John Turri

A standard view in philosophy is that knowledge entails justification. Yet recent research suggests otherwise. Chapter 2 argues that this admirable and striking research suffers from an important limitation: participants were asked about knowledge but not justification. Thus it is possible that people attributed knowledge partly because they thought the belief was justified. Perhaps though, if given the opportunity, people would deny justification while still attributing knowledge. It is also possible that earlier findings were due to perspective taking. This chapter reports further research that directly addresses these questions; its findings support the hypothesis that knowledge entails justification on the ordinary view.

Chapter 14 reviews several theoretical and empirical developments relevant to assessing contemporary virtue epistemology’s theory of knowledge. It develops a novel theory of knowledge—_abilism_—which is more empirically adequate, better captures the ordinary conception of knowledge, and is ripe for cross-fertilization with cognitive science. Four virtues of abilism are that it does not require knowledge to be reliably produced, can adequately capture the subtle relationships between knowledge and luck, can adequately capture the relationship between knowledge and belief, and potentially connects knowledge​ attributions​ to important distinctions in commonsense metaphysics and causal cognition. The chapter also identifies several topics for future research.

The term ‘Gettier case’ is a technical term frequently applied to a wide array of thought experiments in contemporary epistemology. What do these cases have in common? It is said that they all involve a justified true belief which, intuitively, is not knowledge, due to a form of luck called ‘gettiering.’ While this very broad characterization suffices for some purposes, it masks radical diversity. We argue that the extent of this diversity merits abandoning the notion of a ‘Gettier case’ in favor of more finely grained terminology. We propose such terminology, and use it to effectively sort the myriad Gettier cases from the theoretical literature in a way that charts deep fault lines in ordinary judgments about knowledge.

This paper connects recent findings from experimental epistemology to several major themes in classical Indian epistemology. First, current evidence supports a specific account of the ordinary knowledge concept in contemporary anglophone American culture. According to this account, known as abilism, knowledge is a true representation produced by cognitive ability. I present evidence that abilism closely approximates Nyāya epistemology’s theory of knowledge, especially that found in the Nyāya-sūtra. Second, Americans are more willing to attribute knowledge of positive facts than of negative facts, especially when such facts are inferred and even when the positive and negative “facts” are logically equivalent. Similar suspicions about knowledge of negative facts (absences) seemingly occur in classical Indian epistemology, suggesting that the asymmetry might not be an American quirk but instead reflect a cross-culturally robust tendency in knowledge attributions. Each of these themes—abilism and the positive/negative asymmetry—presents an exciting opportunity for further research in experimental cross-cultural epistemology.

Traditional theories of knowledge explain knowledge in terms of things like justification and belief. Knowledge-first theories of justification and belief explain justification and belief in terms of knowledge. When epistemologists ask whether knowledge "comes first," they are asking whether traditional theories of knowledge take the right approach, or whether knowledge-first theories of things like justification and belief take the right approach. In her contribution to this debate, Mona Simion defends knowledge-first epistemology by defending a knowledge-first theory of belief and using this theory of belief to motivate a knowledge-first theory of justification. In his contribution to this debate, Aidan McGlynn defends traditional epistemology by critiquing Simion's knowledge-first theory of belief. As Simion and McGlynn both recognize, Simion's argument depends on the idea that beliefs that do not amount to knowledge are epistemically defective. While Simion thinks this is plausible, McGlynn thinks we can produce examples of epistemically non-defective beliefs that do not amount to knowledge. As McGlynn acknowledges, his contribution to the debate does not provide a traditional theory of knowledge in place of Simion's knowledge-first theories of justification and belief. However, if McGlynn is right that we can produce examples of epistemically non-defective beliefs that do not amount to knowledge, this casts doubt on at least one central idea in knowledge-first epistemology: that knowledge has explanatory priority over belief.

Pure voluntarism is the claim that we have the same voluntary control over intentions as we do decisions. The Toxin Puzzle is often taken to challenge pure voluntarism by supporting a reasons constraint on intentions. According to this constraint, one cannot voluntarily intend to do something that one lacks a practical reason to do. We present the results of three experiments stemming from this puzzle demonstrating that the concept does not support a reasons constraint and suggests that intentions are regarded as voluntary to the same degree that decisions are.

Knowledge sets the standard for appropriate assertion and recent evidence suggests that it might also set the standard for appropriate belief and decision‐making. Governments spend hundreds of millions of dollars to support the creation, transfer, and mobilization of knowledge. Philosophers have created a dizzying array of Gettier case thought experiments. In doing so, many have been guilty of experimenter bias. This includes some original players who helped set the agenda for decades to come. Cognitive scientists recently began seriously investigating knowledge judgments. The study of Gettier cases was motivated by work in psychology showing important cultural differences in reasoning styles and moral judgments. The nominal category Gettier case includes a variety of cases with radical structural differences that are extremely important in both theory and ordinary practice, so important as to render the nominal category, as the authors have inherited it, utterly useless.

Fully updated with new topics covering the latest developments and debates, the second edition of this highly influential text retains its unique combination of accessibility and originality. Second edition of a highly influential text that has already become a standard in the field, for students and professional researchers alike, due to its impressive line-up of contributors, and its unique combination of accessibility and originality Twenty-six essays in total, covering 13 essential topics Features five new topics that bring readers up to speed on some of the latest developments in the field, and give them a glimpse of where it's headed: Should knowledge come first? Do practical matters affect whether you know? Is virtuous motivation essential to knowing? Can knowledge be lucky? Can evidence be permissive? Substantially updates two other debates: Is there immediate justification? Can belief be justified through coherence alone?

Reliabilism says that knowledge must be produced by reliable abilities. Abilism disagrees and allows that knowledge is produced by unreliable abilities. Previous research strongly supports the conclusion that abilism better describes how knowledge is actually defined in commonsense and science. In this paper, I provide a novel argument that abilism is ethically superior to reliabilism. Whereas reliabilism unethically discriminates against agents by excluding them from knowing, abilism virtuously includes them.

The value of knowledge has always been a central topic within epistemology. Going all the way back to Plato’s Meno, philosophers have asked, why is knowledge more valuable than mere true belief? Interest in this question has grown in recent years, with theorists proposing a range of answers. But some reject the premise of the question and claim that the value of knowledge is ‘swamped’ by the value of true belief. And others argue that statuses other than knowledge, such as justification or understanding, are distinctively valuable. We will call the general question of why knowledge is valuable the value problem.

According to the non-factive hypothesis, espoused by contemporary epistemologists, our ordinary practice of evaluating belief is insensitive to the truth. In other words, on the ordinary view, there is no evaluative connection between what someone should believe and whether their belief would be true. Contrary to that, the factive hypothesis holds that our ordinary practice of evaluating belief is sensitive to the truth. Results from recent behavioral studies strongly support the factive hypothesis, but this evidence was recently subjected to three new objections (Weissglass in Synthese, 2020. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-020-02584-5). This paper summarizes and responds to these objections.

Research on the capacity to understand others' minds has tended to focus on representations ofbeliefs,which are widely taken to be among the most central and basic theory of mind representations. Representations ofknowledge, by contrast, have received comparatively little attention and have often been understood as depending on prior representations of belief. After all, how could one represent someone as knowing something if one does not even represent them as believing it? Drawing on a wide range of methods across cognitive science, we ask whether belief or knowledge is the more basic kind of representation. The evidence indicates that nonhuman primates attribute knowledge but not belief, that knowledge representations arise earlier in human development than belief representations, that the capacity to represent knowledge may remain intact in patient populations even when belief representation is disrupted, that knowledge (but not belief) attributions are likely automatic, and that explicit knowledge attributions are made more quickly than equivalent belief attributions. Critically, the theory of mind representations uncovered by these various methods exhibits a set of signature features clearly indicative of knowledge: they are not modality-specific, they are factive, they are not just true belief, and they allow for representations of egocentric ignorance. We argue that these signature features elucidate the primary function of knowledge representation: facilitating learning from others about the external world. This suggests a new way of understanding theory of mind – one that is focused on understanding others' minds in relation to the actual world, rather than independent from it.

This paper synthesizes convergent lines of evidence to evaluate the hypothesis that objective falsity is essential to lying. Objective accounts of lying affirm this hypothesis; subjective accounts deny it. Evidence from history, logic, social observation, popular culture, lexicography, developmental psychology, inference, spontaneous description, and behavioral experimentation strongly supports the hypothesis. Studies show that the only apparent evidence against the hypothesis is due to task substitution, i.e. ethical concerns or perspective-taking interfering with performance on categorization tasks. I conclude that, overall, existing evidence decisively favors objective accounts.

This entry introduces many of the most important results of the contemporary Virtue epistemology (hereafter 'VE') research program. These include novel attempts to resolve longstanding disputes, solve perennial problems, grapple with novel challenges, and expand epistemology’s horizons. In the process, it reveals the diversity within VE. Beyond sharing the two unifying commitments mentioned above, its practitioners diverge over the nature of intellectual virtues, which questions to ask, and which methods to use.

Virtue epistemology is by now a broad and varied field. Also by now, there are various helpful overviews of the field available, some of which are included in this volume (see especially Battaly 2008 and Baehr 2008).1 This introduction will not provide another. Rather, we will begin with a brief characterization of what virtue epistemology is (Section 1), and then briefly describe some of the topics that are treated in this volume (Section 2). Some of these are topics that have occupied epistemologist in general, while others are raised by virtue epistemology in particular. We end with a summary of the selections that have been collected here (Section 3).