Jonathan L. Kvanvig

In order to compete well against foundationalism and coherentism, the more popular non-skeptical responses to the regress problem, infinitists need two things. They need accounts of both propositional and doxastic justification, where the difference between the two involves the idea of properly basing a belief for the latter. Focusing on the previous chapter’s account of the distinction, this chapter argues that infinitists have difficulties accounting for both propositional and doxastic justification.

Various noncognitivist approaches to faith have been developed recently, treating faith, for example, in terms of hope or some other affective state. One such approach identifies faith with trust. This chapter examines such approaches, focusing on the latter, and concluding that the identification of faith with trust is a mistake. At the same time, it articulates and defends a more generic affective approach to faith, claiming that it does a better job than standard cognitive approaches to faith in helping us to understand important examples of faith, both religious and mundane. The faith of Abraham is discussed as an example of religious faith, and the faith of ordinary people in pursuing their ideals is discussed as an example of mundane faith.

Human beings are rational animals, not in the sense of never being irrational, but in the sense of having a capacity at least occasionally displayed in thought and behavior. The display of this capacity can be casual or carefully controlled, but in neither case is there any guarantee that things will go well just because the capacity in question is on display. The goal of the present chapter is to inquire into the interstices of the three dimensions just employed: the descriptive realm of what people typically do, the normative realm of what they should or shouldn’t do, and the evaluative realm of what is good for them to do.

The Swamping Problem is one of the central problems in the new value-driven approach to epistemology that has arisen recently. It arises from the fact that value isn't always additive, so if you begin with something valuable (true belief) and add a further valuable thing (justification), there is no guarantee that the combination is more valuable. The usual target of such concerns is reliabilism, but such concerns plague approaches that are more conscious of value concerns as well, such as functional accounts that aim at an account of knowledge in terms of its social significance as a marker of dependable sources of information. Here this chapter investigates the fundamental nature of the problem and several recent attempts to provide an escape route from the problem, concluding that none of them succeed.

The knowability paradox derives from a proof by Frederic Fitch in 1963. The proof purportedly shows that if all truths are knowable, it follows that all truths are known. Antirealists, wed as they are to the idea that truth is epistemic, feel threatened by the proof. For what better way to express the epistemic character of truth than to insist that all truths are knowable? Yet, if that insistence logically compels similar assent to some omniscience-like claim, antirealism is in jeopardy. Response to the paradox has drifted toward a common theme — a theme that this chapter argues is a non-starter in resolving the paradox. Seeing this point will also make clear the philosophical inadequacy of simply viewing the paradox as a refutation of a wide range of antirealisms.

Jonathan Kvanvig argues that rational disagreement between epistemic peers is unproblematic. He does so in two steps. First, he urges that the contrary view faces a number of serious objections. Second, he proposes a plausible model of disagreement according to which rational disagreement between epistemic peers is sensible. Kvanvig focuses on the cognitive results of reflection and the sufficiency of justification for closing inquiry. He raises some technical difficulties for some kinds of mollificationism—a view bearing considerable similarity to the view defended by Feldman—and even levels charges of self-defeat. He suggests there is something other than evidence which goes into justification: what you make of the evidence.

This chapter explores the challenge to the proof of Fitch’s results presented by intuitionism, and the prospects of this viewpoint in avoiding the paradox that results. It argues that adopting intuitionistic principles of reasoning will not help avoid the paradox. It merely changes what is paradoxical from a lost distinction between known truth and knowable truth, to a lost distinction between unknown truth and unknowable truth. Since paradox remains in both cases, the solution to the paradox must be found elsewhere.

This chapter explores the different grounds for accepting the claim that all truths are knowable, the assumption central to the derivation of Fitch’s result. It argues that although there is no compelling argument for holding that all truths are knowable, there are various positions in which this feature of semantic anti-realism fits naturally; rejecting this puts serious tension into a broad range of philosophical outlooks, including theism and physicalism. In the end, the paradox should be felt by everyone, even those who do not accept the knowability claim, because the heart of the paradox is not simply in what is implied by the knowability claim, but in a lost logical distinction between what is actual and what is possible.

This chapter examines the logical structure of the knowability paradox, presenting the details of the proofs that underlie the paradox, and clarifying which elements of these proofs give rise to paradox. It argues that there is no simple and obvious logical mistake in the derivation of the knowability result. A paradox has deep significance only if it arises from plausible premises. Those in question in Fitch’s proof are the claim of epistemic modesty, that some truths will never be known, and the knowability principle that all truths are knowable. Although the second claim does not have the same intuitive pull as the first, there are substantive grounds in its favour; grounds that some hold show that all truths are knowable, but which show at the very least that it is plausible to maintain that all truths are knowable.

This chapter argues that the literature surrounding the Gettier Problem arises from a kind of methodological false consciousness in the epistemology of the middle part of the twentieth century. The underlying methodology is contrasted with two paradigms within the history of epistemology: one prompted by the conversational context of scrapes with the skeptic and the other on the scientific project of trying to understand the universe and our place in it. These competing paradigms call for two quite different epistemological projects and we can separate the two projects in a way that sees them as complementary, unlike the picture that emerges from within the presuppositions of the Gettier literature. The resulting picture does not make the Gettier Problem go away, but implies a weaker claim, that it should not now be and never should have been a primary focus of epistemology.

There are two common responses to skepticism, the epistemological claim that knowledge is at least non-existent and perhaps also unachievable, and both are to be avoided. So Jonathan Kvanvig argues here. The first response is to succumb to it, trying then to find some adequate basis for life that foregoes presumptions of knowledge. The second response is dismissive, viewing it as an overwrought, hyperbolic response to human limitations, so wrongheaded that nothing beyond a laconic response is needed before returning to important philosophical tasks. Avoiding these responses requires theory development on the part of skepticism and a way of characterizing sensitive fallibilism in contrast to complacent versions of it. These two tasks take up the majority of the chapters, several of which show how theory development on behalf of the skeptic needs to proceed. The hardest part of this project is to characterize the skeptical ideal for matters that we investigate through the use of defeasible reasoning, where the idea of finding an infallibilist standard looks impossible. In spite of this appearance, it is possible to characterize this ideal in terms of reasoning that puts one in full control over the possibility of error. The other task involves characterizing fallibilism in terms of this notion of full control over the possibilities of error, and then developing a version of this view that doesn't require such full control while at the same time acknowledging, predicting, and explaining how and why such full control appears whenever the language of knowledge is used. The result is an approximationist version of fallibilism that acknowledges that our knowledge is never ideal but is nonetheless close enough to the ideal to be present.