Oushinar Nath

Traditional conceptions of the epistemically ideal agent emphasise the possession of positive epistemic states (e.g., truth, knowledge, understanding, etc.) and the avoidance of falsehood and other epistemic defects. Matthew Shields challenges this picture and argues that flawless epistemic performance may be merely self-serving: an agent might pursue epistemic goods only because achieving them produces personal satisfactions. By contrast, changing one’s mind in response to good evidence and at a likely cost deprives the agent of such satisfaction. It, therefore, provides especially strong evidence that the agent values epistemic goods for their own sake. From this, Shields concludes that an epistemically ideal agent must have had at least one false belief or defective practice which they subsequently corrected. I argue that although Shields correctly identifies an inadequacy in accounts of ideal epistemic agency that focus exclusively on epistemic outcomes, it does not follow that the ideal agent must actually have been wrong – what matters is not so much the correction of error, but the agent’s practical willingness to expose their epistemic position to possible correction when doing so is costly.

This paper examines the oddity of first-person wisdom ascriptions, such as ‘I am wise.’ While individuals may possess wisdom, self-ascriptions of wisdom appear infelicitous in ordinary discourse. I argue that the explanation of this phenomenon lies in the epistemic structure of wisdom itself. I defend the claim that wisdom is non-luminous: a wise agent lacks higher-order knowledge that she possesses the knowledge required for wisdom, largely because wisdom involves humility, open-mindedness, and sensitivity to one’s cognitive limitations. These traits generate a form of higher-order ignorance about one’s own wisdom-related knowledge. Drawing on the norms of assertion, particularly a rational norm requiring justified belief for rationally permissible assertion, I argue that a wise agent lacks the justification needed to assert that she is wise, thus explaining why first-person wisdom ascriptions sound deviant.

A current debate in philosophy focusses on whether propositional knowledge is necessary for wisdom. In this paper I defend the view that propositional knowledge is necessary for wisdom. I call Weak Reductionism the view that propositional knowledge is merely necessary for wisdom, but not sufficient. I also examine two rival accounts of wisdom –Strong Reductionism, the view that propositional knowledge is both necessary and sufficient for wisdom, and Non-Reductionism, the view that propositional knowledge is neither necessary and nor sufficient for wisdom. I critique both of these views and find them wanting in light of various wisdom-related intuitions that we have.

Wise agents are characteristically open-minded. In this paper, I discuss why that is the case. Central to my argument is the notion that open-mindedness is an inquiring attitude. A standard thought about inquiring attitudes is that they entail ignorance—if S is inquiring into a question q, then S doesn’t know its answer pq. This, however, doesn’t sit well with some of our intuitions about open-mindedness; for, as I shall show, there are instances of open-mindedness where S knows that pq and yet is justified in inquiring into q. I explain that such instances are best explained in terms of KK-failure, i.e. failing to know that one knows, and more specifically a sort of KK-failure that emerges out of S’s sensitivity to unawareness. I argue that a wise agent too is in a similar state of KK-failure in relation to the body of knowledge that makes her wise, and it’s precisely because of this that a wise agent remains characteristically open-minded.

Wise agents are characteristically open-minded. In this paper I discuss why that is the case. Central to my argument is the notion that open-mindedness is an inquiring attitude. A standard thought about inquiring attitudes is that they entail ignorance – if S is inquiring into a question q then S doesn’t know its answer pq. This, however, doesn’t sit well with some of our intuitions about open-mindedness for, as I shall show, there are instances of open-mindedness where S knows that pq and yet is justified in inquiring into q. I explain that such instances are best explained in terms of KK-failure, i.e., failing to know that one knows, and more specifically a sort of KK-failure that emerges out of S’s sensitivity to unawareness. I argue that a wise agent too is in a similar state of KK-failure in relation to the body of knowledge that makes her wise, and it’s precisely because of this that a wise agent remains characteristically open-minded.

An important debate in the current philosophy of wisdom is whether knowledge is necessary for wisdom. In this paper I argue that knowledge is necessary to explain wise actions. Towards this, firstly, I individuate two modal properties relevant for wise actions: (i) counterfactual robustness: an action performed in the actual world is wise only if it leads to or is constituted by the goals of living well in all nearby worlds; (ii) rational robustness: an action performed for the sake of living well is wise only if, in all nearby worlds, when an agent has sufficient reasons to perform the action, she performs the action. Secondly, I argue that these two modal properties are best explained in terms of two central features of knowledge: (a) safety: if the agent knows that a certain action will help her successfully reach the relevant goal(s) of living well, or is constituted by those goal(s), then in all the nearby worlds, her belief that the action will help her successfully reach the goal is true; (b) stability: the agent's knowledge that the action will help her successfully reach the goal(s) of living well, or is constituted by those goals, entails that her belief that the action will help her successfully reach the goal(s), or is constituted by those goals, isn’t based on any reason that could easily have been defeated by misleading evidence.