Sven Bernecker

If one can justifiably believe, based solely on the probability of infection and side effects, that vaccination will either protect against a contagious disease or result in a serious adverse reaction, then one can likewise believe, based solely on the odds, that a ticket in a fair lottery will either win or lose. Advocates of vaccination compare vaccine refusal or delay to a risky game of chance, such as Russian roulette. Conversely, skeptics compare vaccine acceptance to it. This paper puts forward two claims. First, if one lacks justified belief in the lottery case, then one likewise lacks it in the vaccination case. Second, vaccination campaigns are not analogous to lotteries because the risks and benefits of vaccination are determined by causal and explanatory factors rather than uniform chance.

How has Kant's philosophy been, and how does it continue to be, received, reinterpreted, and developed in non-European contexts? The essays collected here examine the impact of Kant's racism, ask whether and how his philosophy is entangled with colonialism, and consider whether his thought can provide resources for postcolonial and cosmopolitan theories. They address topics ranging from human rights and colonialism to the world religions, East Asia, and global justice. Together they offer a searching reassessment of Kant's place in a world beyond the European tradition that first claimed him

What does it take for a belief to count as knowledge rather than lucky guesswork? Explaining Knowledge develops a new answer, in favor of an “abductivist” theory of knowledge. According to abductivism, a belief constitutes knowledge when, given the way it is formed or maintained, the best explanation of its being true rather than false lies in the facts themselves rather than in adventitious factors. Sven Bernecker here develops the abductivist theory and argues for its superiority by contrasting it with its two main rivals: safety theory and causal explanationism. To situate these competing theories, safety theorists maintain that a belief counts as knowledge only if it could not easily have been false, emphasizing modal robustness, while causal explanationists insist that knowledge requires the right kind of causal connection---often a direct explanatory chain---between fact and belief. Both approaches capture important insights, but each faces longstanding difficulties in accounting for environmental luck, mathematical knowledge, knowledge based on false premises, and lottery cases. Bernecker posits that the abductivist theory of knowledge is superior to its competitors because it can handle a wider range of test cases and offers greater explanatory power-notably, unlike causal explanationism, it can handle barn cases and account for mathematical knowledge. By focusing on the explanatory relationship between a belief's truth and the facts that make it true, abductivism outperforms the safety theory in terms of accounting for the knowledge-undermining role of misleading evidence, and in distinguishing Gettier cases from knowledge of falsehoods and Frankfurt-style knowledge. Explaining Knowledge shows that the abductivist model offers fresh solutions to well-known philosophical puzzles about luck, mistaken assumptions, and mathematical knowledge, while also explaining how new evidence can undermine what we previously took ourselves to know.

Philosophers have long discussed the ethical and epistemological issues raised by vaccines, but issues have assumed new significance since the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic. This volume focuses on vaccine hesitancy as a case of deep overlap of ethics and epistemology. Vaccine hesitancy stems from a range of concerns, many of which are fuelled by conspiracy theories, misunderstandings about vaccine technology, or misconceptions about scientific research. While some grounds for vaccine hesitancy are clearly irrational, other concerns appear more reasonable. This is the first volume to offer a comprehensive exploration of the interplay of epistemological and ethical dimensions of vaccine hesitancy from a post-COVID perspective. The chapters in the first part of the volume reflect on the epistemology of vaccine hesitancy. They address issues related to trust and expertise, probability literacy, and epistemic justice. The second part covers the ethics of vaccine hesitancy and the implications for public policy. These chapters explore the moral implications of free riding, as well as the complex interplay between individual rights, public health, emergencies, and the collective good. Together, they help us to consider where the line between personal freedom and civic responsibility should be drawn.

Davidson defends a coherence theory of knowledge, on which beliefs are justified only by other beliefs and a coherent belief system counts as true. This faces a classic objection: how can we rule out that our belief system is fully coherent yet entirely false? Assessing Davidson's answer requires examining his arguments against two forms of skepticism—Cartesian skepticism (about knowledge of the external world) and second-order skepticism (about privileged access to one's own belief contents). The latter concern arises from his externalism about propositional content, which seems to threaten privileged self-knowledge. This paper has two aims: to show that, within Davidson's epistemology, refuting second-order skepticism is a necessary precondition for his argument against Cartesian skepticism; and to show that both anti-skeptical arguments fail for the same reason: the truth of a belief system cannot be derived from its coherence. Davidson's anti-skepticism thus offers no satisfactory answer to the classic objection.

The vast majority of contemporary epistemologists hold that factual remembering is not a source but a kind of knowledge. This view, usually called the "epistemic theory of memory," defines remembering as the retrieval of previously acquired and retained knowledge: S remembers at time t1 that P if and only if (1) S knows at t1 that P, (2) S knew that P at some earlier time t0, and (3) S knows at t1 that P because she knew at t0 that P. Since knowledge is standardly identified with justified true belief, conditions (1) and (2) can each be decomposed into three sub-conditions; condition (1), for instance, requires that (1a) P is true at t1, (1b) S believes at t1 that P, and (1c) S has grounds at t1 for believing that P. This paper aims to refute the epistemic theory of memory by arguing that one can (factually) remember that P without knowing that P. The focus is on the belief conditions (1b) and (2b): it is argued that S can remember at t1 that P without believing that P at either t1 or t0.

Why is knowledge more valuable than mere true belief? This question, first raised in Plato's Meno, animates the value problem in epistemology. This article surveys the contemporary debate, distinguishing the primary problem from its more demanding variants, examining the swamping problem faced by reliabilist theories and the virtue-theoretic response that treats knowledge as creditable achievement, and considering revisionist proposals that locate distinctive epistemic value in understanding rather than knowledge.

Given that there are genuine cases of knowledge from falsehood, what distinguishes them from Gettier cases where the subject relies on reasoning from falsehood? It is a criterion of adequacy for a theory of knowledge that it can explain the difference between knowledge from falsehood and falsehood-involving Gettier cases. Interestingly, only few theories of knowledge attempt to explain the difference and none of these attempts is successful. The point of the paper is to propose a novel account of knowledge from falsehood. Reasoning from falsehood generates knowledge only when appeal to the fact that p enters prominently into the explanation of the fact that upon using a particular belief-forming method in the given context the agent arrives at the belief that p. In other words, a belief based on a falsehood counts as knowledge if the fact to which the belief refers explains both its content and the method by which it is formed.

The mnemonic confabulation debate has reached an impasse. Like the memory–imagination debate, it is framed through either the causal theory of memory (causalism) or the simulation theory (simulationism)—making confabulation a matter of either an absent causal connection or an unreliable process. Bernecker identifies two structural problems with this framing. The bootstrapping problem is one of circularity: the criteria for identifying a case of confabulation rely on the very theory the case is meant to support. The red herring problem is that, because accounts of confabulation derive from accounts of successful memory, the debate is really a proxy battle between causalism and simulationism; resolve the memory controversy, and the confabulation debate resolves with it. The paper then proposes an explanationist account of memory to break the stalemate. On this view, truly representing that P via the memory system qualifies as remembering if it is better explained by the fact that P than by coincidental factors. Because causalism and simulationism are distinct ways of fleshing out this explanation relation, the explanationist model can expose the dispute's core issues and reconcile rival intuitions.

This paper introduces the concept of communicative trust, defined as trust in a speaker’s cooperative linguistic behavior. Communicative trust is distinguished from both cognitive trust and rapport. The distinction between communicative and cognitive trust is elucidated through Grice’s maxims of communication. Although communicative trust is neither necessary nor sufficient for cognitive trust, it can nonetheless promote or generate cognitive trust. The paper also addresses the more specifically epistemological question, whether and to what extent the transition from communicative to cognitive trust can be rational or reliable.

If we have reason to believe that by following the news, we acquire more false beliefs than true ones or we acquire true but irrelevant beliefs, then we may be justified in taking a newsbreak. We are propositionally justified in temporarily ignoring the news either in a domain or from a source if (i) we are in a fake news environment or are justified in believing that we are, and (ii) it is cognitively difficult or time consuming to discriminate genuine from fake news or to obtain genuine news. The defense of news abstinence rests either on reliabilism about justification or the defeasibility theory. When reliabilism is combined with epistemic consequentialism, news abstinence in a fake news environment is not only epistemically permitted but also epistemically required.

Over the past forty years, epistemology has become one of the fastest-growing branches of philosophy, expanding to topics such as peer disagreement, understanding, testimony, epistemic injustice, collective knowledge, and memory. Kant scholarship has likewise grown immensely. Given Kant’s philosophical legacy and the importance of engaging with the history of philosophy, one might expect Kantian ideas to figure prominently in contemporary epistemology. Yet they remain strikingly absent. As Karl Ameriks notes, “contemporary epistemology has yet to find a recognized spokesman within the classical German tradition.” This special issue seeks to help close this gap. Its papers build, or strengthen, bridges between contemporary epistemology and Kantian philosophy.

This volume consists of a series of essays on the epistemology of fake news, written by leading philosophers. The epistemology of fake news is a branch of applied epistemology, and an exercise in non-ideal epistemology. It provides insight into the nature and spread of misinformation, fake news, conspiratorial thinking, echo chambers, epistemic pathologies in the formation of public opinion, and the relation between epistemic ideals and fake news. The volume is arranged into three parts. The chapters in Part I are concerned with the meaning of ‘fake news’ and related notions such as ‘conspiracy theory’ as well as with the novelty of the phenomenon of fake news. This part also addresses the question whether ‘fake news’ and related notions can be properly used within science. Part II discusses various practices that generate fake news, promote its spread, or are purported to do so. These practices include science denialism, Google algorithms, democratic ideals, vice in experts, and unreliable echo chambers. Part III explores potential therapies for fake news. Authors’ proposals include developing the virtue of epistemic trustworthiness, abstaining from news, and developing good epistemic practices.