The Knowledge Norm of Belief

Doxastic normativism is the thesis that norms are constitutive of or essential to belief, such that no mental state not subject to those norms counts as a belief. A common normativist view is that belief is essentially governed by a norm of truth. According to Krister Bykvist and Anandi Hattiangadi, truth norms for belief cannot be formulated without unpalatable consequences: they are either false or they impose unsatisfiable requirements on believers. I propose that we construe the fundamental norm of belief as a knowledge norm, rather than a truth norm. I argue that a specific kind of knowledge norm—one that has a subject's obligation to believe that p depend on her being in a position to know that p—might avoid the well-known formulation problems with truth norms

How to Form the Knowledge that Marketers Need? An Approach for Marketers to SMEs

International audienceTraditionally, the formula for knowledge consists of belief and truth. The key challenge behind this is to understand how a marketer can benefit from this knowledge. Like the traditional Chinese saying, the reason a ship floats or sinks is the same, it is because of water. Similarly, the success or failure of a marketing campaign depends on knowledge. For a marketer, useful knowledge is the combination between the truth and the customer " s belief

The Value and Expected Value of Knowledge

ABSTRACT: Meno's Thesis—the idea that knowing something is better than merely having a true belief about it—is incompatible with the joint claims that (a) believing the truth is the sole source of the value of knowledge and (b) true belief and knowledge are equally successful in believing the truth. Recent answers to that so-called "swamping” problem reject either (a) or (b). This paper rejects Meno's Thesis instead, as relying on a confusion between expected value and value proper. The proposed solution relies on an externalist view of rationality, which is presente

What Might International Development Assistance Be Able to Tell Us About Contemporary "Policy Government" in Developed Countries?

The article examines international development assistance—aid. Donors assert that experts possess predictive knowledge and project belief in such knowledge into organizational form—the Logical Framework Approach. While such beliefs lack predictive power, as aid operates under multiple sovereignty conditions, no single authority determines truth. Donors ease pressure on experts by accepting variation in intervention logics, yet assert the validity of “single truth ” knowledge; knowledge production practices have not basically changed. Belief that what is believed is true, revealed in aid work, illuminates the nature of policy in rich countries and helps explain low confidence in government

Are Intellectual Virtues Truth-Relevant?

According to attributor virtue epistemology (the view defended by Ernest Sosa, John Greco, and others), S knows that p only if her true belief that p is attributable to some intellectual virtue, competence, or ability that she possesses. Attributor virtue epistemology captures a wide range of our intuitions about the nature and value of knowledge, and it has many able defenders. Unfortunately, it has an unrecognized consequence that many epistemologists will think is sufficient for rejecting it: namely, it makes knowledge depend on factors that aren't truth-relevant, even in the broadest sense of this term, and it also makes knowledge depend in counterintuitive ways on factors that are truth-relevant in the more common narrow sense of this term. As I show in this paper, the primary objection to interest-relative views in the pragmatic encroachment debate can be raised even more effectively against attributor virtue epistemology

Knowledge and Luck

Nearly all success is due to some mix of ability and luck. But some successes we attribute to the agent’s ability, whereas others we attribute to luck. To better understand the criteria distinguishing credit from luck, we conducted a series of four studies on knowledge attributions. Knowledge is an achievement that involves reaching the truth. But many factors affecting the truth are beyond our control and reaching the truth is often partly due to luck. Which sorts of luck are compatible with knowledge? We find that knowledge attributions are highly sensitive to lucky events that change the explanation for why a belief is true. By contrast, knowledge attributions are surprisingly insensitive to lucky events that threaten but ultimately fail to change the explanation for why a belief is true. These results shed light on our concept of knowledge, help explain apparent inconsistencies in prior work on knowledge attributions, and constitute progress toward a general understanding of the relation between success and luck

Epistemological Realism and Onto-Relations

The traditional concept of knowledge is a justified true belief. The bulk of contemporary epistemology has focused primarily on that task of justification. Truth seems to be a quite obvious criterion—does the belief in question correspond to reality? My contention is that the aspect of ontology is far too separated from epistemology. This onto-relationship of between reality and beliefs require the epistemic method of epistemological realism. This is not to diminish the task of justification. I will then discuss the role of inference from the onto-relationships of free invention and discovery and whether it is best suited for a foundationalist or coherentist model within a theistic context

Indywidualny wymiar wiedzy a jej wartość

On Relation between the Individual Character of Propositional Knowledge and Its Value The paper presents two aspects of human propositional knowledge, objective and subjective. The former is based on the truth condition, and the latter on the belief condition. Then several problems of the value of knowledge are briefly presented. The last part contains two arguments for the sine qua non belief condition of knowledge, one of which concerns the problem of epistemic luck assumed in virtu

INVESTIGATING KNOWLEDGE AND OPINION

This work treats the correlative concepts knowledge and opinion, in various senses. In all senses of ‘knowledge’ and ‘opinion’, a belief known to be true is knowledge; a belief not known to be true is opinion. In this sense of ‘belief’, a belief is a proposition thought to be true—perhaps, but not necessarily, known to be true. All knowledge is truth. Some but not all opinion is truth. Every proposition known to be true is believed to be true. Some but not every proposition believed to be true is known to be true. Our focus is thus on propositional belief (“belief-that”): the combination of propositional knowledge (“knowledge-that”) and propositional opinion (“opinion-that”). Each of a person’s beliefs, whether knowledge or opinion, is the end result of a particular thought process that continued during a particular time interval and ended at a particular time with a conclusive act—a judgment that something is the case. This work is mainly about beliefs in substantive informative propositions—not empty tautologies. We also treat objectual knowledge (knowledge of objects in the broadest sense, or “knowledge-of”), operational knowledge (abilities and skills, “knowledge-how-to”, or “know-how”), and expert knowledge (expertise). Most points made in this work have been made by previous writers, but to the best of our knowledge, they have never before been collected into a coherent work accessible to a wide audience. Key words: belief, knowledge/opinion, propositional, operational, objectual, cognition

Group Knowledge

There is knowledge in groups or communities, e.g. in the\ud scientific community, that such and such is the case, and\ud that in some cases groups as groups know; and in all\ud these cases there must be or have been actual knowers.\ud Accordingly, there is knowledge available in social groups,\ud and this knowledge can be "picked up� and had by\ud individual members as knowledge. My main concern in this\ud paper is to give an account of group beliefs and knowledge\ud in the sense that the group members as a group believe or\ud know something. A central case here is normatively\ud binding group belief and knowledge. In such a case the\ud group is obligated to reason and act on the truth of the\ud content of the belief in question. I will assume that a group\ud cannot know unless its members or at least some of them\ud know the item in question. The general ground for this\ud assumption is that group properties supervene on their\ud members' relevant properties (see Tuomela 1995 Chapter\ud 6, for a discussion). A group's normatively binding belief\ud concerning a topic will accordingly depend on its members,\ud beliefs, indeed we-mode "acceptance� beliefs, about the\ud topic and on their relevant "interconnections" concerning it.\ud We-mode acceptance belief centrally involves the idea of\ud functioning fully as a group member (see Tuomela 2002a,\ud 2003a for the we-mode). A member"s private or I-mode\ud beliefs may differ from his relevant we-mode beliefs