J. Adam Carter

It is a natural assumption in mainstream epistemological theory that ascriptions of knowledge of a proposition p track strength of epistemic position vis-à-vis p. It is equally natural to assume that the strength of one’s epistemic position is maximally high in cases where p concerns a simple analytic truth (as opposed to an empirical truth). For instance, it seems reasonable to suppose that one's epistemic position vis-à-vis “a cat is a cat” is harder to improve than one's position vis-à-vis “a cat is on the mat”, and consequently, that the former is at least as unambiguous a case of knowledge as the latter. The current paper, however, presents empirical evidence which challenges this intuitive line of reasoning. Our study on the epistemic intuitions of hundreds of academic philosophers supports the idea that simple and uncontroversial analytic propositions are less likely to qualify as knowledge than empirical ones. We show that our results, though at odds with orthodox theories of knowledge in mainstream epistemology, can be explained in a way consistent with Wittgenstein's remarks on 'hinge propositions' or with Stalnaker's pragmatics of assertion. We then present and evaluate a number of lines of response mainstream theories of knowledge could appeal to in accommodating our results. Finally, we show how each line of response runs into some prima facie difficulties. Thus, our observed asymmetry between knowing “a cat is a cat” and knowing “a cat is on the mat” presents a puzzle which mainstream epistemology needs to resolve.

If Savulescu's (2001, 2009) controversial principle of Procreative Beneficence (PB) is correct, then an important implication is that couples should employ genetic tests for non-disease traits in selecting which child to bring into existence. Both defenders as well as some critics of this normative entailment of PB have typically accepted the comparatively less controversial claim about non-disease traits: that there are non-disease traits such that testing and selecting for them would in fact contribute to bringing about the child who is expected to have the best life. We challenge this less controversial claim, not by arguing deductively for its falsity, but by showing that Savulescu's central argument for this presumably less controversial claim fails. Savulescu offers intelligence as the paradigm example of a testable non-disease trait such that testing and selecting for it would increase the likelihood that the child selected would be the one who is expected to have the best life (or at least as good a life as the others). We provide a series of arguments aimed at demonstrating that Savulescu's argument from intelligence fails. If our arguments are successful, the upshot is not that PB is false, but more modestly, that the burden of proof remains squarely with Savulescu.

Expressivist views of an area of discourse encourage us to ask not about the nature of thebrelevant kinds of values but rather about the nature of the relevant kind of evaluations. Their answer to the latter question typically claims some interesting disanalogy between those kinds of evaluations and descriptions of the world. It does so in hope of providing traction against naturalism-inspired ontological and epistemological worries threatening more ‘realist’ positions. This is a familiar position regarding ethical discourse; however, some authors (e.g. Field, Heller, Gibbard, Blackburn, Chrisman) have recently defended a similar view regarding epistemic discourse. Others (especially Kvanvig, Cuneo, and Lynch) have argued that epistemic expressivism faces special problems, not necessarily attaching to expressivism about other areas. Their arguments differ in interesting ways, but the common strategy is an attempt to show that the very sort of meta-epistemological theorizing needed to articulate and establish epistemic expressivism involves the epistemic expressivist in some sort of internal incoherence or self-defeat. That is, they think that articulating or defending the position requires implicit commitment to the negation of one of the positions core tenets. This paper responds to those arguments on behalf of epistemic expressivism, suggesting that they each misunderstand what is crucial to epistemic expressivism. By responding to these arguments, we hope to achieve more clarity about what epistemic expressivism is and why one might want to endorse it in a meta-epistemology.

Philosophy of mind and cognitive science (e.g., Clark and Chalmers 1998; Clark 2010; Palermos 2014) have recently become increasingly receptive to the hypothesis of extended cognition, according to which external artifacts such as our laptops and smartphones can—under appropriate circumstances—feature as material realizers of a person's cognitive processes. We argue that, to the extent that the hypothesis of extended cognition is correct, our legal and ethical theorizing and practice must be updated by broadening our conception of personal assault so as to include intentional harm toward gadgets that have been appropriately integrated. We next situate the theoretical case for extended personal assault within the context of some recent ethical and legal cases and close with critical discussion.

One notable line of argument for epistemic relativism appeals to considerations to do with non-neutrality: in certain dialectical contexts—take for instance the famous dispute between Galileo and Cardinal Bellarmine concerning geocentrism—it seems as though a lack of suitably neutral epistemic standards that either side could appeal to in order to (non-question-beggingly) resolve their first-order dispute is itself—as Rorty (1979) influentially thought—evidence for epistemic relativism. In this essay, my aim is first to present a more charitable reformulation of this line of reasoning, one that is framed not merely in terms of the availability of epistemic norms that are suitably neutral between interlocutors, but in terms of the availability of what I call Archimedean metanorms. Once this more charitable line of argument is developed, I show how, even though it avoids problems that face ‘non-neutrality’ versions of the argument, it nonetheless runs into various other problems that appear ultimately intractable and, further, that the strategy in question gives us no decisive reason to draw the relativist’s conclusion rather than the Pyrrhonian sceptic’s.

Internalist approaches to epistemic justification are, though controversial, considered a live option in contemporary epistemology. Accordingly, if ‘active’ externalist approaches in the philosophy of mind—e.g. the extended cognition and extended mind theses—are _in principle_ incompatible with internalist approaches to justification in epistemology, then this will be an epistemological strike against, at least the _prima facie_ appeal of, active externalism. It is shown here however that, contrary to pretheoretical intuitions, neither the extended cognition _nor_ the extended mind theses are in principle incompatible with two prominent versions of epistemic internalism—viz., accessibilism and mentalism. In fact, one possible diagnosis is that pretheoretical intuitions regarding the incompatibility of active externalism with epistemic internalism are symptomatic of a tacit yet incorrect identification of epistemic internalism with epistemic individualism. Thus, active externalism is not in principle incompatible with epistemic internalism per se and does not significantly restrict one’s options in epistemology.

Descartes’ demon is a deceiver: the demon makes things appear to you other than as they really are. However, as Descartes famously pointed out in the Second Meditation, not all knowledge is imperilled by this kind of deception. You still know you are a thinking thing. Perhaps, though, there is a more virulent demon in epistemic hell, one from which none of our knowledge is safe. Jonathan Schaffer (2010) thinks so. The “Debasing Demon” he imagines threatens knowledge not via the truth condition on knowledge, but via the basing condition. This demon can cause any belief to seem like it’s held on a good basis, when it’s really held on a bad basis. Several recent critics (Brueckner (2011), Conee (2015), Ballantyne & Evans (2013)) grant Schaffer the possibility of such a debasing demon, and argue that the skeptical conclusion doesn’t follow. By contrast, we argue that on any plausible account of the epistemic basing relation, the “debasing demon” is impossible. Our argument for why this is so gestures, more generally, to the importance of avoiding common traps by embracing mistaken assumptions about what it takes for a belief to be based on a reason.

In Chapter 3 of Judgment and Agency, Sosa (Judgment and Agency, 2015) explicates the concept of a fully apt performance. In the course of doing so, he draws from illustrative examples of practical performances and applies lessons drawn to the case of cognitive performances, and in particular, to the cognitive performance of judging. Sosa’s examples in the practical sphere are rich and instructive. But there is, I will argue, an interesting disanalogy between the practical and cognitive examples he relies on. Ultimately, I think the source of the disanalogy is a problematic picture of the cognitive performance of guessing and its connection to knowledge and defeat. Once this critical line of argument is advanced, an alternative picture of guessing, qua cognitive performance, is articulated, one which avoids the problems discussed, and yet remains compatible with Sosa’s broader framework.

Intentional action is, in some sense, non-accidental, and one common way action theorists have attempted to explain this is with reference to control. The idea, in short, is that intentional action implicates control, and control precludes accidentality. But in virtue of what, exactly, would exercising control over an action suffice to make it non-accidental in whatever sense is required for the action to be intentional? One interesting and prima facie plausible idea that we wish to explore in this paper is that control is non-accidental in virtue of requiring knowledge—either knowledge-that or knowledge-how (e.g., Beddor and Pavese 2021; cf., Setiya 2008; 2012 and Habgood-Coote 2018). We review in detail some key recent work defending such knowledge-centric theories of control, and we show that none of these accounts holds water. We conclude with some discussion about how control opposes the sort of luck intentional action excludes without doing so by requiring knowledge (that- or how).

Simion and Kelp offer a prima facie very promising account of trustworthy AI. One benefit of the account is that it elegantly explains trustworthiness in the case of cancer diagnostic AIs, which involve the acquisition by the AI of a representational etiological function. In this brief note, I offer some reasons to think that their account cannot be extended — at least not straightforwardly — beyond such cases (i.e., to cases of AIs with non-representational etiological functions) without incurring the unwanted cost of overpredicting untrustworthiness.

This paper is an extended prolepsis in favor of epistemic situationism, the thesis that epistemic virtues are not sufficiently widely distributed for a virtue-theoretic constraint on knowledge to apply without leading to skepticism. It deals with four objections to epistemic situation: 1) that virtuous dispositions are not required for knowledge, 2) that the Big Five or Big Six personality model proves that intellectual virtues are a reasonable ideal, 3) that the cognitive-affective personality system framework proves that intellectual virtues are a reasonable ideal, and 4) that weakening the reliability requirement through epistemic dependence or abilism means that common inferential strategies really are virtues. The paper concludes with reflections on the replication crisis in psychological science.

A popular view in mainstream social epistemology maintains that, in the face of a revealed peer disagreement over p, neither party should remain just as confident vis-a-vis p as she initially was. This ‘conciliatory’ insight has been defended with regard to individual epistemic peers. However, to the extent that (non-summativist) groups are candidates for group knowledge and beliefs, we should expect groups (no less than individuals) to be in the market for disagreements. The aim here will be to carve out and explore an extension of the conciliatory insight from individual peer disagreement to group peer disagreement; in doing so, I’ll raise and address three key problems that face any plausible defence of such a constraint.

Intentional action is, in some sense, non-accidental, and one common way action theorists have attempted to explain this is with reference to control. The idea, in short, is that intentional action implicates control, and control precludes accidentality. But in virtue of what, exactly, would exercising control over an action suffice to make it non-accidental in whatever sense is required for the action to be intentional? One interesting and prima facie plausible idea that we wish to explore in this paper is that control is non-accidental in virtue of requiring knowledge – either knowledge-that or knowledge-how (e.g., Beddor and Pavese 2021; cf., Setiya 2008; 2012 and Habgood-Coote 2018). We review in detail some key recent work defending such knowledge-centric theories of control, and we show that none of these accounts holds water. We conclude with some discussion about how control opposes the sort of luck intentional action excludes without doing so by requiring knowledge (that- or how).

Research questions in mainstream epistemology often take for granted a cognitive internalist picture of the mind. Perhaps this is unsurprising given the seemingly safe presumptions that (i) knowledge entails belief (viz. the entailment thesis) and that (ii) the kind of belief that knowledge entails supervenes exclusively on brainbound cognition. It will be argued here that (contra orthodoxy) the most plausible version of the entailment thesis holds just that knowledge entails dispositional belief. However, regardless of whether occurrent belief supervenes only as the cognitive internalist permits, we should reject the idea that dispositional belief supervenes only in cognitive internalist-friendly ways. These observations, taken together, reveal two things: first, that a cognitive internalist picture of the mind is much more dispensable in epistemology than has been assumed and, second, that pursuing questions in extended epistemology need not involve any radical departure from the commitments of more traditional epistemological projects.

I motivate and defend a new way of theorising about trust and trustworthiness – and their relationship to each other – by locating both within a broader picture that captures largely overlooked symmetries on both the trustor's and trustee's side of a cooperative exchange. The view defended here takes good cooperation as a theoretical starting point; on the view proposed, cooperation between trustor and trustee is working well when achievements in trust and in responding to trust are matched on both sides of the trust exchange. In a bit more detail, the trustor ‘matches’ her achievement in trusting (an achievement in fitting reliance to reciprocity) with the trustee's achievement in responding to trust (an achievement in fitting reciprocity to reliance). From this starting point, we can then appreciate symmetrical ways that the trustor and trustee can (respectively) fall short, by violating what are shown to be symmetrical evaluative norms – of success, competence and aptness – that regulate the attempts made by both trustor and trustee. The overall picture has important advantages over the received way of theorising about how trust stands to trustworthiness, and it clears the way – by identifying key questions that have been obscured – to making further progress.

What is it to trust well? How do we do it? If we think of trust as a kind of aimed performance, capable not only of success but also of competence and aptness, we can put our understanding of what it is to trust well on an entirely new footing. This book takes this project up, and in doing so, it uses the core ‘trust as performance’ idea—which is developed and refined in substantive detail—in the service of explaining a range of philosophically important phenomena related to trust, including its nature and varieties, the evaluative norms that govern good trusting and distrusting (both implicit and deliberative), how trust relates to vulnerability, risk, negligence, and monitoring, as well as to trustworthiness and, more generally, to our practices of cooperation. The result, a telic theory of trust, opens up entirely new option space and a research agenda in the philosophy of trust that is methodologically in the spirit of virtue epistemology, but which takes on its own distinctive shape.

This essay investigates an underappreciated way in which trust and testimonial injustice are closely connected. Credibility deficit and credibility excess cases both (in their own distinctive ways) contribute to a speaker’s being harmed in her capacity a knower. But moreover, as we will show—by using the tools of a performance-theoretic framework—both credibility deficit and credibility excess cases also feature incompetent trusting on the part of the hearer. That is, credibility deficit and excess cases are shown to manifest qualities of thinkers that are inconducive to trust’s being reliably fulfilled. What this implies is an interesting result about testimonial injustice: to the extent that we want to mitigate against testimonial injustice—one promising way to do so will be to target incompetent trusting of the sort that underlies it. We conclude by outlining and defending what we take to be a promising substantive version of such a mitigation strategy, one which is centred around the cultivation of higher-order trusting competences.

This paper develops and defends a new account of therapeutic trust, its nature and its constitutive norms. Central to the view advanced is a distinction between two kinds of therapeutic trust – default therapeutic trust and overriding therapeutic trust – each which derives from a distinct kind of trusting competence. The new view is shown to have advantages over extant accounts of therapeutic trust, and its relation to standard (non-therapeutic) trust, as defended by Hieronymi, Frost-Arnold, and Jones.

The value of knowledge has always been a central topic within epistemology. Going all the way back to Plato’s Meno, philosophers have asked, why is knowledge more valuable than mere true belief? Interest in this question has grown in recent years, with theorists proposing a range of answers. But some reject the premise of the question and claim that the value of knowledge is ‘swamped’ by the value of true belief. And others argue that statuses other than knowledge, such as justification or understanding, are distinctively valuable. We will call the general question of why knowledge is valuable the value problem.