John Hawthorne

This paper will examine two strategies by which religious believers might attempt to defend the rationality of religious belief. The first strategy is a “fine tuning argument.” The main shortcoming of that strategy is that it ignores the crucial issue of the appropriate prior probabilities. The second strategy is what might be called a “trust” strategy. According to this strategy, a belief that is based on trusting someone who knows something is thereby also an instance of knowledge. This strategy might suffice in some respects, but it involves reliance on a mechanism that is doubtful as a prototype for all of our beliefs.

In this work, I discuss how our psychological concepts relate to those pertaining to public language. On the account that I propose, folk psychology has a behavioristic core that provides sufficient conditions for having beliefs and desires, and so a grasp of folk psychological concepts consists fundamentally in understanding how facts about behavior license our applying such concepts. ;In the behavioristic core, semantic concepts applying to public language and psychological concepts have an equally fundamental role to play. On the one hand, psychological concepts are essential to our grip on semantic concepts. First, the concept of belief is fundamental to our sense of the line between a creature that uses a language and one that does not, since we take declarative language use to be, fundamentally, a means of expressing beliefs. It follows that any language user will have to be a fit subject for folk psychology. Second, psychological concepts play a crucial role both in our understanding of what it is to communicate and in communicative activity itself. On the other hand, semantic concepts are crucial to our understanding of what it is to be a believer. I argue for this conclusion by showing that only where there is structured linguistic behavior can we be licensed to ascribe beliefs and desires on the basis of how someone is disposed to behave. ;We should distinguish those psychological concepts that describe inner episodic thinkings from those that do not. The concepts of belief, goal and intention, which fall into the latter category, are conceptually more fundamental then the former, since it is they that belong to the behavioristic core of folk psychology. ;Folk psychology makes room for edpisodic inner thinkings, but our grasp of how to discern inner thinkings both from a third and first person point of view is parasitic on our grasp of what it takes for public language to have content. This thesis gains increased plausibility once one ceases to view public language as a mere instrument for communication and recognizes its role as a tool for cognition.

A very simple contextualist treatment of a sentence containing an epistemic modal, e.g. a might be F, is that it is true iff for all the contextually salient community knows, a is F. It is widely agreed that the simple theory will not work in some cases, but the counterexamples produced so far seem amenable to a more complicated contextualist theory. We argue, however, that no contextualist theory can capture the evaluations speakers naturally make of sentences containing epistemic modals. If we want to respect these evaluations, our best option is a relativist theory of epistemic modals. On a relativist theory, an utterance of a might be F can be true relative to one context of evaluation and false relative to another. We argue that such a theory does better than any rival approach at capturing all the behaviour of epistemic modals.

Moral encroachment is the thesis that morality has an effect---unrecognized by traditional epistemology---on which doxastic states are epistemically appropriate. The thesis is increasingly popular among those who, in opposition to Gendler (2011), desire harmony between epistemic and moral demands on belief. This paper has three main goals. First, drawing on attractive structural principles concerning belief and justification, it is shown that a thoroughgoing harmony between moral and epistemic demands is implausible. This weakens the motivation for positing moral encroachment, but a proponent might still hope that moral encroachment can have a significant effect, so that many of the central cases of apparent disharmony can be avoided. The next goal of the paper is to argue that any significant effect of moral encroachment would manifest itself in the credences which are most epistemically appropriate. Finally, it is shown that even a small effect of moral encroachment on credence is in tension with widely accepted basic constraints on epistemically appropriate credence.

This chapter examines sensitive moderate invariantism, and how it may help the puzzle. It describes two mechanisms that bear on the truth of knowledge claims; ones that are similar to contextualist machinery except that they are conceived of as making for subject-sensitivity. The sensitive moderate invariantist claims that the extension of ‘know’ depends not only on the kinds of actors traditionally adverted to accounts of knowledge but also on the kinds of factors that in the contextualist’s hands make for ascriber-dependence.

This chapter introduces the epistemological puzzle to be examined in this volume. In essence, the puzzle consists of a tension between various ordinary claims to know and our apparent incapacity to know whether or not someone will lose a lottery. It discusses why we are inclined to think that lottery propositions are unknowable. These unknowable intuitions are linked to other intuitions concerning our assertoric and deliberative dispositions with regard to lottery propositions. It then discusses the epistemic closure, which is vital to the force of the puzzle.

This chapter examines the advantages and disadvantages of contextualism, and its application to the puzzle. Contextualism offers a compelling solution to puzzle. The contextualist allows that ordinary knowledge ascriptions often come out true, and allows the ordinary claims to the effect that lottery propositions are not known can also come true. He explains away the apparent threat to closure provided by the original puzzles. The resolution of conflicting intuitions is prima facie and extremely compelling.

The main aims in this article are to discuss and criticize the core thesis of a position that has become known as phenomenal conservatism. According to this thesis, its seeming to one that p provides enough justification for a belief in p to be prima facie justified. This thesis captures the special kind of epistemic import that seemings are claimed to have. To get clearer on this thesis, the article embeds it, first, in a probabilistic framework in which updating on new evidence happens by Bayesian conditionalization, and second, a framework in which updating happens by Jeffrey conditionalization. The article spells out problems for both views, and then generalizes some of these to nonprobabilistic frameworks. The main theme of the discussion is that the epistemic import of a seeming should depend on its content in a plethora of ways that phenomenal conservatism is insensitive to.

This paper presents an argument that certain AI safety measures, rather than mitigating existential risk, may instead exacerbate it. Under certain key assumptions - the inevitability of AI failure, the expected correlation between an AI system's power at the point of failure and the severity of the resulting harm, and the tendency of safety measures to enable AI systems to become more powerful before failing - safety efforts have negative expected utility. The paper examines three response strategies: Optimism, Mitigation, and Holism. Each faces challenges stemming from intrinsic features of the AI safety landscape that we term Bottlenecking, the Perfection Barrier, and Equilibrium Fluctuation. The surprising robustness of the argument forces a re-examination of core assumptions around AI safety and points to several avenues for further research.

How can the propositional attitudes of several individuals be aggregated into overall collective propositional attitudes? Although there are large bodies of work on the aggregation of various special kinds of propositional attitudes, such as preferences, judgments, probabilities and utilities, the aggregation of propositional attitudes is seldom studied in full generality. In this paper, we seek to contribute to filling this gap in the literature. We sketch the ingredients of a general theory of propositional attitude aggregation and prove two new theorems. Our first theorem simultaneously characterizes some prominent aggregation rules in the cases of probability, judgment and preference aggregation, including linear opinion pooling and Arrovian dictatorships. Our second theorem abstracts even further from the specific kinds of attitudes in question and describes the properties of a large class of aggregation rules applicable to a variety of belief-like attitudes. Our approach integrates some previously disconnected areas of investigation.

Inquiry aims at knowledge. Your inquiry into a question succeeds just in case you come to know the answer. However, combined with a common picture on which misleading evidence can lead knowledge to be lost, this view threatens to recommend a novel form of dogmatism. At least in some cases, individuals who know the answer to a question appear required to avoid evidence bearing on it. In this paper, we’ll aim to do two things. First, we’ll present an argument for this novel form of dogmatism and show that it presents a substantive challenge. Second, we’ll consider a way those who take knowledge to be the aim of inquiry can mount a response. In the course of doing so, we’ll try to get clearer on the normative connections between inquiry, knowledge and evidence gathering.