Davide Fassio

A recent view in contemporary epistemology holds that practical reasoning is governed by an epistemic norm. Evidence for the existence of this norm is provided by the ways in which we assess our actions and reasoning on the basis of whether certain epistemic conditions are satisfied. Philosophers disagree on what this norm is—whether it is knowledge, justified belief or something else. Nobody however challenges the claim that practical reasoning is governed by such a norm. I argue that assuming the existence of an epistemic norm of practical reasoning is neither the only nor the best way to accommodate the available data. I introduce and defend an alternative account that avoids the assumption. According to this account, the relevant epistemic assessments of action and reasoning are instrumental assessments relative to the regulation conditions of a non-epistemic norm.

The overall objective of this dissertation is to provide an analysis of the standard of correctness of belief. According to this standard, a belief is correct if and only if the believed proposition is true. My analysis consists in the investigation of a set of aspects and properties of the correctness standard of belief. The main point argued in this dissertation is that the correctness standard of belief is a standard of conformity to the satisfaction conditions of a representational function constitutive of belief. Another relevant conclusionreached in my dissertation concerns the appropriate formulation of the standard in an ought-claim. I argued that the proper way of formulating the standard in an ought-claim is: "for any S, p: it ought to be the case that p, given that S believes that p"

In "The Limits of Science" N. Rescher introduces a logical argument known as the Knowability Paradox, according to which, if every true proposition is knowable, then every true proposition is known, i.e. if there are unknown truths, there are unknowable truths. Rescher argues that the Knowability Paradox, giving evidence to a limit of our knowledge (the existence of unknowable truths) could be used for arguing against perfected science. In this article we present two criticisms against Rescher's argument

Some philosophers have recently argued that whether a true belief amounts to knowledge in a specific circumstance depends on features of the subject’s practical situation that are unrelated to the truth of the subject’s belief, such as the costs for the subject of being wrong about whether the believed proposition is true. One of the best-known arguments used to support this view is that it best explains a number of paradigmatic cases, such as the well-known Bank Case, in which a difference in knowledge occurs in subjects differing exclusively with respect to their practical situation. I suggest an alternative explanation of such cases. My explanation has a disjunctive character: on the one hand, it accounts for cases in which the subject is aware of the costs of being wrong in a given situation in terms of the influence of psychological factors on her mechanisms of belief-formation and revision. On the other hand, it accounts for cases in which the subject is ignorant of the costs of being wrong in her situation by imposing a new condition on knowledge. This condition is that one knows that p only if one does not underestimate the importance of being right about whether p. I argue that my explanation has a number of advantages over other invariantist explanations: it accounts for all the relevant cases preserving the semantic significance of our ordinary intuitions, it is compatible with an intellectualist account of knowledge and it escapes several problems affecting competing views.

Deontic Doxastic Constitutivism is the view that beliefs are constitutively governed by deontic norms. This roughly means that a full account and understanding of the nature of these mental attitudes cannot be reached unless one appeals to some norm of this type. My aim in this article is to provide an objection to such a conception of the normativity of belief. I argue that if some deontic norm is constitutive of belief, then the addressees of such a norm are committed to a potentially infinite number of norms. Furthermore, if addressees are in the position to fulfill all such norms, they must also be able to hold a potentially infinite number of logically independent beliefs. Both these consequences are problematic if compared with limited human capacities to act and believe.

Nicholas Rescher, in The Limits of Science (1984), argued that: «perfected science is a mirage; complete knowledge a chimera» . He reached the above conclusion from a logical argument known as Fitch’s Paradox of Knowability. The argument, starting from the assumption that every truth is knowable, proves that every truth is also actually known and, given that some true propositions are not actually known, it concludes, by modus tollens, that there are unknowable truths. Prima facie, this argument seems to seriously narrow our epistemic possibilities and to constitute a limit for knowledge (included scientific knowledge). Rescher’s above quoted conclusion follows the same sort of reasoning. Recently, Bernard Linsky exploited a possible way to block the argument employing a type-distinction of knowledge. If the Knowability paradox is blocked, then Rescher’s conclusion cannot be drawn. After an introduction to the paradox, we suggest, in our paper, a possible way of justifying a type-solution for it in the scientific field. A noteworthy point is that the effectiveness of this solution depends on the degree of reductionism adopted in science: the given solution is available only if we do not adopt a complete reductionism in science so that there is just one kind of scientific knowledge and, consequently, of scientific justification. Otherwise Rescher's argument still works.