Balder Ask Zaar

This paper explores how evolutionary epistemology can offer insights into the discussion of naturalization of epistemology and normativity. Living organisms have an inherent disposition to continue living – i.e., staying in homeostasis – which they accomplish through an anticipatory regulatory process called allostasis. Organisms only survive under certain conditions, and so their actions and predictions need to be “good enough” for the organism, and species, to continue existing. That is, if their actions and predictions are successful or accurate to a satisficing degree, they will have a higher chance of surviving. Since congruence between model and world is conducive to survival, evolution will tend to select for mechanisms that engender such congruence. With this in mind, we argue that the world provides a naturally grounded ‘truth-connected’ normative standard, indicating that epistemic normativity is shaped by an inherent biological disposition to persist in a perilous world.

In this article, I present a modified reliabilist theory of knowledge which purports to solve many of the problems currently facing standard reliabilism. With the help of a dispositionally construed reliabilist theory of knowledge and justification (DRK and DRJ), tentative responses to the following problems for reliabilism are offered: The New Evil Demon Problem, The Clairvoyance Problem, The Mr. Truetemp Problem, The Gettier Problem, Barn Cases (Brandom’s and Goldman’s), and The Lottery Problem. Lastly, I argue that, despite diverging from the letter of standard reliabilism, DRK and DRJ remain within the spirit of reliabilist epistemology.

In this article I discuss two counterexamples (the New Evil Demon Problem and Norman‘s Clairvoyance) to reliabilism and a potential solution: dispositional reliabilism. The latter is a recent addition to the many already-existing varieties of reliabilism and faces some serious problems of its own. I argue here that these problems are surmountable. The resulting central argument of the article aims to demonstrate how viewing reliabilism as an intrinsic dispositional property solves many of the issues facing reliabilism to date.

The new evil demon problem amounts to a difficult challenge for the externalist about epistemic justification. Many solutions to the problem have been proffered in the almost 40 years since its first appearance in the literature. Among the more promising responses is indexical reliabilism, a combination of two versions of actual world reliabilism where “actual” denotes either the world of utterance or a rigidly determined actual world. This paper does three things. First, it attempts to clarify indexical reliabilism and how it purports to solve the new evil demon problem. Second, it attempts to mitigate some of the prominent criticism that has been leveled against the theory. Third, it poses an explanatory challenge for the theory which remains even after all of the premises supporting indexical reliabilism are accepted. The conclusion is that indexical reliabilism is not tenable until a linguistic mechanism for the use of “actually reliable” has been offered that explains how the theory avoids collapsing into a two-concepts response to the new evil demon problem.

In this paper, I evaluate some recent attacks on Williamson's claim that knowledge is the most general factive stative propositional attitude. Two types of approaches are discussed: The first approach attempts to show that there are factive mental states denoted by factive mental state operators that are not cases of knowing. The second approach aims to show that there are factive mental states that to Williamson count as cases of knowing, but nonetheless fail to entail a corresponding belief. If either of these approaches were successful, it would potentially be damaging for Williamson's theory of knowledge. I argue that recent arguments that exemplify these approaches are unconvincing.