Baron Reed

This chapter examines the relationship between the practical and the epistemic. It rejects two broad ways of thinking about that relationship—pragmatic encroachment and an epistemology centered on the truth norm—before offering a new approach, which explains epistemic normativity as arising from our practical commitment to a social practice that has arisen from our need to share information with one another. The chapter discusses the way in which the social practice view captures the importance of knowledge and epistemic reasons to action, while preventing our practical interests from playing a disruptive role in how we arrive at our beliefs.

One of the main strands of the Cartesian tradition is the view that the mental realm is cognitively accessible to us in a special way: whenever one is in a mental state of a certain sort, one can know it just by considering the matter. In that sense, the mental realm is thought to be a cognitive home for us, and the mental states it comprises are luminous. Recently, however, Timothy Williamson has argued that we are cognitively homeless: no mental state is in fact luminous. But his argument depends on an excessively strong account of luminosity. I formulate a weaker conception of luminosity that is unaffected by Williamson’s argument and yet is substantial enough to satisfy those who wish to retain this part of the Cartesian tradition.

This chapter traces the significance of a common feature of action and knowledge. A successful analysis of action must capture the sense in which there is someone who is acting. Similarly, it is argued, a successful analysis of knowledge must capture the sense in which there is someone who knows. Explicitly recognizing this fact helps to explain the importance of epistemic agency in understanding what knowledge is. This chapter explores the connections between knowledge, agency, and personhood and argues that some of the most widely shared intuitions in epistemology can be grounded in the sense that knowledge belongs to persons. The chapter comments on the way in which a claim of this sort has been taken up by virtue epistemology, as well as the difficulties we face in providing a full understanding of how knowledge can belong to persons. The chapter closes with a consideration of the value of knowledge.

Many people find their encounter with sceptical arguments to be puzzling. A few even find them disturbing enough to warrant writing refutations. Nathan’s approach is different. He is willing to concede that some sceptical arguments are sound; he denies, however, that this matters. The conjecture that Nathan tests in this book is that “no sound sceptical argument has a conclusion whose truth value is anything but a matter of indifference”. His focus, then, is not so much on the sceptical arguments themselves as on our reactions to them

There have been several recent attempts to account for the special authority of self-knowledge by grounding it in a constitutive relation between an agent's intentional states and her judgments about those intentional states. This constitutive relation is said to hold in virtue of the rationality of the subject. I argue, however, that there are two ways in which we have self-knowledge without there being such a constitutive relation between first-order intentional states and the second-order judgments about them. Recognition of this fact thus represents a significant challenge to the rational agency view

Ernest Sosa's virtue perspectivism can be thought of as an attempt to capture as much as possible of the Cartesian project in epistemology while remaining within the framework of externalist fallibilism. I argue (a) that Descartes's project was motivated by a desire for intellectual stability and (b) that his project does not suffer from epistemic circularity. By contrast, Sosa's epistemology does entail epistemic circularity and, for this reason, proves unable to secure the sort of intellectual stability Descartes wanted. I then argue that this leaves Sosa's epistemology vulnerable to an important kind of skepticism

Almost every contemporary theory of knowledge is a version of fallibilism, yet an adequate statement of fallibilism has not yet been provided. Standard definitions cannot account for fallibilistic knowledge of necessary truths. I consider and reject several attempts to resolve this difficulty before arguing that a belief is an instance of fallibilistic knowledge when it could have failed to be knowledge. This is a fully general account of fallibilism that applies to knowledge of necessary truths. Moreover, it reveals, not only the connection between fallibility and error, but the connection between fallibility and accidental truth as well.

Any theory of knowledge that is fallibilist—i.e., that allows for one to have knowledge that could have been false or accidentally true—faces the lottery paradox. The paradox arises from the combination of two plausible claims: first, no one can know that one’s lottery ticket will lose prior to learning that it in fact has lost, and, second, the justification one has for the belief that one’s ticket will lose is just as good as the justification one has for paradigmatic instances of knowledge. In thispaper, I offer a solution to the lottery paradox that is grounded in a thorough-going acceptance of fallibilism.

Fallibilism is the philosophical view that reconciles our ability to have knowledge with our constant vulnerability to error: we know even though our basis for knowledge might have failed to be adequate. In the central chapter, I trace a parallel between fallibilism and compatibilism. Recent work in the philosophy of free agency has drawn attention to a connection between freedom and personhood . I suggest that a similar connection is crucial in epistemology: only persons can know, and knowledge must be connected with what constitutes a subject as a cognitive person. Fallibilism and compatibilism offer what I call world-involving theories of personhood: what constitutes one as a person essentially involves how one is connected to the world. These world-involving theories face difficulties in showing how a person can be properly related to the thing known or to an action . I argue that fallibilism and compatibilism are incapable of resolving these problems and, hence, that world-involving theories of personhood are fundamentally flawed. Other chapters develop closely related themes: the proper analysis of fallibilism, the importance of the intellectual virtues and their role in epistemic agency, the kinds of accidentality that may undermine knowledge, and disjunctivism as a response to skepticism. Disjunctivism is a view that attempts to combine fallibilism with the ability to have a direct awareness of the truth . I examine this view as it is developed both in current epistemology and by the ancient Stoics

Epistemic circularity occurs when a subject forms the belief that a faculty F is reliable through the use of F. Although this is often thought to be vicious, externalist theories generally don't rule it out. For some philosophers, this is a reason to reject externalism. However, Michael Bergmann defends externalism by drawing on the tradition of common sense in two ways. First, he concedes that epistemically circular beliefs cannot answer a subject's doubts about her cognitive faculties. But, he argues, subjects don't have such doubts, so epistemically circular beliefs are rarely called upon to play this role. Second, following Thomas Reid, Bergmann argues that we have noninferential, though epistemically circular, knowledge that our faculties are reliable. I argue, however, that Bergmann's view is undermined by doubts a subject should have and that there is no plausible explanation for how we can have noninferential knowledge that our faculties are reliable.

Although recent epistemology has been marked by several prominent disagreements – e.g., between foundationalists and coherentists, internalists and externalists – there has been widespread agreement that some form of fallibilism must be correct. According to a rough formulation of this view, it is possible for a subject to have knowledge even in cases where the justification or grounding for the knowledge is compatible with the subject’s being mistaken. In this paper, I examine the motivation for fallibilism before providing a fully general account of the view. I conclude by looking at the two major difficulties for fallibilism: the Gettier problem and the lottery paradox.