Paul Silva Jr.

What might the place of factual awareness be in the set of research questions that define social epistemology? Of course, if all social epistemic facts are grounded in epistemic facts about individuals, then the fundamentality of factual awareness in individual epistemology would guarantee the fundamentality of factual awareness in social epistemology. But are there any further ways in which factual awareness is fundamental to social epistemology? There are. For the relation of content-listening – listening to what others say – is a distinctive part of what makes social epistemology social. Content-listening, we’ll show, needs to be understood in terms of factual awareness. The relation that content-listening stands in to hearing, attention, perception, and factual awareness are explored, culminating in an awareness-first account of content-listening that outperforms its knowledge-centric counterpart.

Knowledge implies the presence of a positive relation between a person and a fact. Factual ignorance, on the other hand, implies the absence of some positive relation between a person and a fact. The two most influential views of ignorance hold that what is lacking in cases of factual ignorance is knowledge or true belief, but these accounts fail to explain a number of basic facts about ignorance. In their place, we propose a novel and systematic defense of the view that factual ignorance is the absence of awareness, an account that both comes apart from the dominant views and overcomes their deficiencies. Given the important role that ignorance plays in moral and legal theory and our understanding of various epistemic injustices, a precise and theoretically unproblematic account of the nature of ignorance is important not only for normative epistemology, but also for law, ethics, and applied epistemology.

I provide a novel knowledge-first account of justification that avoids the pitfalls of existing accounts while preserving the underlying insight of knowledge-first epistemologies: that knowledge comes first. The view I propose is, roughly, this: justification is grounded in our practical knowledge (know-how) concerning the acquisition of propositional knowledge (knowledge-that). I first refine my thesis in response to immediate objections. In subsequent sections I explain the various ways in which this thesis is theoretically superior to existing knowledge-first accounts of justification. The upshot is a virtue-theoretic, knowledge-first view of justification that is internalist-friendly and able to explain more facts about justification than any other available view.