Yannick Kohl

Matthew Boyle advocates a transformative view of rationality in which the possession of rational and reflective capacities fundamentally changes perceptual and motivational capacities. After disambiguating different criteria for transformation and additivity, and presenting Boyle’s conceptual understanding of the transformative view, the chapter argues that Boyle fails to provide a satisfying account of the transformation of our mental states when we act and believe reflectively. Additionally, Boyle’s conception does not reach the bedrock of the explanation of why transformed states are fundamentally different. The chapter suggests a functionalist explanation of this difference. Rational capacities give perception and desire new causal roles. If perception and desire of rational animals are embedded in different functional systems, this explains why the states themselves are different. This view, while being weaker than Boyle’s transformativism, offers a more fine-grained understanding of the criteria for differentiating transformative and additive accounts.

Some philosophers have claimed that there is knowledge from falsehood (KFF, in short), i.e., inferential knowledge that involves a relevant false premise. The main thesis of this paper is that there are no standard cases of KFF. By ‘standard cases’ we mean cases in which the subject employs a measurement procedure in order to determine the value of some quantity, such as the time or the number of people present in a room. If knowledge is attained at all, it is attained by inference not from a false premise but, instead, from two pieces of reflective knowledge. A brief look at putative non-standard cases of KFF reveals that they can be explained away in a different way, albeit a way that shares a common pattern with standard cases.