Tim Black

Authenticity has become one of the defining ideals of the modern world. It is the quality we are meant to demand in that which we consume; a value to be opposed to all that is ‘fake’ or ‘phoney’ or ‘artificial’. Above all, it is what an individual is meant to aspire to be: true to one’s self, self-actualising and self-expressing. Authenticity today has an almost ethical force. It underpins identity politics, legitimises transgenderism and informs the ubiquitous demand for often legal recognition and informal respect. But what does its elevation say about the condition of modernity? What is its historical and conceptual relationship to ideas of freedom and autonomy? And to what extent is it really possible or even desirable, as Shakespeare’s Polonius insisted it was, to be true to thine own self?

Authenticity has become one of the defining ideals of the modern world. It is the quality we are meant to demand in that which we consume; a value to be opposed to all that is ‘fake’ or ‘phoney’ or ‘artificial’. Above all, it is what an individual is meant to aspire to be: true to one’s self, self-actualising and self-expressing. Authenticity today has an almost ethical force. It underpins identity politics, legitimises transgenderism and informs the ubiquitous demand for often legal recognition and informal respect. But what does its elevation say about the condition of modernity? What is its historical and conceptual relationship to ideas of freedom and autonomy? And to what extent is it really possible or even desirable, as Shakespeare’s Polonius insisted it was, to be true to thine own self?

We can address the issue of epistemic luck, the possibility that the world interferes with the activity of believing so as to keep that activity from achieving its aim, by rethinking the aim of that activity. So, if we give up truth, for example, as the aim of belief, and if we embrace a different aim—the aim of believing as my ideal self would have me believe—we can eliminate the possibility of luck and leave the world no room to interfere in the affairs of the activity of believing. All this while at the same time preserving the epistemic’s responsiveness to the world. This way of seeing the epistemic is culled from the work of Kierkegaard’s pseudonyms.

We can find in Henry David Thoreau’s work a response to Cartesian skepticism. Thoreau takes this skepticism to get its start in us only when we are not attuned to the world, that is, only when we lose sight of our being integrated with the world in the way we quite naturally are. Thoreau posits for human beings a natural and unshakeable integration with the world. This develops into an attunement with the world, making us ready to engage with the world as mature epistemic agents. Yet even if we fall out of attunement with the world, perhaps in response to the reasonableness of a comprehensive doubt, our natural integration with the world remains. Skepticism lacks force because we are integrated with the world even when we are not attuned to it, and because our integration with the world can always help us return to a healthy epistemic engagement with the world.

Epistemological contextualists maintain that the truth-conditions of sentences of the form 'S knows that P' vary according to the context in which they're uttered, where this variation is due to the semantics of 'knows'. Among the linguistic data that have been offered in support of contextualism are several everyday cases. We argue that these cases fail to support contextualism and that they instead support epistemological invariantism—the thesis that the truth-conditions of 'S knows that P' do not vary according to the context of their utterance.

The sensitivity condition on knowledge says that one knows that P only if one would not believe that P if P were false. Difficulties for this condition are now well documented. Keith DeRose has recently suggested a revised sensitivity condition that is designed to avoid some of these difficulties. We argue, however, that there are decisive objections to DeRose’s revised condition. Yet rather than simply abandoning his proposed condition, we uncover a rationale for its adoption, a rationale which suggests a further revision that avoids our objections as well as others. The payoff is considerable: along the way to our revision, we learn lessons about the epistemic significance of certain explanatory relations, about how we ought to envisage epistemic closure principles, and about the epistemic significance of methods of belief formation.

To see the ethical as a space that is immune to luck, it seems that we must see it as a space that is utterly inner, locked away inside the cabinet of consciousness. If, on the other hand, we wish to see the space of the ethical as extending into the world, it seems that we must see it as being vulnerable to luck. Kierkegaard and his pseudonyms steer us through this dilemma by extending the space of the ethical into the world while also inoculating it against luck. For Kierkegaard, an action is a single thing with two aspects, one under which it is seen in terms of movements of the will, and another under which it is seen in terms of movements in the world. Given the structure of the Kierkegaardian ethical project, these movements are immune to luck since they can always achieve their ethical aims: they can always count as doing what one’s ideal self would do.

The sensitivity principle is a compelling idea in epistemology and is typically characterized as a necessary condition for knowledge. This collection of thirteen new essays constitutes a state-of-the-art discussion of this important principle. Some of the essays build on and strengthen sensitivity-based accounts of knowledge and offer novel defences of those accounts. Others present original objections to sensitivity-based accounts and offer comprehensive analysis and discussion of sensitivity's virtues and problems. The resulting collection will stimulate new debate about the sensitivity principle and will be of great interest and value to scholars and advanced students of epistemology.

According to the relevant alternatives theory of knowledge (RA), I know that p only if my evidence eliminates all relevant alternatives to p . Jonathan Schaffer has recently argued that David Lewis's version of RA, which is perhaps the most detailed version yet provided, cannot account for our failure to know in cases involving missed clues, that is, cases in which we see but fail to appreciate decisive evidence. I argue, however, that Lewis's version of RA survives exposure to missed clue cases. Moreover, even though Schaffer maintains that Lewis's Rule of Belief provides no protection against missed clue cases, I argue that we should credit the Rule of Belief with ensuring the survival of Lewis's version of RA.

I defend a sensitive neo-Moorean invariantism, an epistemological account with the following characteristic features: (a) it reserves a place for a sensitivity condition on knowledge, according to which, very roughly, S’s belief that p counts as knowledge only if S wouldn’t believe that p if p were false; (b) it maintains that the standards for knowledge are comparatively low; and (c) it maintains that the standards for knowledge are invariant (i.e., that they vary neither with the linguistic context of the subject of knowledge nor with the linguistic context of the attributor of knowledge). I argue that this sort of account allows us to respond adequately to some difficult puzzles in epistemology, puzzles such as skeptical puzzles, as well as puzzles that inspire epistemological contextualism. I also maintain that by utilizing what Keith DeRose calls a warranted assertibility maneuver, sensitive neo-Moorean invariantism can account for our epistemic judgments in each of these puzzle cases.

According to a Moorean response to skepticism, the standards for knowledge are invariantly comparatively low, and we can know across contexts all that we ordinarily take ourselves to know. It is incumbent upon the Moorean to defend his position by explaining how, in contexts in which S seems to lack knowledge, S can nevertheless have knowledge. The explanation proposed here relies on a warranted-assertability maneuver: Because we are warranted in asserting that S doesn’t know that p, it can seem that S does in fact lack that piece of knowledge. Moreover, this warranted-assertability maneuver is unique and better than similar maneuvers because it makes use of H. P. Grice’s general conversational rule of Quantity—“Do not make your contribution more informative than is required”—in explaining why we are warranted in asserting that S doesn’t know that p.

Many think that the aim of Hume’s Dialogues is simply to discredit the design argument for the existence of an intelligent designer. We think instead that the Dialogues provides a model of true religion. We argue that, for Hume, the truly religious person: believes that an intelligent designer created and imposed order on the universe; grounds this belief in an irregular argument rooted in a certain kind of experience, for example, in the experience of anatomizing complex natural systems such as the eye; and retains this belief, on the basis of these reasons, even after careful scrutiny. We argue that two of the Dialogues’s characters, Philo and Cleanthes, exhibit true religion. A third character, Demea, exhibits false religion and a persistent impiety. Taken as a whole, we see the Dialogues as an educational performance for the benefit of Pamphilus, Cleanthes’s ward, as well as for the benefit of readers of the Dialogues. Specifically, we think, given that its lessons concern theology and the principles of religion, the dynamics of the Dialogues’s discussion and the interplay between its characters can be seen as a demonstration of a method for becoming truly religious.

We can understand epistemic naturalism as the view that there are cases in which we are justified in holding a belief and cases in which we are not so justified, and that we can distinguish cases of one sort from cases of the other with reference to non-normative facts about the mechanisms that produce them. By my lights, Hume is an epistemic naturalist of this sort, and I propose in this paper a novel and detailed account of his epistemic naturalism. On my account, which I call the determinacy account, Hume characterizes epistemic justification in terms of the mind's feeling determined by the relation of cause and effect to move from one impression (or idea) to an(other) idea. I find a statement of this account, which Hume applies initially to what he calls the second system of realities, in Treatise 1.3.9. After rejecting other accounts of Hume's epistemic naturalism, I show how the determinacy account handles the cases Hume considers later in Treatise 1.3.

Stewart Cohen argues that several epistemological theories fall victim to the problem of easy knowledge: they allow us to know far too easily that certain sceptical hypotheses are false and that how things seem is a reliable indicator of how they are. This problem is a result of the theories' interaction with an epistemic closure principle. Cohen suggests that the theories should be modified. I argue that attempts to solve the problem should focus on closure instead; a new and plausible epistemic closure principle can solve the problem of easy knowledge. My solution offers a uniform and more successful response to different versions of the problem of easy knowledge

Contextualist responses to skepticism about the external world are inadequate, and we should prefer an invariantist response to skepticism. There are two kinds of contextualism---anti-theoretical and theoretical. Anti-theoretical contextualists argue that the principles on which skepticism depends are absent from our ordinary epistemic ways of thinking. So anti-theoretical contextualists conclude that the burden of proof is on the skeptic. But some argue that the principles on which skepticism depends are not absent from our ordinary ways of thinking. The existence of this unresolved dispute suggests that anti-theoretical contextualists have not shifted the burden of proof to the skeptic. Anti-theoretical contextualists also fail to refute skepticism outright. Their primary argument here is one in which the notion of certainty plays a key role. But their argument is unsound on all significant uses of the word 'certain.' Thus, anti-theoretical contextualists have neither refuted skepticism nor shifted the burden of proof to the skeptic. ;Theoretical contextualism claims that the solution to skeptical puzzles lies in the fact that the standards for knowledge shift from context to context. Yet if theoretical contextualist solutions are to be adequate, they must explain how those standards shift. Unfortunately, theoretical contextualism fails to provide this explanation. This explanatory failure, along with the problems that face individual theoretical contextualist accounts, shows that theoretical contextualist responses to skepticism are inadequate. ;Even though contextualism fails, a Moorean invariantism---according to which the standards for knowledge are always low---allows us to know across contexts the things we ordinarily take ourselves to know. We should prefer this Moorean invariantism over contextualism. It stands on the same theoretical ground as the dominant contextualisms while still allowing us to explain how we know that certain skeptical hypotheses are false. Also, contextualism raises questions---for example, questions concerning how the standards for knowledge shift---that receive only inadequate answers. The Moorean invariantist account does not raise such questions. All of this suggests that the Moorean invariantist response to skepticism is better than any of its contextualist counterparts

There is reason to think that a familiar and frequently used epistemic closure principle is false. Given this, the relevant instance of that principle should be removed from a familiar skeptical argument, and replaced with an instance of a more plausible epistemic closure principle. Once this has been done, however, we see that even if the resulting skeptical argument is unsound, we need deny neither closure nor the claim that we know the things we ordinarily take ourselves to know. Nothing that the skeptic can do, at least with an argument that makes use of an epistemic closure principle, can ever force us to relinquish closure or the utterly vast stretches of knowledge that we ordinarily take ourselves to have

Jessica Brown effectively contends that Keith DeRose’s latest argument for contextualism fails to rule out contextualism’s chief rival, namely, classic invariantism. Still, even if her position has not been ruled out, the classic invariantist must offer considerations in favor of her position if she is to convince us that it is superior to contextualism. Brown defends classic invariantism with a warranted assertability maneuver that utilizes a linguistic pragmatic principle of relevance. I argue, however, that this maneuver is not as effective as it might be. I propose a different warranted assertability maneuver—one that utilizes a pragmatic principle of strength—that affords a more successful defense of classic invariantism, and that helps to establish that classic invariantism is superior to contextualism.