Thomas Kelly

Epistemology: What it is and Why You Should Care tackles the question undergraduates often ask when they first confront any subject: “Who cares?!” Michael Veber argues that epistemology is often invisible yet essential to our lives. He shows how controversial assumptions about knowledge and inquiry are fundamental and pervasive, shaping even our simplest efforts to understand the world. Geared to those with no background in epistemology or philosophy, the book's accessible, conversational style brings epistemology to life through vivid examples, including murder mysteries, FBI surveillance operations, Nazis, and flat Earthers. By the final chapter, readers will grasp the most fundamental problems and concepts in epistemology and see how their own thinking fits within them. And they will have fun doing it. This book speaks to anyone curious about the nature, limits, and value of knowledge.

In their 2016 ‘Taking a Chance on KK’, Jeremy Goodman and Bernhard Salow offer an interesting epistemic model that validates KK. The springboard for my discussion will be a mistake in their presentation, one that points to a real problem with the model. My remarks will have a broad interest, since certain of the key examples point to intriguing questions concerning the epistemic contours of testimony and memory. I'll also raise instructive difficulties for a theoretically important weakening of the JTB treatment of knowledge.

A metasemantic theory tells us why a particular concept has its particular content, for example, why the concept orang-utan has orang-utans as its content, rather than Sumatran orang-utans or apes. Many believe that the content of a concept has some important causal explanatory connection to that concept. But a plethora of properties stand in a causal explanatory connection to our concepts without being their contents—this is the Filtering Problem. In this paper, I leverage work from the general philosophy of science on causal explanation to make progress on the Filtering Problem. The working hypothesis is that a concept’s content is the property that best explains why that concept was formed. I use the explanatory virtues of proportionality, homogeneity, and distal balance to weed out problematic contents. The picture that emerges is one where much of the work of metasemantics can be accomplished by appealing to general principles in the theory of good explanation rather than the particularities of mental representation itself.

Susanna Rinard has recently offered a new argument for pragmatism and against evidentialism. According to Rinard, evidentialists must hold that the rationality of belief is determined in a way that is different from how the rationality of other states is determined. She argues that we should instead endorse a view she calls Equal Treatment, according to which the rationality of all states is determined in the same way. In this paper, I show that Rinard’s claims are mistaken, and that evidentialism is more theoretically virtuous than its opponents sometimes give it credit for. Not only does evidentialism not make an exception for belief, but it fits naturally into a unified, explanatorily powerful account of the rationality of intentional mental states. According to such an account, the rationality of all intentional mental states, including belief, is determined by the right kind of reasons for those states. Since the right kind of reasons for belief just are evidential considerations, this unified account entails evidentialism. I conclude, contra Rinard, that evidentialism can be situated within a general account of rationality that is at least as theoretically virtuous as pragmatism, if not more so.

The thesis that practical and epistemic justification can diverge-that it can be reasonable to believe something, all things considered, even when believing is epistemically unjustified, and the reverse-is widely accepted. I argue that this acceptance is unfounded. I show, first, that examples of the sort typically cited as straightforwardly illustrative of the "divergence thesis" do not, in fact, support it. The view to the contrary derives from conflating the assessment of acts which cause one to believe with the assessment of believing itself. I argue, too, that the divergence thesis cannot be rescued by appeal to the possibility of doxastic voluntarism. Finally, I argue that the general acceptance of the divergence thesis rests on a conception of justification, both practical and epistemic, which is seriously flawed

Epistemic partialism is the view that friends have a doxastic duty to overestimate each other. If one holds that there are no practical reasons for belief, we will argue, one has to deny the existence of any epistemic duties, and thus reject epistemic partialism. But if it is false that one has a doxastic duty to overestimate one’s friends, why does it so often seem true? We argue that there is a robust causal relationship between friendship and overestimation that can be mistaken for a constitutive relationship; we also argue that one can still accept some of the normative intuitions that motivate epistemic partialism even if one rejects epistemic partialism itself. Along the way, we consider and reject a watered-down version of epistemic partialism—call it epistemic partialism-light—according to which one has a duty to take steps to create in oneself a disposition to overestimate one’s friends.

Deference principles are principles that describe when, and to what extent, it’s rational to defer to others. Recently, some authors have used such principles to argue for Evidential Uniqueness, the claim that for every batch of evidence, there’s a unique doxastic state that it’s permissible for subjects with that total evidence to have. This paper has two aims. The first aim is to assess these deference-based arguments for Evidential Uniqueness. I’ll show that these arguments only work given a particular kind of deference principle, and I’ll argue that there are reasons to reject these kinds of principles. The second aim of this paper is to spell out what a plausible generalized deference principle looks like. I’ll start by offering a principled rationale for taking deference to constrain rational belief. Then I’ll flesh out the kind of deference principle suggested by this rationale. Finally, I’ll show that this principle is both more plausible and more general than the principles used in the deference-based arguments for Evidential Uniqueness.