions in terms of truth. While Sosa refutes arguments from Putnam and Davidson against the correspondence theory, he is hesitant to endorse it because he doubts we have a clear enough grasp of what correspondence amounts to and what the correspondents are. A truth-centered epistemologist, however, is free to work with minimalism about truth and Moorean primitivism. Part of Sosa's case for primitivism, and against minimalism, involves a comparison with Moore's account of goodness. Here McGrath notes an important dissimilarity between the two (i.e., susceptibility to open-question arguments) and suggests that this may be reason to prefer minimalism to primitivism. In Sect. 2, Jeremy Fantl discusses Sosa's work on the role of truth in epistemology. Sosa seems to be motivated by a dilemma facing any account of that role on which true belief is the sole fundamental epistemic value. On the one hand, we want an account of the role of truth in epistemology to explain why we epistemically evaluate beliefs and guide our intellectual lives in the way we do. On the other hand, it should not come out that we have any sort of epistemic obligation to form beliefs about completely boring or trivial matters (e.g., about the first phone number listed on page 356 of the phone book). Sosa's attempt to resolve the dilemma is to, first of all, adopt something like a pluralism about epistemic value and, second of all, move the primary locus of epistemic evaluation from beliefs to faculties. The second part of this chapter investigates the intricacies of these maneuvers.

This book features original essays on knowledge and rationality as related to the work of Stewart Cohen. This is the first volume dedicated to Stewart Cohen, one of the most influential epistemologists of the last few decades. Stewart Cohen is responsible for introducing the New Evil Demon problem, the problem of easy knowledge, and epistemic contextualism. Any one of these contributions is sufficient by itself to establish a lasting philosophical legacy. The chapters in this book reflect of Cohen's legacy and address a variety of important topics related to his work, including the New Evil Demon problem, epistemic justification, epistemic contextualism, pragmatic and moral encroachment, epistemic obligations, skepticism, and the problem of easy knowledge. The book also includes a complete bibliography of Cohen's works. Knowledge and Rationality is an essential resource for scholars and advanced students in epistemology with an interest in engaging with Stewart Cohen's philosophy.

In what follows, I’ll discuss several approaches to suspension. As we’ll see, the issue of whether and in what sense(s) suspension is *question-directed* is important to developing an adequate account. I will argue that suspension isn’t question-directed in the way that curiosity, wondering, and inquiry are. The most promising approach, in my view, takes suspension to be an agential matter; it involves the will. As we’ll see, this view makes sense of a lot of familiar facts about suspension, and it makes sense of its role in curating beliefs. It also raises intriguing questions about how it comes up for epistemic assessment.

Kornblith’s “Epistemic Normativity” is a classic in the now voluminous literature on the source of epistemic normativity. His account is as simple as it is bold: the source is desire, not a desire for true belief, or knowledge, but any set of desires. No matter what desires you have, so long as you are a being of a kind that employs beliefs in cost-benefit analysis, certain sorts of truth-centered epistemic norms will have normative force for you. We can distinguish two questions about epistemic normativity, both under discussion in Kornblith’s paper, but which he does not clearly distinguish: (i) why should we care about having beliefs that satisfy epistemic norms? (ii) how do epistemic considerations have reason-giving force with respect to particular propositions? I will argue that Kornblith’s proposal goes some distance toward answering the first question but is less helpful in answering the second.

We regularly appeal to claims of the form it seems that p in defense of a claim p. When we do so, we typically take it seems that p to be a reason for thinking that p but also a reason that “gets at” a relevant body of facts and its support for p. Other things being equal, we should want to vindicate our ordinary beliefs on this matter. We should want to vindicate the claim that facts about things seeming certain ways can be reasons to think that things are that way while at the same time being somehow derivative reasons, that is, reasons only because they “get at” support from a certain body of facts. However, on the dominant view of how things seem—subjectivism—it is hard to see how to secure this result. Subjectivism takes how things seem to be a matter of how things do or would seem to some relevant subject. What we need is a defensible, nonsubjectivist account of how things seem. I propose and defend an account according to which, roughly, it seems that p iff the body of facts in the relevant perspective supports that p.

In ‘Knowing What Things Look Like,’ I argued against the immediacy of visual objectual knowledge, i.e. visual knowledge that a thing is F, for an object category F, such as avocado, tree, desk, etc. Joseph Shieber proposes a challenging dilemma in reply. Either knowing what Fs look like requires having concepts such as looks or it doesn’t. Either way my argument fails. If knowing what Fs look like doesn’t require having such concepts, then he claims we can give an immediacy-friendly anti-intellectualist account of knowing what Fs look like, one that I neglected. If it does require having such concepts, then knowledge of what Fs look like plays no important role in ordinary cases of knowing things to be F by their looks. I argue for several claims. First, Shieber's anti-intellectualist proposal fails for independent reasons. Second, I give reasons for thinking that knowing what Fs look like doesn't require having a general concept of looks, which lessens worries about nonhuman animals having such knowledge. Finally, I consider the possibility, important to Shieber's argument, that nonhuman animals are simply incapable of knowing what Fs look like. I argue the implications for human knowledge are far from clear.

A rigorous, authoritative new anthology which brings together some of the most significant contemporary scholarship on the theory of knowledge Carefully-calibrated and judiciously-curated, this strong and contemporary new anthology builds upon Epistemology: An Anthology, Second Edition (Wiley Blackwell, 2008) by drawing a concise and well-balanced selection of higher-level readings from a large, diverse, and evolving body of research. Includes 17 readings that represent a broad and vital part of contemporary epistemology, including articles by female philosophers and emerging thought leaders Organized into seven thoughtful and distinct sections, including virtue epistemology, practical reasons for belief, and epistemic dysfunctions among others Designed to sit alongside the highly-successful anthology of canonical essays, Epistemology: An Anthology, Second Edition (Wiley Blackwell, 2008) Edited by a distinguished editorial team, including Ernie Sosa, one of the most influential active epistemologists Highlights cutting edge methodologies and contemporary topics for advanced students, instructors, and researchers.