Annalisa Coliva

The paper analyses the discussion in the last decades on whether perceptions can, as such, justify empirical beliefs, and develops it along two fundamental lines: the nature of perceptual content and the nature of the justifications in play. Starting with Sellars' attack on the «Myth of the given», it examines Davidson's, McDowell's, Peacocke's and Burge's positions. On the one hand, it contends that also creatures that aren't endowed with the relevant concepts can have genuine perceptions; on the other, that only when the latter are conceptualized, they can, as such, justify the corresponding empirical beliefs.

The aim of the paper is to bring out exactly what makes first-personal contents special, by showing that they perform a distinctive cognitive function. Namely, they are stopping points of inquiry. First, I articulate this idea and then I use it to clear the ground from a troublesome conflation. That is, the conflation of this particular function all first-person thoughts have with the property of immunity to error through misidentification, which only some I-thoughts enjoy. Afterward, I show the implications of this idea for a theory of first-person content and of immunity to error though misidentification. I then make some comparisons with Pryor’s notion of wh-misidentification and immunity thereof and with Cappelen and Dever’s position on immunity to error through misidentification and show why they are defective.

This chapter examines the distinction between practical and propositional knowledge. It then considers the objections put forward by Stanley and Williamson and finds them wanting. Afterwards, it presents Chomsky’s position on linguistic competence as a form of propositional knowledge. It criticizes both the theoretical and the empirical arguments Chomsky puts forward in favor of his view and presents some observations in favor of the idea that linguistic competence is ultimately practical. In so doing, it aims to re-habilitate the picture of practical knowledge and of linguistic competence endorsed, arguably, by Wittgenstein and Ryle.

In this paper I address the question of whether the fact that our colour experiences have a finer-grained content than our ordinary colour concepts allow us to represent should be taken as a threat to theories of the conceptual content of experience. In particular, I consider and criticise McDowell's response to that argument and propose a possible development of it. As a consequence, I claim that the role of the argument from the finer-grained content of experience has to be redefined. In particular, I acknowledge that this problem is helpful in order to bring to the fore the issue of the proper characterisation of the constraints upon the possession conditions of perceptual demonstrative concepts. Yet, I contend that, in light of the foregoing discussion, it is neutral with respect to the dispute between conceptual and non-conceptual theorists. For that dispute hinges on whether it is possible to have experiences with a certain content independently of having the concepts, which are needed for its canonical specification and not on whether those experiences are conceptualisable in all their finesse of grain.

The paper illustrates and clarifies the distinction between first-personal and third-personal self-knowledge. It is argued that the characteristic traits of first-personal self-knowledge are groundlessness, transparency and authority. It is maintained that each of these characteristics is a necessary and a priori aspect of first-personal self-knowledge.The thesis that there is first-personal self-knowledge is then defended from challenges coming from cognitive science, which are taken to show that we may fail to know dispositional (sometimes causal) elements of our mental states. Yet, this does not impugn the fact that, regarding the non-dispositional aspects of our mental life, we can and do have first-personal knowledge of them.It is then argued that third-personal self-knowledge is achieved through a plurality of methods, which vary from inference to the best explanation, to induction, simulation, testimony and inferential conceptual deployment. The ensuing self-ascriptions are therefore neither groundless, nor transparent or authoritative and are the result of substantive cognitive achievements.

_ Source: _Volume 7, Issue 4, pp 217 - 234 The paper presents the key themes of my _Extended Rationality: A Hinge Epistemology_. It focuses, in particular, on the moderate account of perceptual justification, the constitutive response put forward against Humean skepticism, epistemic relativism, the closure principle, the transmission of warrant principle, as well as on the applications of the extended rationality view to the case of the principle of the uniformity of nature, testimony, and the justification of basic laws of inference.

The paper reviews Christopher Peacocke's account of self‐knowledge. His proposal relies on the claim that first‐order mental states may be given to a subject so as to function as reasons, from his point of view, for the corresponding self‐ascriptions. Peacocke's Being Known elicits two different views of how that may be the case: a given propositional attitude is considered to be conscious if, on the one hand, there is something it is like to have it; and, on the other, if it can occupy a subject's attention without being an object of attention. I examine both views and conclude that, on the latter, Peacocke's proposal risks of not offering an independent reason for the self‐ascription, and, on the former, of offering no reason at all. I then turn to some ideas from his The Realm of Reason and claim that they can help stabilise his earlier account only at the cost of surrendering internalism in the epistemology of psychological self‐ascriptions and of contaminating internalist proposals about knowledge of any subject matter with an externalist base which would betray their point. Unless one doesn't want to pay this price, then Peacocke's account offers no solution to the problem of self‐knowledge.1.

In this paper I provide an outline of a new kind of constitutive account of self-knowledge. It is argued that in order for the model properly to explain transparency, a further category of propositional attitudes—called “commitments”—has to be countenanced. It is also maintained that constitutive theories can’t remain neutral on the issue of the possession of psychological concepts, and a proposal about the possession of the concept of belief is sketched. Finally, it is claimed that in order for a constitutive account properly to explain authority, it has to take a rather dramatic constructivist turn, which makes it suitable as an explanation of self-knowledge only for a limited class of mental states.

In the last few years there has been a resurgence of interest in Moore’s Proof of the existence of an external world, which is now often rendered as follows:1 (I) Here’s a hand (II) If there is a hand here, there is an external world Therefore (III) There is an external world The contemporary debate has been mostly triggered by Crispin Wright’s influential—conservative —“Facts and certainty” and further fostered by Jim Pryor’s recent—liberal—“What’s wrong with Moore’s argument?”.2 This debate is worth surveying with care because—so I shall contend—it will help us see that, in fact, it allows for an important view that, so far, hasn’t been explicitly considered. The critical survey will be the task of the next two sections, while, in the remaining..

In the recent literature on Moore's Proof of an external world, it has emerged that different diagnoses of the argument's failure are prima facie defensible. As a result, there is a sense that the appropriateness of the different verdicts on it may depend on variation in the kinds of context in which the argument is taken to be a move, with different characteristic aims. In this spirit, Martin Davies has recently explored the use of the argument within two different epistemic projects called respectively ‘deciding what to believe’ and ‘settling the question’. Depending on which project is in hand, according to Davies, the diagnoses of its failure—if indeed it fails—will differ. I believe that, by introducing the idea that the effectiveness of a valid argument may be epistemic project-relative, Davies has pointed the way to an important reorientation of the debates about Moore's Proof. But I wish to take issue with much of the detail of his proposals. I argue that Davies's characterization of his two projects is misleading (§1), and his account of their distinction defective (§2). I then canvass some suggestions about how it may be improved upon and about how further relevant kinds of epistemic projects in which Moore's argument may be taken to be a move can be characterized, bringing out how each of these projects impinges differently on the issue of the Proof's failure and of its diagnosis (§§3 and 4). In conclusion (§5) I offer an overview of the resulting terrain.

Moore’s paradox is taken to be emblematic of peculiarities in the first person point of view, and to have significant implications for several issues in epistemology, in philosophy of language and mind. Yet, its nature remains elusive. In the first part of the paper, the main kinds of analysis of it hereto proposed in the literature are criticized. Furthermore, it is claimed that there are cases in which its content can be legitimately judged. Close inspection of those cases reveals that they depend on self-ascriptions of beliefs as dispositions. These are kinds of belief that are not normative in nature. In the second part of the paper, it is argued that, in order to save the paradox, one must resort to a thoroughly normative notion of beliefs as first-personal commitments. Its bearing on the paradox is explored and, in closing, a defence of it from possible objections is presented.