David Henderson

Armchair reflection commonly provides a low-grade a priori form of justification for certain claims which, if true at all, are necessarily true and are rendered necessarily true solely by virtue of their constituent concepts, independently of any contingent facts about our actual world. The justification afforded is aptly understood as a priori, yet of a low-grade sort that has an ineliminable empirical dimension. The conceptual competence that folk possess for the non-deferential application of concepts features prominently, as does the general capacity for abductive inference. Armchair methodology in linguistics provides a useful model for armchair philosophical reasoning. We argue for two somewhat surprising hypotheses: first, metaphysically necessary truths that are semantically non-analytic and epistemologically a posteriori are underwritten by yet-more-fundamental necessary truths that are analytic; and second, it is a conceptually grounded necessary truth that some statements expressing epistemic possibilities do not express metaphysical possibilities.

Some hold that beliefs arising out of certain sources such as perceptual experience enjoy a kind of entitlement—as one is entitled to believe what is thereby presented as true, at least unless further evidence undermines that entitlement. This is commonly understood to require that default epistemic entitlement is a non-evidential kind of epistemic warrant. Our project here is to challenge this common, non-evidential, conception of epistemic entitlement. We will argue that although there are indeed basic beliefs with default entitlement status, typically the kind of default entitlement they possess is primarily a matter of the evidential support that accrues to them, both synchronically and diachronically, from wider mental states beyond the specific sensory-perceptual experiences that spawn them. We will call this status evidentially embedded epistemic entitlement—as distinct from entitlement as commonly understood in the literature, which we will call evidentially insular. Epistemic entitlement normally is characterized in the manner set forth in the first paragraph above, viz., as a form of default epistemic warrant that a given belief possesses independently of any other beliefs. We suggest that not all evidential support is managed at the level of belief. Thus, leaves room for the possibility of an epistemically embedded kind of entitlement. Here we develop the needed conception of entitlement drawing on Henderson and Horgan’s ideas of a kind of “iceberg epistemology.”

In "Epistemic Norms and the 'Epistemic Game' They Regulate", we advance a general case for the idea that epistemic norms regulating the production of beliefs might usefully be understood as social norms. There, we drew on the influential account of social norms developed by Cristina Bicchieri, and we managed to give a crude recognizable picture of important elements of what are recognizable as central epistemic norms. Here, we consider much needed elaboration, suggesting models that help one think about epistemic communities and, ultimately, the temptations confronted in one's epistemic life. We suggest that once "the epistemic game" is embedded into a wider set of gains and losses, one can understand the epistemic choice situation as a form of mixed-motive game. This allows one to understand epistemic games more straightforwardly using Bicchieri's framework for thinking about social norms. That is, once the choice situation denominated only in terms of classical epistemic gains and losses is embedded in a wider accounting of goods that may compete with the production of true beliefs, one can see how an agent's individual and community epistemic project can be furthered by social norms regulating epistemic practices. We recommend thinking of epistemic norms as analogous to social norms for hygiene.

This paper is a beginning—an initial attempt to think of the function and character of epistemic norms as a kind of social norm. We draw on social scientific thinking about social norms and the social games to which they respond. Assume that people individually follow epistemic norms for the sake of acquiring a stock of true beliefs. When they live in groups and share information with each other, they will in turn produce a shared store of true beliefs, an epistemic public good. True beliefs, produced individually or in groups, constitute an epistemic good—one commonly stockpiled and distributed within a community. Epistemic norms can then be understood as a kind of socially developed and transmitted normative sensibility having to do with the production of this individual and public good. Epistemic norms should serve to regulate this practice—coordinating the practice of individuals so as to afford the benefits of life in an interdependent epistemic community—and to manage the risks of being epistemically dependent on others within such a community. Here, we provide some attempts to characterize the central aspects of "the epistemic game"—the epistemic choice situation confronted by communities of epistemic agents.

This paper explores the role and limits of cognitive simulation in understanding or explaining others. In simulation, one puts one's own cognitive processes to work on pretend input similar to that one supposes that the other plausibly had. Such a process is highly useful. However, it is also limited in important ways. Several limitations fall out from the various forms of cognitive diversity. Some of this diversity results from cultural differences, or from differences in individuals' cognitive biographies. Such diversity is clearly important in history. Some sorts of such diversity are discussed, with attention to the results of contemporary cognitive science. It is argued that one must sometimes employ mixed (simulation-based/theory-based) strategies, and that sometimes what is done will be neither purely simulation nor purely theory-based.

The concept of knowledge is used to certify epistemic agents as good sources (on a certain point or subject matter) for an understood audience. Attributions of knowledge and denials of knowledge are used in a kind of epistemic gate keeping for (epistemic or practical) communities with which the attributor and interlocutors are associated. When combined with reflection on kinds of practical and epistemic communities, and their situated epistemic needs for gate keeping, this simple observation regarding the point and purpose of the concept of knowledge has rich implications. First, it gives one general reason to prefer contextualism over various forms of sensitive invariantism. Second, when gate keeping for a select community of experts or authorities, with an associated body of results on which folk generally might then draw (when gate keeping for a general source community ) the contextual demands approximate those with which insensitive invariantists would be comfortable.

Disagreement affords humans as members of epistemic communities important opportunities for refining or improving their epistemic situations with respect to many of their beliefs. To get such epistemic gains, one needs to explore and gauge one’s own epistemic situation and the epistemic situations of others. Accordingly, a fitting response to disagreement regarding some matter, p, typically will turn on the resolution of two strongly interrelated questions: (1) whether p, and (2) why one’s interlocutor disagrees with oneself about p. When one has high intellectual respect for one’s interlocutor, answering question (2) involves arriving at a sympathetic explanatory understanding of the interlocutor’s own epistemic attitude toward p. Sorting out (2) is an abductive matter. Further, so far as the abductive explanation conditions one’s epistemic take regarding (1), there will be an abductive character to one’s epistemic position with respect to whether p—even where one’s initial purchase on whether p was not an abductive matter. We explain here how this can be managed naturally and tractably.

The papers in this issue all concern the normative standards by which we do or should regulate our joint epistemic lives in communities. Plausibly, reflection on how we should regulate ourselves—what one should insist on in one's own practice and that of one's epistemic partners—takes some cues from reflection on what we do insist on. The reverse is plausibly also the case. These papers also, more or less explicitly, suggest that our epistemic sensibilities themselves reflect the demands of epistemic practice within a community of interdependent agents.

Yoshida considers two broad understandings of how social scientists can and should “describe and explain other cultures or their aspects under concepts of rationality” . In the one corner is a family of approaches that Yoshida finds deeply flawed: cultural interpretivist approaches. Five authors representative of this family are given fine chapter length examinations: Winch, Taylor, Geertz, Sahlins, and Obeyesekere. In the other corner is Yoshida’s favored approach: critical rationalism. This approach is associated with the intellectual descendants of Karl Popper—notably Jarvie and Agassi. It is presented in outline and treated as the clear winner. By virtue of not having the defects that are diagnosed in the interpretivist approaches, critical rationalism is presented as the fitting approach in the social sciences. This dialectical structure has two notable weaknesses: First, showing that one item, A, lacks the problems found in another item, B, should not be take ..

Common formulations of the principle of charity in translation seem to undermine attributions of irrationality in social scientific accounts that are otherwise unexceptionable. This I call the problem of irrationality. Here I resolve the problem of irrationality by developing two complementary views of the principle of charity. First, I develop the view (ill-developed in the literature at present) that the principle of charity is preparatory, being needed in the construction of provisional first-approximation translation manuals. These serve as the basis for explanatory accounts and associated refinements in the translation manual. In developing such explanatory accounts, the principle of charity is no longer constraining. Thus, the principle of charity applies only in the early stages of constructing translation manuals, and there is no problem of irrationality in the later stages of constructing translation manuals. Second, I reduce the principle of charity, where it does apply, to a special case of what I call the principle of explicability: so translate as to attribute explicable beliefs and practices to the speakers of the source-language. I show that the appropriate formulation of the principle of charity counsels just what the principle of explicability requires in the early stages of social scientific investigation.

Accounts of what it is for an agent to be justified in holding a belief commonly carry commitments concerning what cognitive processes can and should be like. A concern for the plausibility of such commitments leads to a multi-faceted epistemology in which elements of traditionally conflicting epistemologies are vindicated within a single epistemological account. The accessible and articulable states that have been the exclusive focus of much epistemology must constitute only a proper subset of epistemologically relevant processing. The interaction of such states looks rather contextualist. It might also be called quasi-foundationalist. However, in attending to our epistemological tasks we must rely on processing that is sensitive to information that we could not articulate, that is not accessible in the standard internalist sense. When focusing on the full range of epistemologically important processes, the structure of what makes for justification is rather more like that envisioned by some coherentists.

We propose an approach to epistemic justification that incorporates elements of both reliabilism and evidentialism, while also transforming these elements in significant ways. After briefly describing and motivating the non-standard version of reliabilism that Henderson and Horgan call “transglobal” reliabilism, we harness some of Henderson and Horgan’s conceptual machinery to provide a non-reliabilist account of propositional justification (i.e., evidential support). We then invoke this account, together with the notion of a transglobally reliable belief-forming process, to give an account of doxastic justification.

The argument I present here is an example of the manner in which naturalizing epistemology can help address fairly traditional epistemological issues. I develop one argument against coherentist epistemologies of empirical knowledge. In doing so, I draw on BonJour (1985), for that account seems to me to indicate the direction in which any plausible coherentist account would need to be developed, at least insofar as such accounts are to conceive of justification in terms of an agent (minimally) possessing articul able reasons and arguments, as is standard. I end by indicating important elements of coherentist epistemology that can be salvaged in the face of my argument, provided we are willing to drop the traditional commitment to characterizing justification in terms of the structure of articulable argument.

On what has become the received view of the principle of charity, it is a fundamental methodological constraint on interpretation that we find peoples’ intentional states patterned in ways that are characterized by norms of rationality. This recommended use of normative principles of rationality to inform intentional description is epistemically unmotivated. To say that the received view lacks epistemic motivation is to say that to interpret as it recommends would be epistemically irresponsible ans, in important respects irrational. On the alternative that I recommend, descriptive psychological generalization are what properly inform interpretation. One can readily understand the epistemic motivations for so interpreting, for they are the familiar reasons for informing description with background descriptive information. No parallel motivations for the received view seems possible.

One of the central points of contention in the epistemology of testimony concerns the uniqueness (or not) of the justification of beliefs formed through testimony--whether such justification can be accounted for in terms of, or 'reduced to,' other familiar sort of justification, e.g. without relying on any epistemic principles unique to testimony. One influential argument for the reductionist position, found in the work of Elizabeth Fricker, argues by appeal to the need for the hearer to monitor the testimony for credibility. Fricker (1994) argues, first, that some monitoring for trustworthiness is required if the hearer is to avoid being gullible, and second, that reductionism but not anti-reductionism is compatible with ascribing an important role to the process of monitoring in the course of justifiably accepting observed testimony. In this paper we argue that such an argument fails.

In codifying the methods of translation, several writers have formulated maxims that would constrain interpreters to construe their subjects as (more or less) rational speakers of the truth. Such maxims have come to be known as versions of the principle of charity. W. V. O. Quine suggests an empirical, not purely methodological, basis for his version of that principle. Recently, Stephen Stich has criticized Quine's attempt to found the principle of charity in translation on information about the probabilities of various sorts of mistakes. Here 1 defend Quine's approach. These issues have important implications for the supposed a priori status of human rationality.

Reliablists have argued that the important evaluative epistemic concept of being justified in holding a belief, at least to the extent that that concept is associated with knowledge, is best understood as concerned with the objective appropriateness of the processes by which a given belief is generated and sustained. In particular, they hold that a belief is justified only when it is fostered by processes that are reliable (at least minimally so) in the believer’s actual world.[1] Of course, reliablists typically recognize other concepts of justification--typically subjective notions--which are given a noncompeting sort of epistemic legitimacy. However, they have tended to focus on the epistemically central notion of "strong justification," and have come to settle on this familiar reliablist analysis, supposing that it pretty much exhausts what there is to say about "objective justification.".

This introductory chapter proceeds in three parts. The first section characterizes the general approach to epistemology around which the volume revolves—purposeful epistemology—and examines the general motivation for that approach. The guiding idea is that considerations about the point and purpose of epistemic evaluation might fruitfully constrain epistemological theory and yield insights for epistemological reflection. The second section explores the approach by characterizing some important versions of it. Several themes and issues that we see running through the volume are here articulated and highlighted. The third section provides a brief summary of each contribution to the collection.

Familiar accounts have it that one explains thoughts or actions by showing them to be rational. It is common to find that the standards of rationality presupposed in these accounts are drawn from what would be thought to be aprioristic sources. I advance an argument to show this must be mistaken. But, recent work in epistemology and on rationality takes a less aprioristic approach to such standards. Does the new (psychological or cognitive scientific) realism in accounts of rationality itself significantly improve the prospects for unproblematic forms of rationalizing explanation? Do earlier misgivings about rationalizing explanation ring hollow when the rationality to be attributed is "naturalized"? Answer: while explanation in terms of naturalized rationality would be free of one fatal flaw possessed by explanation in terms of rationality understood in the traditional fashion, it would yet have parallel flaws