Pierre Le Morvan

This paper builds on two of James Baldwin’s insights concerning the epistemic effects of American racism on Black Americans. I argue that he anticipated important points later raised by José Medina and Charles Mills, according to which those subjected to discrimination may have an epistemic advantage over discriminators, are an advantage in terms of what Medina later called meta-lucidity. Building on another one of Baldwin’s insights, I then argue that racial discrimination (and by extension other forms of discrimination) can also epistemically harm those subjected to it. In doing so, I relate this harm to the topic of epistemic injustice, and draw connections to work done on relevant alternatives in epistemology, on micro-aggressions, and on self-trust. I also consider the extent to which the epistemic advantage that may arise from being subjected to discrimination may mitigate the epistemic harm it inflicts.

Exploring intentionality from an externalist perspective, I distinguish three kinds of intentionality in the case of seeing, which I call transparent, translucent, and opaque respectively. I then extend the distinction from seeing to knowing, and then to believing. Having explicated the three-fold distinction, I then critically explore some important consequences that follow from granting that (i) there are transparent and translucent intentional states and (ii) these intentional states are mental states. These consequences include: first, that existential opacity is neither the mark of intentionality nor of the mental; second, that Sellars has not shown that all intentionality is non-relational; third, that a key Quinean argument for semantic indeterminacy rests on a false premise; fourth, that perceptual experience is intentional on Alston’s Theory of Appearing; fifth, that either some mental causation is more than internal physiological causation or some mental states are epiphenomenal.

Cassam (Citation2023) argued in this journal that vice-charging - the practice of charging others with epistemic vices such as gullibility and dogmatism - can itself be epistemically vicious. He focused, in particular, on charges of gullibility and dogmatism directed at parents hesitant to allow their kids to be vaccinated with the MMR vaccine. In this paper, I build on and extend his case by discussing relevant work he did not address. This includes work by Navin (Citation2016) on parental vaccine refusal, recent empirical work concerning the link between differing moral values and COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy, and recent empirical work on vaccine uptake and moral reproach. The work discussed here has important implications for public education efforts that aim to increase vaccine uptake.

In this work, I defend the Theory of Appearing, an explicatory account of the perceptual experience of concrete particulars. On this Direct Realist, act/object theory, the perceptual, experience of concrete particulars essentially consists in one or more physical space occupants appearing as C to a subject S. Perception essentially consists in one or more physical space occupants appearing as it is . Misperception essentially consists in one or more physical space occupants appearing as it is not. ;My defense of the Theory of Appearing comes in four main interrelated parts: noting the Theory of Appearing's close fit with important pretheoretical intuitions about perceptual experience, showing that none of the objections canvassed in this work defeats the Theory of Appearing, eliminating alternatives by undercutting reasons for, and by adducing reasons against, the main rivals to the Theory of Appearing and detailing some of the important epistemological and metaphysical payoff the Theory of Appearing affords, namely, a defensible account of Foundationalism and the Given, and support for an argument in the spirit of Kant's Refutation of Idealism

I argue that a debate in information theory concerning whether information can be false has important implications for how we should understand the nature of informational privacy. In particular, these implications bear on whether we should understand such privacy as being restricted to facts or whether it can encompass falsehoods as well. I also argue that the stand we take on the latter issue has a significant bearing on the coherence and justification of what is known as false light privacy tort in American tort law.

Antognazza (“The Benefit to Philosophy”, “The Distinction in Kind”), Dutant (“The Legend”), and I (“Knowledge Before Gettier”) have argued for the historical falsity of the claim that, prior to Gettier’s famous counterexamples of sixty years ago, the so-called ‘traditional’ conception of knowledge was the justified true belief (JTB) conception. This note addresses a related historical question that, rather surprisingly, has not yet been addressed in the philosophical literature; to wit: when did this claim first appear in this literature?

This paper discusses two important emphases of epistemology – of virtue and vice epistemology in particular – one concerning agency and patiency, and the other concerning self-regard and other-regard. The paper offers, for the first time in the literature, a framework in which four types of epistemological work can be categorized according to their respective dual emphases: Type 1 (agent/self-regarding), Type 2 (agent/other-regarding), Type 3 (patient/self-regarding), and Type 4 (patient/other-regarding). The paper also shows how four ways of doing epistemology can be categorized in terms of these four types and draws particular attention to one dubbed other-centering.

Suppose that knowledge and ignorance are complements in the sense of being mutually exclusive: for person S and fact p, either S knows that p or is ignorant that p. Understood in this way, ignorance amounts to a lack or absence of knowledge: S is ignorant that p if and only if it is not the case that S knows that p. Let us call the thesis that knowledge and ignorance are opposites the “Complement Thesis”. In this article, I discuss its deployment in an ingenious new argument advanced by Alvin Goldman and Erik Olsson (2009) which, if sound, establishes that there is a kind of knowledge that amounts to nothing more than true belief. I rebut their argument and in doing so delineate some important epistemological lessons brought to light by the contrast between ignorance and knowledge.

Alvin Goldman contends that, in addition to the familiar sense or use of the term “knowledge” according to which knowledge is at least true justified belief, there is a weaker yet strict sense or use of the term “knowledge” according to which knowledge amounts to nothing more than information-possession or mere true belief. In this paper, I argue that Goldman has failed to show that there is such a weaker sense, and that, even if he had shown this, he has not shown that this putative weaker sense is a strict one by his own criterion for strictness.

ABSTRACTIn this paper, I offer an account of propositional learning: namely, learning that p. I argue for what I call the “Three Transitions Thesis” or “TTT” according to which four states and three transitions between them characterize such learning. I later supplement the TTT to account for learning why p. In making my case, I discuss mathematical propositions such as Fermat's Last Theorem and the ABC Conjecture, and then generalize to other mathematical propositions and to non-mathematical propositions. I also discuss some interesting applications of the TTT, and reply to some noteworthy objections.

An ingenious argument – we may call it the Argument from Excuse – purports to show that the Standard View of Ignorance is false and the New View of Ignorance is true. On the former, ignorance is lack of knowledge; on the latter, ignorance is lack of true belief. I defend the Standard View by arguing that the Argument from Excuse is unsound. I also argue that an implication of my case is that Factual Ignorance Thesis (FIT) is false. According to FIT, whenever an agent A acts from factual ignorance, A is morally blameworthy (culpable) for the act only if A is morally blameworthy (culpable) for the ignorance from which A acts.

It is widely held, to the point of being the received interpretation, that Frank Ramsey was the first to defend the so-called Redundancy Theory of Truth in his landmark article ‘Facts and Propositions’ (hereafter ‘FP’) of 1927.1 For instance, A.J. Ayer2 cited this article in the context of arguing that saying that p is true is simply a way of asserting p and that truth is not a real quality or relation. Other holders of the received interpretation, such as George Pitcher,3 J.L. Mackie, 4 Susan Haack,5 A.C. Grayling,6 Nils-Eric Sahlin,7 Richard Kirkham,8 Donald Davidson9 and Michael Lynch10 credit Ramsey with having originated what they call ‘the Redundancy Theory.’ Even an authoritative source such as The Encyclopedia of Philosophy11 attributes this theory to him. What is more, Grover et al.,12 in defending their Prosentential Theory of Truth, claim that their theory is an improvement and development of the Redundancy Theory, which they too attribute to Ramsey.13..

Crispin Sartwell ingeniously defends the provocative thesis that mere true belief suffices for knowledge. In doing so, he challenges one of the most deeply entrenched epistemological tenets, namely that knowledge must be more than mere true belief. Particularly interesting is the way he defends his thesis by appealing to considerations adduced by such prominent epistemologists as William Alston, Laurence BonJour, Alvin Goldman and Paul Moser, each of whom denies that knowledge is merely true belief. In this paper, I argue that the case Sartwell presents for his thesis fails. However, by examining why it fails, we may derive at least four important epistemological lessons: being justified does not entail being able to give a justification; we should distinguish between epistemic justification conceived of as intrinsically conducive to truth and conceived of as extrinsically conducive to truth; we should distinguish between epistemic justification conceived of as an essential criterion of knowledge and conceived of as an accidental criterion of knowledge ; and epistemologists need to specify how the telos of inquiry involves more than the acquisition of true beliefs.Socrates: Then tell me: what definition can we give with the least risk of contradicting ourselves?

Since the demise of the Sense-Datum independent objects or events to be objects Theory and Phenomenalism in the last cenof perception; however, unlike Direct Retury, Direct Realism in the philosophy of alists, Indirect Realists take this percepperception has enjoyed a resurgence of tion to be indirect by involving a prior popularity.1 Curiously, however, although awareness of some tertium quid between there have been attempts in the literature the mind and external objects or events.3 to refute some of the arguments against Idealists and Phenomenalists agree with Direct Realism, there has been, as of yet, the Indirect Realists.

Exploring intentionality from an externalist perspective, I distinguish three kinds of intentionality in the case of seeing, which I call transparent, translucent, and opaque respectively. I then extend the distinction from seeing to knowing, and then to believing. Having explicated the three-fold distinction, I then critically explore some important consequences that follow from granting that (i) there are transparent and translucent intentional states and (ii) these intentional states are mental states. These consequences include: first, that existential opacity is neither the mark of intentionality nor of the mental; second, that Sellars has not shown that all intentionality is non-relational; third, that a key Quinean argument for semantic indeterminacy rests on a false premise; fourth, that perceptual experience is intentional on Alston’s Theory of Appearing; fifth, that either some mental causation is more than internal physiological causation or some mental states are epiphenomenal.