David Henderson

This introductory chapter proceeds in three parts. The first section characterizes the general approach to epistemology around which the volume revolves—purposeful epistemology—and examines the general motivation for that approach. The guiding idea is that considerations about the point and purpose of epistemic evaluation might fruitfully constrain epistemological theory and yield insights for epistemological reflection. The second section explores the approach by characterizing some important versions of it. Several themes and issues that we see running through the volume are here articulated and highlighted. The third section provides a brief summary of each contribution to the collection.

On what has become the received view of the principle of charity, it is a fundamental methodological constraint on interpretation that we find peoples’ intentional states patterned in ways that are characterized by norms of rationality. This recommended use of normative principles of rationality to inform intentional description is epistemically unmotivated. To say that the received view lacks epistemic motivation is to say that to interpret as it recommends would be epistemically irresponsible ans, in important respects irrational. On the alternative that I recommend, descriptive psychological generalization are what properly inform interpretation. One can readily understand the epistemic motivations for so interpreting, for they are the familiar reasons for informing description with background descriptive information. No parallel motivations for the received view seems possible.

Epistemic Evaluation aims to explore and apply a particular methodology in epistemology. The methodology is to consider the point or purpose of our epistemic evaluations, and to pursue epistemological theory in light of such matters. Call this purposeful epistemology. The idea is that considerations about the point and purpose of epistemic evaluation might fruitfully constrain epistemological theory and yield insights for epistemological reflection. Several contributions to this volume explicitly address this general methodology, or some version of it. Others focus on advancing some application of the methodology rather than on theorizing about it. The papers go on to explore the idea that purposes allow one to understand the conceptual demands on knowing, examine how purposeful epistemology might shed light on the debate between internalist and externalist epistemologies, and further develop the idea of purposeful epistemology.

In What Philosophers Know, Gary Gutting provides an epistemology of philosophical reflection. This paper focuses on the roles that various intuitive inputs are said to play in philosophical thought. Gutting argues that philosophers are defeasibly entitled to believe some of these, prior to the outcome of the philosophical reflection, and that they then rightly serve as significant (again defeasible) anchors on reflection. This paper develops a view of epistemic entitlement and applies it to argue that many prephilosophical convictions of the kind Gutting discusses would be just the sort of belief for which entitlement would plausibly be defeated from the start. They then could not properly play the role in philosophical reflection that Gutting envisions for them

Accounts of what it is for an agent to be justified in holding a belief commonly carry commitments concerning what cognitive processes can and should be like. A concern for the plausibility of such commitments leads to a multi-faceted epistemology in which elements of traditionally conflicting epistemologies are vindicated within a single epistemological account. The accessible and articulable states that have been the exclusive focus of much epistemology must constitute only a proper subset of epistemologically relevant processing. The interaction of such states looks rather contextualist. It might also be called quasi-foundationalist. However, in attending to our epistemological tasks we must rely on processing that is sensitive to information that we could not articulate, that is not accessible in the standard internalist sense. When focusing on the full range of epistemologically important processes, the structure of what makes for justification is rather more like that envisioned by some coherentists.

Disagreement affords humans as members of epistemic communities important opportunities for refining or improving their epistemic situations with respect to many of their beliefs. To get such epistemic gains, one needs to explore and gauge one’s own epistemic situation and the epistemic situations of others. Accordingly, a fitting response to disagreement regarding some matter, p, typically will turn on the resolution of two strongly interrelated questions: (1) whether p, and (2) why one’s interlocutor disagrees with oneself about p. When one has high intellectual respect for one’s interlocutor, answering question (2) involves arriving at a sympathetic explanatory understanding of the interlocutor’s own epistemic attitude toward p. Sorting out (2) is an abductive matter. Further, so far as the abductive explanation conditions one’s epistemic take regarding (1), there will be an abductive character to one’s epistemic position with respect to whether p—even where one’s initial purchase on whether p was not an abductive matter. We explain here how this can be managed naturally and tractably.

The argument I present here is an example of the manner in which naturalizing epistemology can help address fairly traditional epistemological issues. I develop one argument against coherentist epistemologies of empirical knowledge. In doing so, I draw on BonJour (1985), for that account seems to me to indicate the direction in which any plausible coherentist account would need to be developed, at least insofar as such accounts are to conceive of justification in terms of an agent (minimally) possessing articul able reasons and arguments, as is standard. I end by indicating important elements of coherentist epistemology that can be salvaged in the face of my argument, provided we are willing to drop the traditional commitment to characterizing justification in terms of the structure of articulable argument.

Naturalized epistemology is not a recent invention, nor is it a philosophical invention. Rather, it is a cognitive phenomena that is pervasive and desirable in the way of human epistemic engagement with their world. It is a matter of the way that one’s cognitive processes can be modulated by information gotten from those same or wider cognitive processes. Such modulational control enhances the reliability of one’s cognitive processes in many ways ‐ and judgments about objective epistemic justification consistently evince a reasonable demand for it. However, with suitable modulational control in place within an agent or a community of agents, the fitting cognitive processes take time to generate information that then engenders changes in processes and norms. Further, as there are significant historical and biographical contingencies involving trajectories through one’s environment, there are contingencies in the information and modifications that will be engendered by suitable modulational control. As a result, what makes for objectively justified belief at a time will vary ‐ as the fruits of suitable modulational control accrue over time. This is a moderate form of historicism about epistemic justification

This paper explores a position that combines contextualism regarding knowledge with the idea that the central point or purpose of the concept of knowledge is to feature in attributions that keep epistemic gate for contextually salient communities. After highlighting the main outlines and virtues of the suggested gate-keeping contextualism, two issues are pursued. First, the motivation for the view is clarified in a discussion of the relation between evaluative concepts and the purposes they serve. This clarifies why one's sense for the point of an evaluative concept ought to constrain and inform one's understanding of the concept. Second, the paper explores ways of avoiding a problem in the author's earlier development of gate-keeping contextualism. The initial development of the view opened the door to a form of skepticism that would hobble an important facet of our social-epistemic lives

The chapter rehearses the main outlines of gatekeeping contextualism—the view that it is central to the concept of knowledge that attributions of knowledge function in a kind of epistemic gatekeeping for contextually salient communities. The case for gatekeeping contextualism is clarified within an extended discussion of the character of philosophical reflection. The chapter argues that normatively valenced, evaluative concepts constitute a broad class of concepts for which a sociolinguistic point or purpose may be readily sensed—and for which the intimate connection between point/purpose and the concept itself is readily understandable. Commonly at the inception of philosophical reflection one’s sense for the point or purpose of a specific concept is seldom highly articulate. The chapter argues that this does not prevent one’s grasp of point/purpose from doing real work in philosophical reflection.

We respond to the central concerns raised by our commentators to our book, The Epistemological Spectrum. Casullo believes that our account of what we term “low-grade a priori” justification provides important clarification of a kind of philosophical reflection. However he objects to calling such reflection a priori. We explain what we think is at stake. Along the way, we comment on his idea of that there may be an epistemic payoff to making a distinction between assumptions and presumptions. In the book, we argued that an epistemically important form of nonaccidental reliability can be understood as a matter of processes being “transglobally reliable under modulational control.” Graham recommends another form of nonaccidental reliability, one rooted in evolutionary etiology. We explain why we think that the reliability of perceptual processes is best understood as turning of the kinds of modulational control that we highlight. We clarify how this approach represents a kind of reasonable epistemic patience—modulational control takes time, as it must turn on agents generating information about their own capacities and foibles. Lyons raises interesting questions regarding how (what we term) morphological content possessed by the agent can do the work that we set for it. We argue that it is necessary in order for agents to accommodate the background information that is relevant to many central problems of belief formation. We clarify how it can be expected to work

Some hold that beliefs arising out of certain sources such as perceptual experience enjoy a kind of entitlement—as one is entitled to believe what is thereby presented as true, at least unless further evidence undermines that entitlement. This is commonly understood to require that default epistemic entitlement is a non-evidential kind of epistemic warrant. Our project here is to challenge this common, non-evidential, conception of epistemic entitlement. We will argue that although there are indeed basic beliefs with default entitlement status, typically the kind of default entitlement they possess is primarily a matter of the evidential support that accrues to them, both synchronically and diachronically, from wider mental states beyond the specific sensory-perceptual experiences that spawn them. We will call this status evidentially embedded epistemic entitlement—as distinct from entitlement as commonly understood in the literature, which we will call evidentially insular. Epistemic entitlement normally is characterized in the manner set forth in the first paragraph above, viz., as a form of default epistemic warrant that a given belief possesses independently of any other beliefs. We suggest that not all evidential support is managed at the level of belief. Thus, leaves room for the possibility of an epistemically embedded kind of entitlement. Here we develop the needed conception of entitlement drawing on Henderson and Horgan’s ideas of a kind of “iceberg epistemology.”