Are Introspective Beliefs about One’s Own Visual Experiences Immediate?

The aim of this paper is to show that introspective beliefs about one’s own current visual experiences are not immediate in the sense that what justifies them does not include other beliefs that the subject in question might possess. The argument will take the following course. First, the author explains the notions of immediacy and truth-sufficiency as they are used here. Second, the author suggests a test to determine whether a given belief lacks immediacy. Third, the author applies this test to a standard case of formation of an introspective belief about one’s own current visual experiences and concludes that the belief in question is neither immediate nor truth-sufficient. Fourth, the author rebuts several objections that might be raised against the argument

The Obligation to Diversify One's Sources: Against Epistemic Partisanship in the Consumption of News Media

In this paper, I defend the view that it is wrong for us to consume only, or overwhelmingly, media that broadly aligns with our own political viewpoints: that is, it is wrong to be politically “partisan” in our decisions about what media to consume. We are obligated to consume media that aligns with political viewpoints other than our own – to “diversify our sources”. This is so even if our own views are, as a matter of fact, substantively correct

The Intuition of Knowing: Its Biological Function and Natural Triggering-Conditions

Over the last hundred years, competing and incompatible positions in relation to basic problems of knowledge and the use of the verb ‘to know’ have multiplied; and the prospect of a consensus solution emerging with respect to any of the problems has not seemed particularly good. We have a Gordian knot. Even so, I suggest that we also have a way to cut it. This will involve identifying why the cognitive mechanism that produces our intuitions of knowing evolved and was maintained (by natural selection), i.e., identifying the ‘teleonomic function’ of that cognitive mechanism. Also, it will involve predicting, on the basis of this teleonomic function, the triggering-conditions of these natural knowledge intuitions. In this thesis, I develop a general theory of the origin, function and triggering-conditions of knowledge intuitions that will allow us to cut that knot. That theory follows basic biological theory (including that which pertains to natural altruism) and also signal detection theory. My theory identifies a number of different circumstances under which the triggering-conditions of knowledge intuitions are different. Strikingly, these different circumstances (and their associated triggering-conditions) map onto the different competing and incompatible epistemological positions to which I referred. This suggests that these positions are all correct within the boundaries of one of the circumstances that my theory identifies; and that the Gordian knot is largely the result of epistemologists claiming universal applicability of a theory that in fact only applies under particular circumstances. We cut the knot by specifying the different circumstances under which each of the different epistemological positions will hold, and the reason we should expect it to hold in just these circumstances, in light of the teleonomic function of knowledge intuitions

Knowing and Expressing Ourselves

This dissertation concerns two epistemologically puzzling phenomena. The first phenomenon is the authority that each of us has over our minds. Roughly, to have authority is to be owed (and to tend to receive) a special sort of deference when self-ascribing your current mental states. The second phenomenon is our privileged and peculiar self-knowledge. Roughly, self-knowledge is privileged insofar as one knows ones mental states in a way that is highly epistemically secure relative to other varieties of contingent empirical knowledge. Roughly, one has peculiar self-knowledge insofar as one acquires it in a way that is available only to oneself. In Chapter One I consider several more detailed specifications of the authority of self-ascriptions. Some specifications emphasize the relative indubitability of our self-ascriptions, while others focus on their presumptive truth. In Chapter Two I defend a Neo-Expressivist explanation of authority. According to Neo-Expressivism, self-ascriptions are authoritative insofar as they are acts that put ones mental states on display for others, whether or not these mental states are also known by the self-ascriber with privilege and peculiarity. However, I do not dispute that we often have privileged and peculiar self-knowledge. This raises the question of what such knowledge does explain, if not the authority of our self-ascriptions. In Chapter Three I examine several extant answers to this question, focusing on privileged and peculiar self-knowledge of the propositional attitudes. Each answer meets with objections. In Chapter Four I develop a Social Agentialist account of the explanatory indispensability of privileged and peculiar self-knowledge. I argue that such knowledge enables at least three forms of social-epistemic agency: interpersonal reasoning, complex group action, and linguistic interpretation. Next, I argue that, even though privileged and peculiar self-knowledge does not explain the authority of our self-ascriptions, it is importantly related to our (Neo-Expressively understood) authority. In Chapter Five I consider possible sources of our privileged and peculiar self-knowledge, focusing again on propositional-attitudinal self-knowledge. I eventually defend a Constitutivist view. This is the view that, for agents who meet certain background conditions, self-knowledge is privileged and peculiar because it is metaphysically built into the attitudes self-known

Suspension-to-Suspension Justification Principles

We will be in a better position to evaluate some important skeptical theses if we first investigate two questions about justified suspended judgment. One question is this: when, if ever, does one justified suspension confer justification on another suspension? And the other is this: what is the structure of justified suspension? The goal of this essay is to make headway at answering these questions. After surveying the four main views about the non-normative nature of suspended judgment and offering a taxonomy of the epistemic principles that might govern which suspended judgments are justified, I will isolate five important principles that might govern which suspended judgments are justified. I will call these suspension-to-suspension principles. I will then evaluate these principles by the lights of each of the four views about what suspensions are. I close by drawing some conclusions about the prospects for skepticism, the structure of justified suspended judgment, and the importance of theorizing about justified suspended judgment

The Psychological Dimension of the Lottery Paradox

The lottery paradox involves a set of judgments that are individually easy, when we think intuitively, but ultimately hard to reconcile with each other, when we think reflectively. Empirical work on the natural representation of probability shows that a range of interestingly different intuitive and reflective processes are deployed when we think about possible outcomes in different contexts. Understanding the shifts in our natural ways of thinking can reduce the sense that the lottery paradox reveals something problematic about our concept of knowledge. However, examining these shifts also raises interesting questions about how we ought to be thinking about possible outcomes in the first place

Assertion, knowledge and rational credibility: the scoreboard

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Experimental epistemology and "Gettier" cases

This chapter reviews some faults of the theoretical literature and findings from the experimental literature on “Gettier” cases. Some “Gettier” cases are so poorly constructed that they are unsuitable for serious study. Some longstanding assumptions about how people tend to judge “Gettier” cases are false. Some “Gettier” cases are judged similarly to paradigmatic ignorance, whereas others are judged similarly to paradigmatic knowledge, rendering it a theoretically useless category. Experimental procedures can affect how people judge “Gettier” cases. Some important central tendencies in judging “Gettier” cases appear to be robust against demographic variation in biological sex, age, language, and culture, although there could be some interesting differences related to culture and personality traits. Some remaining questions regarding Gettier’s cases, “Gettier” cases, and “the Gettier problem” concern the psychology and sociology of contemporary anglophone theoretical epistemology. Some remaining questions regarding the empirical study of knowledge judgments concern mechanisms underlying observed behavioral patterns