Daniel Greco

While recent discussions of contextualism have mostly focused on other issues, some influential early statements of the view emphasized the possibility of its providing an alternative to both coherentism and traditional versions of foundationalism. In this essay, I will pick up on this strand of contextualist thought, and argue that contextualist versions of foundationalism promise to solve some problems that their non-contextualist cousins cannot. In particular, I will argue that adopting contextualist versions of foundationalism can let us reconcile Bayesian accounts of belief updating with a version of the holist claim that all beliefs are defeasible.

This paper argues for several related theses. First, the epistemological position that knowledge requires safe belief can be motivated by views in the philosophy of science, according to which good explanations show that their explananda are robust. This motivation goes via the idea—recently defended on both conceptual and empirical grounds—that knowledge attributions play a crucial role in explaining successful action. Second, motivating the safety requirement in this way creates a choice point—depending on how we understand robustness, we'll end up with different conceptions of safety in epistemology. Lastly, and most controversially, there's an attractive choice at this point that will not vindicate some of the most influential applications of the safety-theoretic framework in epistemology, e.g., Williamson's arguments against the KK principle, and luminosity.

In this paper I present a qualified defense of the KK principle. In section one I introduce two popular arguments against the KK principle, along with an example in which these arguments seem to prove too much. In section two I provide a simple formal model of knowledge in which KK holds, and which I argue provides an attractive analysis of the example from section one. I go on argue that when this model is combined with contextualism, we can retain our attractive analysis of the example, while also explaining away the appeal of the aforementioned arguments against KK. I use the same maneuver contextualists have used to defend epistemic closure principles--I argue that KK holds within contexts, but can fail across contexts.

We defend Uniqueness, the claim that given a body of total evidence, there is a uniquely rational doxastic state that it is rational for one to be in. Epistemic rationality doesn't give you any leeway in forming your beliefs. To this end, we bring in two metaepistemological pictures about the roles played by rational evaluations. Rational evaluative terms serve to guide our practices of deference to the opinions of others, and also to help us formulate contingency plans about what to believe in various situations. We argue that Uniqueness vindicates these two roles for rational evaluations, while Permissivism clashes with them.

Frequentism and Bayesianism represent very different approaches to hypothesis testing, and this presents a skeptical challenge for Bayesians. Given that most empirical research uses frequentist methods, why (if at all) should we rely on it? While it is well known that there are conditions under which Bayesian and frequentist methods agree, without some reason to think these conditions are typically met, the Bayesian hasn’t shown why we are usually safe in relying on results reported by significance testers. In this article, I provide arguments that such conditions will usually be met; the Bayesian can maintain her theoretical disagreement with the frequentist while holding that her error is mostly harmless in practice

While there has been a great deal of recent interest in parallels between metaethics and metaepistemology, there has been little discussion of epistemological analogues of the open question argument. This is somewhat surprising—the general trend in recent work is in the direction of emphasizing the continuity between metaethics and metaepistemology, and to treat metanormative questions as arising in parallel in these two normative domains. And while the OQA has been subjected to a wide variety of objections, it is still influential in metaethics. In this paper, I aim to show that an epistemological version of the OQA is just as promising as its moral cousin. That's not to say that I'll unqualifiedly endorse either argument. Rather, my aim is to show that there is just as strong a prima facie case for an OQA in metaepistemology as there is in metaethics—I leave open whether the ultima facie case collapses.