Radu Bogdan

This essay focuses critically on two major targets, called representationalism and naturalism, whose assumptions and conclusions are examined in almost each chapter, relative to the topic of interest. Both views are shown to ignore cognitive agency and the pragmatics of an agent's current cognition. In the search for objective and infallible guarantees of knowledge both views end up being "subsystemic epistemologies". In contrast, the general message of this essay is that we need an agent-oriented epistemology. ;The present work is a cognition-oriented, pre-epistemic inquiry into the conditions and structure of those cognitive undertakings by means of which an agent acquires information. Chapter I outlines the general framework of my inquiry. Chapter II characterizes the concept of cognitive agent, and contrasts it with the concept of subsystemic capabilities which only explains what makes an agent's cognition objectively possible but cannot explain what it consists in. Chapter III argues that an agent's current cognition is contextual, local, indexical and governed by a set of pragmatic and strategic parameters. These parameters include an agent's current uncertainty, the theme and attention frame of his cognition, his tasks and objectives, some given and new information, the categorial articulation and the level of descriptive detail of that information, etc. I argue that it is not representations but increments in cognitive information that constitute the content of an agent's current cognition. Chapter IV argues that, being geared to pragmatically determined increments in information, one's belief and acceptance should be understood functionally as ways in which one treats information and not as features of one's physiological constitution or internal experience . The same view is extended, in chapter VI, to evidence and justification. Some implications of this view for the analysis of knowledge and the Gettier counterexamples to it are explored in some detail. Chapter V shows that the general pragmatic features of one's incremental cognition apply to linguistic communication as well. ;Knowledge characterizes epistemic achievement. An achievement is a successful undertaking. To understand what one achieves when one is said to know something requires understanding what one's cognitive undertaking consists in. In cognition one typically undertakes to increase one's information about a given topic in order to reduce an uncertainty, solve a problem, make a decision, act and so forth. An increment in information does its cognitive job whether it is veridical or not, whether it is justified or not. The failure of an increment to be veridical or justified affects its epistemic but not its cognitive status. The cognitive function of an informational increment is thus conceptually distinct from, prior to, and hence required for the understanding of, its epistemic accomplishment. A philosophical theory of cognition qua informational incrementation is thus a prerequisite of, and places constraints on, a theory of knowledge as epistemic achievement