Knowledge in the face of conspiracy conditionals

A plausible principle about the felicitous use of indicative conditionals says that there is something strange about asserting an indicative conditional when you know whether its antecedent is true. But in most contexts there is nothing strange at all about asserting indicative conditionals like ‘If Oswald didn’t shoot Kennedy, then someone else did’. This paper argues that the only compelling explanation of these facts requires the resources of contextualism about knowledge

Everyone Knew He Did It, But He Was Not Condemned! Knowledge and Knowledge Attributions in Legal Contexts

Theorizing about knowledge attributions has revolved almost exclusively around the problem of skepticism and knowledge attributions in everyday conversations. Sutton (2007), however, points out that Epistemic Contextualism seems to settle another field: [i]t is sometimes suggested that courtroom proceedings provide a context that shows the context-sensitivity of knowledge ascription truth-conditions (p. 87). This dissertation is devoted to the evaluation of this contextualist suggestion (CS). Epistemic Contextualism claims that the correctness of knowledge attributions depends on the salience of error possibilities or the practical states of a knowledge attributor\u27s context of utterance. I interpret CS implies that the context of utterance is the context of litigation in which a knowledge attributor is at the moment of the attribution. A counter-example for CS is criminal cases in which the conviction of the defendant would meet the epistemic standards of all the knowledge attributors within and without the courtroom (e.g., police officers, the prosecutor, the judge, the jury). However, conviction is not guaranteed because it does not meet the invariant epistemic standards of proof fixed for conviction. My working hypothesis is that knowledge attributions have the purpose of stating that a cognitive agenda has been properly closed. Given that the object of knowledge attributions is cognitive agendas, the conditions under which knowledge is properly attributed depends on the nature of the cognitive agenda claimed to have been properly closed or advanced. This explains why, in the aforementioned cases, conviction cannot be secure, even if everyone within and without the court knows that the defendant is guilty. One of the closure conditions of conviction is the finding of the facts supporting conviction beyond a reasonable doubt. Knowledge is not properly attributed to the trier of facts, and conviction is not secured, until such requirement is satisfied. My working hypothesis is also confirmed studying the function of knowledge attributions in our cognitive economies instantiated by criminal investigations, in the attributions of testimonial knowledge as the most important source of legal knowledge, in the attributions of specialized knowledge by the trial judge, and in the attributions of group knowledge to juries and multi-agent courts

Do we need dynamic semantics?

I suspect the answer to the question in the title of this paper is no. But the scope of my paper will be considerably more limited: I will be concerned with whether certain types of considerations that are commonly cited in favor of dynamic semantics do in fact push us towards a dynamic semantics. Ultimately, I will argue that the evidence points to a dynamics of discourse that is best treated pragmatically, rather than as part of the semantics

A solution to skeptical puzzles

"May 2014."Dissertation Supervisor: Dr. Matthew McGrath.Includes vita.In this dissertation, I aim at resolving the skeptical puzzle. An instance of this puzzle is as follows: (1) I know that I have hands. (2) I don't know that I am not a brain in a vat (being stimulated to experience having hands). (3) If I know that I have hands, I know that I am not a brain in a vat. (1)-(3) are puzzling since, while each is individually plausible, they are jointly inconsistent. Siding with epistemic contextualism, I argue that the truth values of (1)-(3) vary with contexts. More precisely, (1), not-(2) and (3) are true in the ordinary context, while not-(1), (2), and (3) are true in the skeptical context. However, contextualists claim that the variability of the truth values consists in the variability of the standards for knowledge, while I claim that the variability is due to the variability of one's epistemic position with respect to p. I argue against the contextualist solution. I propose that one's epistemic position with respect to p should be characterized by the sensitivity of one's reason, where S's reason for p is sensitive just in case S would not have the same reason if p had not been the case. I argue that the assessment of the sensitivity of one's reason for p is relative to the epistemic inquiry the assessor is engaging in. There are two basic kinds of epistemic inquiry, defining by two distinct epistemic goals: the liberal goal and the conservative goal. I argue that (1) and not-(2) are true relative to the liberal inquiry, while not-(1) and (2) are true relative to the conservative inquiry. This explains why (1) and not-(2) are true in the ordinary context, while not-(1) and (2), the skeptical one.Includes bibliographical references (pages 287-294)

Listening and Normative Entanglement: A Pragmatic Foundation for Conversational Ethics

People care very much about being listened to. In everyday talk, we make moral-sounding judgements of people as listeners: praising a doctor who listens well even if she does not have a ready solution, or blaming a boss who does not listen even if the employee manages to get her situation addressed. In this sense, listening is a normative behaviour: that is, we ought to be good listeners. Whilst several disciplines have addressed the normative importance of interpersonal listening—particularly in sociology, psychology, media and culture studies—analytic philosophy does not have a framework for dealing with listening as a normative interpersonal behaviour. Listening usually gets reduced mere speech-parsing (in philosophy of language), or into a matter of belief and trust in the testimony of credible knowers (in social epistemology). My preliminary task is to analyse why this reductive view is taken for granted in the discipline; to diagnose the problem behind the reduction and propose a more useful alternative approach. The central task of my work is to give an account of listening which captures its distinctively normative quality as an interpersonal way of relating to someone: one listens not because the speaker is an epistemic expert, but because the speaker is a person, worthy of recognition and care. I created a framework which accomplishes this by deploying the conceptual resources of conversation sociology and psycholinguistics, in counterpoint to the standing philosophical work on the ethics and politics of speech and silencing, to create a practical ethics of listening to people

The New and Old Ignorance Puzzles: How badly do we need closure?

Skeptical puzzles and arguments often employ knowledge-closure principles . Epistemologists widely believe that an adequate reply to the skeptic should explain why her reasoning is appealing albeit misleading; but it’s unclear what would explain the appeal of the skeptic’s closure principle, if not for its truth. In this paper, I aim to challenge the widespread commitment to knowledge-closure. But I proceed by first examining a new puzzle about failing to know—what I call the New Ignorance Puzzle . This puzzle resembles to the Old Ignorance Puzzle , although it does not involve a closure principle. It instead centers on the standard view of ignorance, a highly intuitive principle stating that ignorance is merely a failure to know. In Sects. 2 and 3, I argue that the best way to solve the New Ignorance Puzzle is to reject the standard view of ignorance and to explain away its appeal via conversational implicature. I then use this solution to the New Ignorance Puzzle as a way of explaining why knowledge-closure principles would seem true, and why abominable conjunctions would seem abominable, even if such principles were false . The upshot is a new way of explaining why the skeptic’s reasoning is appealing albeit misleadin

A minimalist approach to epistemology

This thesis addresses the problem of the analysis of knowledge. The persistent failure of analyses of knowledge in terms of necessary and sufficient conditions is used to motivate exploring alternative approaches to the analytical problem. In parallel to a similar development in the theory of truth, in which the persistent failure to provide a satisfactory answer to the question as to what the nature of truth is has led to the exploration of deflationary and minimalist approaches to the theory of truth, the prospects for deflationary and minimalist approaches to the theory of knowledge are investigated. While it is argued that deflationary approaches are ultimately unsatisfactory, a minimalist approach to epistemology, which characterises the concept of knowledge by a set of platitudes about knowledge, is defended. The first version of a minimalist framework for the theory of knowledge is developed. Two more substantive developments of the minimalist framework are discussed. In the first development a safety condition on knowledge is derived from the minimalist framework. Problems for this development are discussed and solved. In the second development, an ability condition is derived from the minimalist framework. Reason is provided to believe that, arguably, the ability condition can avoid the problems that beset traditional analyses of knowledge. It is also shown that even if this argument fails, minimalist approaches to epistemology may serve to provide a functional definition of knowledge. Reason is thus provided to believe that minimalist approaches to epistemology can make progress towards addressing the problem of the analysis of knowledge

Belief, knowledge and action

In this thesis, I explore a number of epistemological issues concerning the relations between knowledge, belief and practical matters. In particular, I defend a view, which I call credal pragmatism. This view is compatible with moderate invariantism, a view that takes knowledge to depend exclusively on truth-relevant factors and to require an invariant epistemic standard of knowledge that can be quite easily met. The thesis includes a negative and a positive part. In the negative part (Ch. 1-4) I do two things: i) I critically examine some moderate invariantist accounts of the intuitive influence of practical factors on knowledge ascriptions, and ii) I provide a criticism of the idea that knowledge is the norm of practical reasoning. In Chapter 1, I provide a general overview of the issues that constitute the background for the views and arguments defended in my thesis. In particular, I provide a thorough discussion of two aspects of the relation between knowledge and practical matters: one is constituted by the practical factors’ effects on knowledge ascriptions; the other is the intuitive normative role of knowledge in the regulation and assessments of action and practical reasoning. In Chapter 2, I consider and criticize Timothy Williamson’s account according to which an alleged failure to acknowledge the distinction between knowing and knowing that one knows generates the intuition that knowledge ascriptions are sensitive to practical factors. In Chapter 3, I argue against the idea that practical reasoning is governed by a knowledge norm. The argument generalizes to other candidate epistemic norms of practical reasoning. In Chapter 4, I criticise a number of accounts which explain effects of practical factors on knowledge ascriptions in terms of the influence of practical factors on belief. These include the accounts of Brain Weatherson, Dorit Ganson, Kent Bach and Jennifer Nagel. In the positive part of the thesis (Ch. 5-6), I develop and argue for credal pragmatism, an original account of the nature and interaction of different doxastic attitudes and the role of practical factors in their rational regulation. On this view, given a certain fixed amount of evidence, the degree of credence of an adaptively rational agent varies in different circumstances depending on practical factors, while the threshold on the degree of credence necessary for outright belief remains fixed across contexts. This account distinguishes between two kinds of outright belief: occurrent belief, which depends on the actual degree of credence, and dispositional belief, which depends on the degree of credence in normal circumstances. In Chapter 5, I present the view and I show how credal pragmatism can explain the practical factors’ effects on knowledge ascriptions. In Chapter 6, I develop a fallibilist account of several features about knowledge ascriptions including i) why in folk epistemological practices knowledge is often taken to be a necessary and sufficient epistemic condition for relying on a proposition in practical reasoning; ii) concessive knowledge attributions and related data; and iii) the infallibilist intuition that knowledge excludes error possibilities