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Diversity Reading List

Helping you include authors from under-represented groups in your teaching

Normativity without Cartesian Privilege

Posted on May 23, 2016May 13, 2025 by Simon Fokt

Summary: This paper aims to explore the implication of rejecting Cartesianism for our relationship to the normative realm. It is argued that it implies that this relationship is more fraught than many would like to think. Without privileged access to our own minds, there are no norms that can invariably guide our actions, and no norms that are immune from blameless violation. This will come as bad news to those normative theorists who think that certain central normative notions – e.g. the ethical ought or epistemic justification – should be cashed out in terms of subjects’ mental states precisely in order to generate norms that are action-guiding and immune from blameless vi- olation. Meanwhile Anti-Cartesianism might come as good news to those normative theorists who resist cashing out norms in terms of mental states. For Anti-Cartesnianism implies that no norms – however closely tied to the mental – can be perfectly action-guiding or totally immune from blameless violation. More generally, once we have accepted that our relationship to our own minds lacks the perfect intimacy promised by Cartesianism, we are, for better or worse, left with the view that the normative realm is suffused with ignorance and bad luck.

Posted in Epistemic Internalism and Externalism, Epistemic Normativity, Epistemology, Metaphysics & EpistemologyTagged Cartesianism, epistemic normativity, externalism, internalismLeave a comment

On the Epistemic Costs of Implicit Bias

Posted on May 23, 2016May 13, 2025 by Simon Fokt

Summary: Tamar Gendler argues that, for those living in a society in which race is a salient sociological feature, it is impossible to be fully rational: members of such a society must either fail to encode relevant information containing race, or suffer epistemic costs by being implicitly racist.

Posted in Hope, Implicit Bias, Normative Ethics, Social and Political Philosophy, Value TheoryTagged alief, beliefLeave a comment

Acting on Knowledge

Posted on May 23, 2016June 26, 2025 by Simon Fokt

Summary: This paper argues that there are various kinds of cases in which a subject clearly knows that p, yet it is not epistemically appropriate for her to use the proposition that p in practical reasoning, to act as if p, or act on p. Knowledge is not, therefore, always sufficient for epistemically justifying practical rationality, unlike what says in the sufficiency condition of the knowledge norm of practical reasoning. In addition, it offers a diagnosis of what is salient in the above cases and suggests a broad feature that needs to be accounted for in any view of the norm governing practical rationality.

Posted in Epistemic Norms, Epistemology, Metaphysics & EpistemologyTagged knowledge, practical rationality, practical reasoningLeave a comment

Testimonial knowledge and transmission

Posted on May 23, 2016June 26, 2025 by Simon Fokt

Abstract: We often talk about knowledge being transmitted via testimony. This suggests a picture of testimony with striking similarities to memory. For instance, it is often assumed that neither is a generative source of knowledge: while the former transmits knowledge from one speaker to another, the latter preserves beliefs from one time to another. These considerations give rise to a stronger and a weaker thesis regarding the transmission of testimonial knowledge. The stronger thesis is that each speaker in a chain of testimonial transmission must know that p in order to pass this knowledge to a hearer. The weaker thesis is that at least the first speaker must know that p in order for any hearer in the chain to come to know that p via testimony. I argue that both theses are false, and hence testimony, unlike memory, can be a generative source of knowledge.

Posted in Epistemology, Epistemology of Testimony, Metaphysics & Epistemology, Transmission of WarrantTagged non-reductivism, reductivism, testimonial knowledge, testimony, transmissionLeave a comment

Norms of Assertion

Posted on May 23, 2016June 26, 2025 by Simon Fokt

Introduction: I shall argue that the Knowledge Norm of Assertion is false. In particular, I shall show that there are cases in which a speaker asserts that p in the absence of knowing that p without being subject to criticism in any relevant sense, thereby showing that knowledge cannot be what is required for proper asser- tion. I shall then develop and defend an alternative norm of assertion – what I shall call the Reasonable to Believe Norm of Assertion – that not only avoids the problems afflicting the Knowledge Norm of Assertion but also more fully and co- herently accommodates our general intuitions about both asserters and their assertions.

Posted in Epistemic Norms, Epistemology, Metaphysics & Epistemology, Norms of Assertion, Philosophy of LanguageTagged assertion, knowledge normLeave a comment

Contextualism and warranted assertibility manoeuvres

Posted on May 23, 2016May 13, 2025 by Simon Fokt

Abstract: Contextualists such as Cohen and DeRose claim that the truth conditions of knowledge attributions vary contextually, in particular that the strength of epistemic position required for one to be truly ascribed knowledge depends on features of the attributor’s context. Contextualists support their view by appeal to our intuitions about when it’s correct (or incorrect) to ascribe knowledge. Someone might argue that some of these intuitions merely reflect when it is conversationally appropriate to ascribe knowledge, not when knowledge is truly ascribed, and so try to accommodate these intuitions even on an invariantist view. DeRose (Blackwell Guide to Epistemology, 1998; Philosophical Review, 2002) argues that any such ‘warranted assertibility manoeuvre’, or ‘WAM’, against contextualism is unlikely to succeed. Here, I argue that his objections to a WAM against contextualism are not persuasive and offer a pragmatic account of the data about ascriptions of knowledge.

Posted in Epistemic Contextualism and Invariantism, Epistemology, Metaphysics & Epistemology, Norms of Assertion, Philosophy of LanguageTagged Cohen, contextualism, DeRose, warranted assertibility manoeuvresLeave a comment

Experimental Philosophy, Contextualism and SSI

Posted on May 23, 2016May 13, 2025 by Simon Fokt

Abstract: I will ask the conditional question: if folk attributions of “know” are not sensitive to the stakes and/or the salience of error, does this cast doubt on contextualism or subject-sensitive invariantism (SSI)? I argue that if it should turn out that folk attributions of knowledge are insensitive to such factors, then this undermines contextualism, but not SSI. That is not to say that SSI is invulnerable to empirical work of any kind. Rather, I defend the more modest claim that leading versions of SSI are not undermined by one particular kind of experimental result, namely the recent suggestion that knowledge attributions are insensitive to the stakes.

Posted in Epistemic Contextualism and Invariantism, Epistemology, Epistemology of Intuition, Experimental Philosophy, Experimental Philosophy: Contextualism and Invariantism, Metaphilosophy, Metaphysics & Epistemology, Pragmatic EncroachmentTagged contextualism, experimental philosophy, subject sensitive invariantismLeave a comment

Knowledge as a mental state

Posted on May 23, 2016May 13, 2025 by Simon Fokt

Abstract: In the philosophical literature on mental states, the paradigmatic examples of mental states are beliefs, desires, intentions, and phenomenal states such as being in pain. The corresponding list in the psychological literature on mental state attribution includes one further member: the state of knowledge. This article examines the reasons why developmental, comparative and social psychologists have classified knowledge as a mental state, while most recent philosophers – with the notable exception of Timothy Williamson – have not. The disagreement is traced back to a difference in how each side understands the relationship between the concepts of knowledge and belief, concepts which are understood in both disciplines to be closely linked. Psychologists and philosophers other than Williamson have generally have disagreed about which of the pair is prior and which is derivative. The rival claims of priority are examined both in the light of philosophical arguments by Williamson and others, and in the light of empirical work on mental state attribution.

Posted in Epistemology, Mental States, Metaphysics & Epistemology, Philosophy of Cognitive Science, Philosophy of Mind, Primitivism about Knowledge, Science Logic & Mathematics, The Nature of Folk PsychologyTagged attribution, folk psychology, knowledge, knowledge-first, mental stateLeave a comment

Intuitions and Experiments: A Defense of the Case Method in Epistemology

Posted on May 23, 2016May 13, 2025 by Simon Fokt

Abstract: Many epistemologists use intuitive responses to particular cases as evidence for their theories. Recently, experimental philosophers have challenged the evidential value of intuitions, suggesting that our responses to particular cases are unstable, inconsistent with the responses of the untrained, and swayed by factors such as ethnicity and gender. This paper presents evidence that neither gender nor ethnicity influence epistemic intuitions, and that the standard responses to Gettier cases and the like are widely shared. It argues that epistemic intuitions are produced by the natural ‘mindreading’ capacity that underpins ordinary attributions of belief and knowledge in everyday social interaction. Although this capacity is fallible, its weaknesses are similar to the weaknesses of natural capacities such as sensory perception. Experimentalists who do not wish to be skeptical about ordinary empirical methods have no good reason to be skeptical about epistemic intuitions.

Posted in Critiques of Experimental Philosophy, Epistemology, Epistemology of Intuition, Experimental Philosophy, Experimental Philosophy: Epistemology, Metaepistemology, Metaphilosophy, Metaphysics & Epistemology, The Nature of IntuitionTagged epistemology, experimental philosophy, Gettier, intuition, methodologyLeave a comment

Epistemic Anxiety and Adaptive Invariantism

Posted on May 23, 2016May 13, 2025 by Simon Fokt

Abstract: Do we apply higher epistemic standards to subjects with high stakes? This paper argues that we expect different outward behavior from high-stakes subjects – for example, we expect them to collect more evidence than their low-stakes counterparts – but not because of any change in epistemic standards. Rather, we naturally expect subjects in any condition to think in a roughly adaptive manner, balancing the expected costs of additional evidence collection against the expected value of gains in accuracy. The paper reviews a body of empirical work on the automatic regulation of cognitive effort in response to stakes, and argues that we naturally see high- and low-stakes subjects as experiencing different levels of ‘epistemic anxiety’, and anticipate different levels of cognitive effort from them for this reason. If unresolved epistemic anxiety always bars an ascription of knowledge, then we can explain our responses to cases involving shifting stakes without positing any variation in the standards of intuitive knowledge ascription.

Posted in Epistemic Contextualism and Invariantism, Epistemology, Evidence and Knowledge, Metaphysics & Epistemology, Pragmatic EncroachmentTagged epistemic anxiety, knowledge ascription, stake-sensitivityLeave a comment

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