Epistemic Luck and the Extended Mind

Contemporary debates about epistemic luck and its relation to knowledge have traditionally proceeded against a tacit background commitment to cognitive internalism, the thesis that cognitive processes play out inside the head. In particular, safety-based approaches (e.g., Pritchard 2005; 2007; Luper-Foy 1984; Sainsbury 1997; Sosa 1999; Williamson 2000) reveal this commitment by taking for granted a traditional internalist construal of what I call the cognitive fixedness thesis—viz., the thesis that the cognitive process that is being employed in the actual world is always ‘held fixed’ when we go out to nearby possible worlds to assess whether the target belief is lucky in a way that is incompatible with knowledge. However, for those inclined to replace cognitive internalism with the extended mind thesis (e.g., Clark and Chalmers 1998), a very different, ‘active externalist’ version of the cognitive fixedness thesis becomes the relevant one for the purposes of assessing a belief’s safety. The aim here will be to develop this point in a way that draws out some of the important ramifications it has for how we think about safety, luck and knowledge

'Mrs. Pace' and the ambiguous language of victimization

'Justice' is a historical phenomenon: legal institutions and cultural attitudes (along with their various languages) vary across geography and time. At the same time, enduring elements of human psychology and recurring patterns in social structures provide continuities which allow the past to speak to contemporary issues. To understand the 'experience of justice', the historical tension between continuity and change and the many factors influencing the perceived boundaries of acceptable behaviour must be addressed. One approach involves examining specific experiences of victimisation, which is particularly important in the case of those who have traditionally been socially, legally and politically disadvantaged, such as women. However, while it is primarily an admission of powerlessness, 'victimhood' - the active claiming of victim status - can also be a source of social power. Only 'victims', after all, are in the position to claim some form of justice, whether retributive or restorative. However, one of the main problems with gaining a historical perspective on female victims of domestic violence is that their voices have relatively rarely survived in the public record. A valuable exception is the case of Beatrice Annie Pace. The wife of a Gloucestershire quarryman and sheep farmer, she was tried and acquitted for murdering her husband with arsenic in 1928. Extensive pre-trial hearings had revealed the horrifying extent of the dead man's physical and psychological brutality throughout eighteen-years of marriage. The dramatic twists and unexpected developments in the case were eagerly picked up by the voracious newspaper media, making the trial a sensation. 'Mrs. Pace', as she was known, achieved celebrity status; no longer simply an individual, she also became a popular and sympathetic media persona. This chapter explores the issue of justice by looking at the languages surrounding the Pace case. While legal issues raised in the trial (such as the accused's treatment by the police and coroner's jury) even led to questions being asked in Parliament, Pace was not only talked about but also received the rare opportunity to present her own version of events to the public which had so eagerly supported her. Following her acquittal, she sold her story to a tabloid, and the married 'martyrdom' which she revealed in a serialised memoir riveted newspaper readers across Britain. In this context, she had a great deal to say about her experience of abuse, the nature of married life and her treatment by the British legal system. The result is an invaluable resource for examining not only how one woman came to grips with her experience but also to compare her own views with those of other observers of the case. For some, Pace's suffering was evidence of serious shortcomings in British society and law. Pace's own commentary is both more personal and, ultimately, more ambiguous about the meaning of her victimisation and ultimate vindication. Thus, this case allows a unique, historically aware consideration of the complicated nature of the ways in which one woman created justice and resisted injustice through one of the only vehicles available to her: language

The Inquiring Mind: On Intellectual Virtues and Virtue Epistemology

This is a book review of Jason Baehr's 'The Inquiring Mind: On Intellectual Virtues and Virtue Epistemology' (OUP)

Epistemic Perceptualism, Skill, and the Regress Problem

A novel solution is offered for how emotional experiences can function as sources of immediate prima facie justification for evaluative beliefs, and in such a way that suffices to halt a justificatory regress. Key to this solution is the recognition of two distinct kinds of emotional skill (what I call generative emotional skill and doxastic emotional skill) and how these must be working in tandem when emotional experience plays such a justificatory role. The paper has two main parts, the first negative and the second positive. The negative part criticises the epistemic credentials of Epistemic Perceptualism (e.g., Tappolet 2012, 2016; Doring 2003, 2007; Elgin 2008; Roberts 2003), the view that emotional experience alone suffices to prima facie justify evaluative beliefs in a way that is analogous to how perceptual experience justifies our beliefs about the external world. The second part of the paper develops an account of emotional skill and uses this account to frame a revisionary form of Epistemic Perceptualism that succeeds where the traditional views could not. I conclude by considering some objections and replies

Radical Scepticism and the Epistemology of Confusion

The lack of knowledge—as Timothy Williamson (2000) famously maintains—is ignorance. Radical sceptical arguments, at least in the tradition of Descartes, threaten universal ignorance. They do so by attempting to establish that we lack any knowledge, even if we can retain other kinds of epistemic standings, like epistemically justified belief. If understanding is a species of knowledge, then radical sceptical arguments threaten to rob us categorically of knowledge and understanding in one fell swoop by implying universal ignorance. If, however, understanding is not a species of knowledge, then three questions arise: (i) is ignorance the lack of understanding, even if understanding is not a species of knowledge? (ii) If not, what kind of state of intellectual impoverishment best describes a lack of understanding? (iii) What would a radical sceptical argument look like that threatened that kind of intellectual impoverishment, even if not threatening ignorance? This paper answers each of these questions in turn. I conclude by showing how the answers developed to (i-iii) interface in an interesting way with Virtue Perspectivism as an anti-sceptical strategy

Faulkner, Paul, Knowledge on Trust

This is a review of Faulkner, Paul, Knowledge on Trust, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011, pp.240, US 55.00 (hardback)

A Survey of Quandle Ideas

This article surveys many aspects of the theory of quandles which algebraically encode the Reidemeister moves. In addition to knot theory, quandles have found applications in other areas which are only mentioned in passing here. The main purpose is to give a short introduction to the subject and a guide to the applications that have been found thus far for quandle cocycle invariants.Comment: Submitted to conference proceedings; embarrassing misspellings of various names corrected. Many apologies and thanks to readers who pointed out correction

On Behalf of a Bi-Level Account of Trust

A bi-level account of trust is developed and defended, one with relevance in ethics as well as epistemology. The proposed account of trust—on which trusting is modelled within a virtue-theoretic framework as a performance-type with an aim—distinguishes between two distinct levels of trust, apt and convictive, that take us beyond previous assessments of its nature, value, and relationship to risk assessment. While Ernest Sosa (2009; 2015; 2017), in particular, has shown how a performance normativity model may be fruitfully applied to belief, my objective is to apply this kind of model in a novel and principled way to trust. I conclude by outlining some of the key advantages of the performance-theoretic bi-level account of trust defended over more traditional univocal proposals

Epistemological Implications of Relativism

Relativists about knowledge ascriptions think that whether a particular use of a knowledge-ascribing sentence, e.g., “Keith knows that the bank is open” is true depends on the epistemic standards at play in the assessor’s context—viz., the context in which the knowledge ascription is being as- sessed for truth or falsity. Given that the very same knowledge-ascription can be assessed for truth or falsity from indefinitely many perspectives, relativism has a striking consequence. When I ascribe knowledge to someone (e.g., when I say that, at a particular time, “Keith knows that the bank is open”), what I’ve said does not get a truth-value absolutely, but only relatively. If this semantic thesis about the word “knows” and its cognates is true, what implications would this have for epistemology, the philosophical theory of knowledge? e present aim will be to engage with this mostly unexplored question, and then to consider how the epistemological conclusions drawn might bear on the plausibility of a relativist semantics for “knows”

Group peer disagreement

A popular view in mainstream social epistemology maintains that, in the face of a revealed peer disagreement over p, neither party should remain just as confident vis-a-vis p as she initially was. This ‘conciliatory’ insight has been defended with regard to individual epistemic peers. However, to the extent that (non-summativist) groups are candidates for group knowledge and beliefs, we should expect groups (no less than individuals) to be in the market for disagreements. The aim here will be to carve out and explore an extension of the conciliatory insight from individual peer disagreement to group peer disagreement; in doing so, I’ll raise and address three key problems that face any plausible defence of such a constraint