To understand something involves some sort of commitment to a set of propositions comprising an account of the understood phenomenon. Some take this commitment to be a species of belief; others, such as Elgin and I, take it to be a kind of cognitive policy. This paper takes a step back from debates about the nature of understanding and asks when this commitment involved in understanding is epistemically appropriate, or ‘acceptable’ in Elgin’s terminology. In particular, appealing to lessons from the (...) lottery and preface paradoxes, it is argued that this type of commitment is sometimes acceptable even when it would be rational to assign arbitrarily low probabilities to the relevant propositions. This strongly suggests that the relevant type of commitment is sometimes acceptable in the absence of epistemic justification for belief, which in turn implies that understanding does not require justification in the traditional sense. The paper goes on to develop a new probabilistic model of acceptability, based on the idea that the maximally informative accounts of the understood phenomenon should be optimally probable. Interestingly, this probabilistic model ends up being similar in important ways to Elgin’s proposal to analyze the acceptability of such commitments in terms of ‘reflective equilibrium’. (shrink)

Philosophers’ traditional emphasis on theories, theoretical modeling, and explanation misguides research in philosophy of science. Articulating and applying core theories is part of scientific practice, but it is not the essence of scientific practice. Insofar as science has an essence, it is to systematically investigate and learn about what is not yet understood. This lecture analyzes genetics to articulate a broad-practice-centered approach to philosophy of science. It concludes by arguing that this approach can lead to richer, deeper, and more useful (...) philosophies of science, philosophies that can better inform science policy and the public’s understanding of science. (shrink)

A common complaint against contemporary epistemology is that its issues are too rarified and, hence, of little relevance for the everyday assessments we make of each other=s beliefs. The notion of epistemic rationality focuses on a specific goal, that of now having accurate and comprehensive beliefs, whereas our everyday assessments of beliefs are sensitive to the fact that we have an enormous variety of goals and needs, intellectual as well as nonintellectual. Indeed, our everyday assessments often have a quasi-ethical (...) dimension; we want to know, for example, whether someone has been responsible, or at least non-negligent, in forming opinions. Nevertheless, epistemology, properly conceived, is relevant to our commonplace intellectual concerns. Epistemic rationality is an idealized notion, but its idealized character makes it suitable to serve as a theoretical anchor for other notions of rationality, including notions that are less idealized and, hence, potentially more directly relevant to our everyday assessments. (shrink)

Philosophical discussions on causal inference in medicine are stuck in dyadic camps, each defending one kind of evidence or method rather than another as best support for causal hypotheses. Whereas Evidence Based Medicine advocates the use of Randomised Controlled Trials and systematic reviews of RCTs as gold standard, philosophers of science emphasise the importance of mechanisms and their distinctive informational contribution to causal inference and assessment. Some have suggested the adoption of a pluralistic approach to causal inference, and an inductive (...) rather than hypothetico-deductive inferential paradigm. However, these proposals deliver no clear guidelines about how such plurality of evidence sources should jointly justify hypotheses of causal associations. We here develop such guidelines by first giving a philosophical analysis of the underpinnings of Hill’s viewpoints on causality. We then put forward an evidence-amalgamation framework adopting a Bayesian net approach to model causal inference in pharmacology for the assessment of harms. Our framework accommodates a number of intuitions already expressed in the literature concerning the EBM vs. pluralist debate on causal inference, evidence hierarchies, causal holism, relevance, and reliability. (shrink)

Considerable attention has been paid recently to the gendering of organizations and occupations. Unfortunately, the gendered-organizations approach remains theoretically and empirically underdeveloped, as there have as yet been few clear answers to the question central to the perspective: What does it really mean to say that an organization itself, or a policy, practice, or slot in the hierarchy, is “gendered”? Reviewing literature in the gendered-organizations tradition, the author discusses three of the most common ways the perspective has been applied and (...) argues that all of these definitions pose potential problems for the project of meaningful social and organizational change. The article concludes with some suggestions about how a more useful conception of the gendered organization might be built. (shrink)

A popular form of virtue epistemology—defended by such figures as Ernest Sosa, Linda Zagzebski and John Greco—holds that knowledge can be exclusively understood in virtue-theoretic terms. In particular, it holds that there isn't any need for an additional epistemic condition to deal with the problem posed by knowledge-undermining epistemic luck. It is argued that the sustainability of such a proposal is called into question by the possibility of epistemic twin earth cases. In particular, it is argued that such cases (...) demonstrate the need for virtue-theoretic accounts of knowledge to appeal to an independent epistemic condition which excludes knowledge-undermining epistemic luck. (shrink)

The previous chapter offers a distinctive virtue-theoretic account of knowledge, which the chapter describes as dispositional robust virtue epistemology. It is argued that this view is ultimately untenable because it cannot accommodate what we refer to as the epistemic dependence of knowledge. This point is motivated by employing what we call an epistemic Twin Earth argument, and also by appealing to some familiar claims in the epistemology of testimony. In addition, it is claimed that there is an alternative (...) proposal available, which we refer to as anti-luck virtue epistemology, that can accommodate epistemic dependence and which can thus offer a more satisfactory account of knowledge. (shrink)

Both Popper and van Fraassen have used evolutionary analogies to defend their views on the aim of science, although these are diametrically opposed. By employing Price's equation in an illustrative capacity, this paper considers which view is better supported. It shows that even if our observations and experimental results are reliable, an evolutionary analogy fails to demonstrate why conjecture and refutation should result in: (1) the isolation of true theories; (2) successive generations of theories of increasing truth-likeness; (3) empirically adequate (...) theories; or (4) successive generations of theories of increasing proximity to empirical adequacy. Furthermore, it illustrates that appeals to induction do not appear to help. It concludes that an evolutionary analogy is only sufficient to defend the notion that the aim of science is to isolate a particular class of false theories, namely those that are empirically inadequate. (shrink)

Wikipedia is a free encyclopedia that is written and edited entirely by visitors to its website. I argue that we are misled when we think of it in the same epistemic category with traditional general encyclopedias. An empirical assessment of its reliability reveals that it varies widely from topic to topic. So any particular claim found in it cannot be relied on based on its source. I survey some methods that we use in assessing specific claims and argue that the (...) structure of the Wikipedia frustrates them. (shrink)

The paper argues against Peacocke's moderate rationalism in modality. In the first part, I show, by identifying an argumentative gap in its epistemology, that Peacocke's account has not met the Integration Challenge. I then argue that we should modify the account's metaphysics of modal concepts in order to avoid implausible consequences with regards to their possession conditions. This modification generates no extra explanatory gap. Yet, once the minimal modification that avoids those implausible consequences is made, the resulting account cannot (...) support Peacocke's moderate rationalism. (shrink)

Whether we live in a world of autonomous things, or a world of interconnected processes in constant flux, is an ancient philosophical debate. Modern biology provides decisive reasons for embracing the latter view. How does one understand the practices and outputs of science in such a dynamic, ever-changing world - and particularly in an emergency situation such as the COVID-19 pandemic, where scientific knowledge has been regarded as bedrock for decisive social interventions? We argue that key to answering this question (...) is to consider the role of the activity of reification within the research process. Reification consists in the identification of more or less stable features of the flux, and treating these as constituting stable things. As we illustrate with reference to biological and biomedical research on COVID-19, reification is a necessary component of any process of inquiry and comes in at least two forms: means reification, when researchers create objects meant to capture features of the world, or phenomena, in order to be able to study them; and target reification, when researchers infer an understanding of phenomena from an investigation of the epistemic objects created to study them. We note that both objects and phenomena are dynamic processes and argue that have no reason to assume that changes in objects and phenomena track one another. We conclude that failure to acknowledge these forms of reification and their epistemic role in scientific inquiry can have dire consequences for how the resulting knowledge is interpreted and used. (shrink)

In this paper I discuss a new kind of hinge epistemology which is called transcendental hinge epistemology. According to this view, hinges are immune from doubt because it is impossible to doubt them coherently, and this impossibility arises because any attempt to doubt them will presuppose their truth. Such an immunity is possessed only by inescapable hinges, that is, hinges that must be presupposed in every inquiry. I will argue that current hinge epistemologies fail to provide a satisfactory (...) anti-sceptical strategy because they focus on escapable hinges, that is, hinges with respect to which one can entertain coherent doubts. (shrink)

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The volume contains the written versions of all papers given at the workshop, divided into five chapters and followed by Alvin Goldman's replies in the sixth.

This article discusses immediate premises in Aristotle’s epistemology. The traditional interpretation identifies immediacy with indemonstrability: immediate truths are the indemonstrable principles of science from which the theorems are derived by demonstration. Against this common reading, I argue that Aristotle’s recognition of two kinds of epistemic priority (priority by nature and priority to us) commits him to the existence of two types of immediacy, only one of which is equivalent to indemonstrability. As a result, my interpretation offers a better understanding (...) of a puzzling passage (APo. 1.13, 78a22–b4) that seems to contradict the standard view. (shrink)

The Fallibility Norm—the claim that we ought to take our fallibility into account when managing our beliefs—appears to conflict with several other compelling epistemic norms. To shed light on these apparent conflicts, I distinguish two kinds of norms: norms of perfection and norms of compensation. Roughly, norms of perfection tell us how agents ought to behave if they’re to be perfect; norms of compensation tell us how imperfect agents ought to behave in order to compensate for their imperfections. I argue (...) that the Fallibility Norm is a norm of compensation, and that thinking of it like this helps us make progress in debates surrounding disagreement, higher-order evidence, and coherence. (shrink)

Drawing on resources from both the Analytical and Continental traditions, Form and World argues that a comprehension of Kant's aesthetics is necessary for grasping the scope and force of his epistemology. Fiona Hughes draws on phenomenological and aesthetic resources to bring out the continuing relevance of Kant's project. One of the difficulties faced in reading the Critique of Pure Reason is finding a way of reading the text as one continuous discussion. This book offers a reading at each stage (...) of Kant's epistemological argument, showing how various elements of Kant's argument, often thought of as extraneous or indefensible, can be integrated. This incisive study, arguing for the centrality of aesthetics in philosophy, and within experience in general, challenges a blind spot in the Anglo-American tradition of philosophy and will contribute to a growing interest in the general significance of aesthetic culture. (shrink)

Though concise and introductory, this book argues inter alia that Dretske’s information-theoretic epistemology must take into account that many of our information channels are socially constructed, not least through learning concepts and information. These social aspects of human knowledge are consistent with realism about the objects of our empirical knowledge. It further argues that, though important, Margaret Gilbert’s social ontology in principle can neither accommodate nor account for the most fundamental social dimensions of human cognition.

. In whatever form, terminal philosophy holds that some matters are so fundamental that they are presupposed in any practice of reason-giving; accordingly, if reason-giving were applied to such matters in order to justify them, or even to criticize, then the very attempt to do so would necessarily assume what is at issue, a fatal circularity . No further argumentative recourse is possible at this level of fundamentality ; rational reason-giving must terminate.

This paper distinguishes between "descriptive" and "normative" conceptions of Bayesian principles of rationality, both in the context of inference and in the context of decision (which of course are not unrelated). I emphasize an idea according to which, "You have to work with what you have to work with" - that is, that rationality is a relation among old beliefs, new information, and new beliefs (in the case of inference) and among beliefs, desires, preferences, and choices (in the case of (...) decision). According to this conception of rationality, one's current beliefs and desires are not themselves subject to evaluation as to their rationality (except for some minimal, basically logical and "coherentist" constraints). From this perspective, rationality is about how we move from old beliefs (whatever they are) to new beliefs when confronted with evidence, and about how our preferences are structured given what we believe and what we want (whatever we currently happen to believe and want). I present some formal details of this perspective and discuss several criticisms of it. (shrink)

The opponent in either an ordinary or religious disagreement asserts you have made a mistake. To avoid mistakes we strive to have good justification for beliefs which holds us connected to them during difficult challenges, similar to how a good boat tether, pictured on this book's front cover, holds a valuable boat throughout the many stresses placed on it. The problem is that an equivalently informed and capable opponent shows a possible mistake as relevant, and this ought to reduce confidence (...) in the justification of the religious belief. The Epistemology of Religious Disagreement develops, by looking at foundational issues in the theory of knowledge, an understanding of justification specifically designed to describe exactly why this reduction happens. (shrink)

Whether and how truth is a norm of belief is a contentious issue in contemporary epistemology. In this paper I retrieve Aquinas’s conception of truth in order to advance a new answer to the question of what grounds the truth-norm. I begin by contrasting the two dominant contemporary accounts of this grounding, showing ways in which each succeeds and fails. Unlike the currently dominant accounts, my account seeks to ground the truth-norm in the nature of truth, as opposed to (...) the nature of belief. Ultimately I argue that Aquinas’s conception of truth furnishes us with an account of the grounding of the truth-norm that satisfies three conditions of adequacy. Such an account (1) grounds the truth-norm in the nature of truth, (2) captures the breadth of epistemic evaluation, and (3) makes sense of the fact that truth is a norm specifically for the human person. (shrink)