Stephen Hetherington

How might epistemology build upon its past and present, so as to be better in the future? Epistemology Futures takes bold steps towards answering that question. What methods will best serve epistemology? Which phenomena and concepts deserve more attention from it? Are there approaches and assumptions that have impeded its progress until now? This volume contains provocative essays by prominent epistemologists, presenting many new ideas for possible improvements in how to do epistemology. Contributors: Paul M. Churchland, Catherine Z. Elgin, Richard Feldman, A. C. Grayling, Stephen Hetherington, Christopher Hookway, Hilary Kornblith, Mark Kaplan, William G. Lycan, Adam Morton, Jonathan M. Weinberg, Linda Zagzebski.

Despite the problems students often have with the theory of knowledge, it remains, necessarily, at the core of the philosophical enterprise. As experienced teachers know, teaching epistemology requires a text that is not only clear and accessible, but also capable of successfully motivating the abstract problems that arise.In Knowledge Puzzles, Stephen Hetherington presents an informal survey of epistemology based on the use of puzzles to illuminate problems of knowledge. Each topic is introduced through a puzzle, and readers are invited to work their own ways toward a solution. Hetherington’s light and undogmatic style encourages class discussion and independent thought rather than the memorization of “book” answers.Covering all of the most important epistemological issues, informed by classical and contemporary literature, and rich in probing questions and suggestions for further readings, Knowledge Puzzles is a pedagogical breakthrough. Whether it is used as a main text or supplement, this lucid and engaging text will be welcomed by both teachers and students.

For a while now, there has been much conceptual discussion about the respective natures of knowledge-that and knowledge-how, along with the intellectualist idea that knowledge-how is really a kind of knowledge-that. Gilbert Ryle put in place most of the terms that have so far been distinctive of that debate, when he argued for knowledge-how's conceptual distinctness from knowledge-that. But maybe those terms should be supplemented, expanding the debate. In that spirit, the conceptual option of practicalism has recently entered the fray. Practicalism conceives anew the nature of knowledge-that, as being a kind of knowledge-how. In this paper we enlarge upon this conceptual suggestion. We draw from an ancient Chinese text, the Analects of Confucius, explaining how it lends some support to practicalism

I argue that Goodman's puzzle of grue at least poses no real challenge about inductive inference. By drawing on Stove's characterisation of Hume's characterisation of inductive inference, we see that the premises in an inductive inference report experienced impressions; and Goodman can be interpreted as posing a real challenge about inductive inference only if we treat an epistemic subject's observations more as logical contents and less as experienced impressions. So, even though the grue puzzle was effective against its stated logicist targets, it is not thereby an enduring difficulty regarding experience's ability to impart epistemic justification via inductive evidence.

The consequence argument is at the core of contemporary incompatibilism about causal determinism and freedom of action. Yet Helen Beebee and Alfred Mele have shown how, on a Humean conception of laws of nature, the consequence argument is unsound. Nonetheless, this paper describés how, by generalising their main idea, we may restore the essential point and force (whatever that might turn out to be) of the consequence argument. A modified incompatibilist argument — which will be called the so-far consequence argument — may thus be derived.

Some key aspects of contemporary epistemology deserve to be challenged, and _How to Know_ does just that. This book argues that several long-standing presumptions at the heart of the standard analytic conception of knowledge are false, and defends an alternative, a practicalist conception of knowledge. Presents a philosophically original conception of knowledge, at odds with some central tenets of analytic epistemology Offers a dissolution of epistemology’s infamous Gettier problem — explaining why the supposed problem was never really a problem in the first place. Defends an unorthodox conception of the relationship between knowledge-that and knowledge-how, understanding knowledge-that as a _kind_ of knowledge-how.

Might epistemic justification be, to some substantive extent, a function of epistemic responsibility—a belief's being formed, or its being maintained, in an epistemically responsible way? I will call any analysis of epistemic justification endorsing that kind of idea epistemic responsibilism—or, for short, responsibilism. Many epistemic internalists are responsibilists, because they think that what makes a belief justified is its being appropriately related to one's good evidence for it, and because many of them regard this appropriate relation as somehow involving one's being epistemically responsible. Alvin Goldman describes internalism as relying upon a guidance-deontological conception of epistemic justification, at the heart of which is a concept of epistemic responsibility. Alvin Plantinga, too, characterises internalism in deontological terms, epistemic responsibility being one of the most prominent such terms. And the concept of epistemic responsibility might feature in attempts to develop a virtue epistemology. Epistemic responsibility would be an epistemic virtue, and epistemic justification would be present partly due to one's being epistemically virtuous.

Philosophers talk routinely of 'Hume's problem of induction'. But the usual accompanying exegesis is mistaken in a way that has led epistemologists to conceive of 'Hume's problem' in needlessly narrow terms. They have overlooked a way of articulating the conceptual problem, along with a potential way of solving it. Indeed, they have overlooked Hume's own way. In explaining this, I will supplement Hume's insights by adapting Ryle's thinking on knowledge-how and knowledge-that. We will also see why Hume's 'sceptical solution' was a perfectly appropriate response to his 'sceptical argument' -- rather than (as is often thought by analytic epistemologists) a merely descriptive response patently missing the normative sceptical point so strikingly formulated by Hume