Nathan J. Fox

A diverse range of epistemological and psychological accounts address systematic deviations from epistemic norms in belief formation and knowledge attribution—for example, contextualism, motivated reasoning, and myside bias. Each focuses on phenomena that exhibit distinctive combinations of contextual, semantic, motivational, normative, ethical, evidential, interpersonal, and institutional features. Even so, Wittgensteinian family resemblances run through these phenomena. Signal detection theory (SDT) illuminates these resemblances by highlighting associations between non-epistemic valuations of decision outcomes and upward or downward pressures on evidentiary thresholds for intuitive certainty—the absence of ordinary doubt. Surveying a deliberately diverse sample of accounts reveals the pattern’s scope and ubiquity, yielding three comparative spectra: pressure dominance, pressure balance, and entrenchment in the face of counterevidence. Recognizing the resemblances and viewing epistemic phenomena along these spectra helps gauge the depth of potential bias, anticipate divergences in certainty or doubt, and foresee social friction or maladaptive behaviour. The framework extends to rational acceptance via dual-process cognition and offers modest implications for Bayesian updating, reliabilism, and coherentism. It thereby fosters greater self-awareness and more constructive dialogue in personal, expert, and institutional contexts.

Over the last hundred years, competing and incompatible positions in relation to basic problems of knowledge and the use of the verb ‘to know’ have multiplied; and the prospect of a consensus solution emerging with respect to any of the problems has not seemed particularly good. We have a Gordian knot. Even so, I suggest that we also have a way to cut it. This will involve identifying why the cognitive mechanism that produces our intuitions of knowing evolved and was maintained (by natural selection), i.e., identifying the ‘teleonomic function’ of that cognitive mechanism. Also, it will involve predicting, on the basis of this teleonomic function, the triggering-conditions of these natural knowledge intuitions. In this thesis, I develop a general theory of the origin, function and triggering-conditions of knowledge intuitions that will allow us to cut that knot. That theory follows basic biological theory (including that which pertains to natural altruism) and also signal detection theory. My theory identifies a number of different circumstances under which the triggering-conditions of knowledge intuitions are different. Strikingly, these different circumstances (and their associated triggering-conditions) map onto the different competing and incompatible epistemological positions to which I referred. This suggests that these positions are all correct within the boundaries of one of the circumstances that my theory identifies; and that the Gordian knot is largely the result of epistemologists claiming universal applicability of a theory that in fact only applies under particular circumstances. We cut the knot by specifying the different circumstances under which each of the different epistemological positions will hold, and the reason we should expect it to hold in just these circumstances, in light of the teleonomic function of knowledge intuitions.

Error Management Theory (EMT) suggests that cognitive adaptations evolve to minimize the cost of false negative and false positive errors in detections of consequential environmental conditions. These adaptations manifest as biases tailored to specific environmental conditions. This paper proposes that the same selection pressure fostered the evolution of a self-biasing ability, allowing us to minimize such costs based on experience and culturally transmitted information. The research indicates that this ability specifically applies to productions of belief or doubt about the existence of an environmental condition that is not adequately perceptible to the senses, e.g., doubt that the man is being honest. A model of this self-biasing process, rooted in signal detection theory, is developed and its explanatory reach is demonstrated through many diverse examples from epistemological and social psychological literatures. These examples feature an evidentiary standard for belief that appears too high or low, or seems to have modulated. This study aims to correct and to significantly enhance EMT by introducing this evolved self-biasing ability.