Christopher Hookway

This volume, derived from the Royal Institute of Philosophy 1992 conference, brings together some of the leading figures in the burgeoning field of cognitive science to explore current and potential advances in the philosophical understanding of mind and cognition. Drawing on work in psychology, computer science and artificial intelligence, linguistics and philosophy, the papers tackle such issues as concept acquisition, blindsight, rationality and related questions as well as contributing to the lively debates about connectionism and neural networks. The collection as a whole reflects the theoretical and methodological dynamism of this interdisciplinary field

Miranda Fricker's important study of epistemic injustice is focussed primarily on testimonial injustice and hermeneutic injustice. It explores how agents' capacities to make assertions and provide testimony can be impaired in ways that can involve forms of distinctively epistemic injustice. My paper identifies a wider range of forms of epistemic injustice that do not all involve the ability to make assertions or offer testimony. The paper considers some examples of some other ways in which injustice can prevent someone from participating in inquiry

Ethics studies the evaluation of actions, agents and their mental states and characters from a distinctive viewpoint or employing a distinctive vocabulary. And epistemology examines the evaluation of actions (inquiries and assertions), agents (believers and inquirers), and their states (belief and attitudes) from a different viewpoint. Given this common concern with evaluation, we should surely expect there to be considerable similarities between the issues examined and the ideas employed in the two areas. However, when we examine most textbooks in ethics and epistemology, this expectation is not fulfilled. Of course, the vocabularies of evaluation are different: in ethics, we are concerned with issues of right and wrong, virtue and vice, moral obligation, and so on; and in epistemology, it is most commonly assumed that we are interested in whether states count as knowledge or as justified beliefs, with whether beliefs and strategies of belief formation are rational