A study in the cognition of individuals’ identity: Solving the problem of singular cognition in object and agent tracking

This article compares the ability to track individuals lacking mental states with the ability to track intentional agents. It explains why reference to individuals raises the problem of explaining how cognitive agents track unique individuals and in what sense reference is based on procedures of perceptual-motor and epistemic tracking. We suggest applying the notion of singular-files from theories in perception and semantics to the problem of tracking intentional agents. In order to elucidate the nature of agent-files, three views of the relation between object- and agent-tracking are distinguished: the Independence, Deflationary and Organism-Dependence Views. The correct view is argued to be the latter, which states that perceptual and epistemic tracking of a unique human organism requires tracking both its spatio-temporal object-properties and its agent-properties

Judgment and Practice in Reid and Wittgenstein

This paper considers the views of two figures whose work falls on either side of the heyday of American pragmatism, Thomas Reid (1710-96) and Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951). The broad similarities between Reid’s and (the later) Wittgenstein’s views, and in particular their epistemological views, has been well documented. Here, I argue that such similarities extend to the relation in their work between common sense and the presence of elements in their thought that can be considered pragmatist in some important respect. Beginning with Reid, I argue that some specific theses commonly associated with pragmatism – e.g., that meaning, truth, or the justifiedness of a belief in a matter of practical effects or efficacy – clearly run counter to his stated views, and stand in tension with the well-known common sense character of his work. At the same time, however, and as others have noted, other pragmatist themes and ideas – e.g., about the close relations between belief (and doubt) and action, theory and practice, and facts and values – do have a clear precedent in Reid (§2). Most fundamentally, however, Reid’s epistemological views in particular display an adherence to the idea that practice is somehow primary – an idea that’s central to pragmatism ‘broadly conceived’, as Brandom calls it and, according to some others (e.g., Putnam, Cavell), to pragmatism per se. What’s more, once we are clear on the respect(s) in which Reid’s views do incorporate an important pragmatist element, it becomes clear that far from being at odds with, or needing supplementation by, the latter, common sense is in fact inseparable from it (§3). Finally, I turn (§4) to Wittgenstein, and suggest that the same close connection between pragmatist elements and common sense as we find in Reid is present here as well: like Reid, Wittgenstein rejects several ‘narrow’ pragmatist theses; but he too ascribes practice a crucial role. And while he seldom explicitly refers to common sense, the notions of good judgment, and of the reasonable person – hallmarks of common sense, as Reid conceives of it – are at the heart of Wittgenstein’s later epistemological views as well

Tracking objects, Tracking agents

Animals and humans have to keep track of individuals in their environment, both in perception (sensorimotor tracking) and in cognition (e.g., spatio-temporal localization and linguistic reference via memory, communication and reasoning). Items that are typical targets for tracking are things such as stationary physical objects (e.g., rocks, plants, trees, buildings, or attached artifacts), moving physical objects (e.g., animals, certain artifacts) and human beings. All such items are located in a spatial environment, persist over time, and are – or at least closely related to, in the case of conspecifics' bodies – physical objects that respect non trivial objecthood criteria such as having cohesive parts, following continuous spatio-temporal paths, or possessing causal powers and dispositions. Perceptually tracking these objects through space and over time requires possessing sensorimotor systems (e.g., the oculomotor system, the visuo-haptic system or the auditory system) that can anchor into and smoothly pursue objects' properties. Nonetheless, one may suspect that tracking intentional agents (i.e. creatures to whom it is natural to attribute intentional states such as beliefs, plans, desires, and who may even participate in shared intentionality), as opposed to physical objects without mental states (i.e. objects which are not intentional agents) exploits or requires further abilities and strategies. In particular, at least for humans, tracking conspecifics amounts to tracking intentional agents. This raises the question of how the perceptual tracking of non-intentional objects relates to the keeping track of intentional agents. Here, we propose an extension and augmentation of recent work on object-tracking to the tracking of intentional agents. Based on the examination of the elementary procedures available for pursing agency, our principal suggestions are as follows. First, identifying intentional agents is significantly dependent upon the perceptual abilities of physical-object tracking, and might therefore be explained by the ‘object-file' hypothesis (this hypothesis is explained in section 3), which we suggest to use in the study of the tracking of intentional agents (section 4). In the most elementary case, humans track intentional agents as physical objects: they track such agents by tracking their bodies (section 5). Even though this kind of tracking is insufficient for keeping track of human individuals ‘as' intentional agents (and explaining their behavior with an intentional stance), it may suffice to explain a number of interacting and situated behaviors in social contexts with intentional agents. Second, however, tracking intentional agents ‘as' intentional agents requires additional capacities for detecting and understanding intentional states and certain further properties which creatures with such states can exhibit (section 6) – e.g., (ir/)rationality, and the capacity to participate in shared intentionality. We note, however, that tracking a human individual as an intentional agent may require an appeal to specific perceptual cues and may even recruit basic sensorimotor skills – such as the detection of biological motions – whose tracking might be independent of the understanding of conspecifics' mental states. For reasons of parsimony and computational economy, unless we have reason to think that there is a separate system devoted to tracking intentional agents, we should suppose that the same mechanism used to track physical objects is recruited for tracking intentional agents

Pluralism about Knowledge

In this paper I consider the prospects for pluralism about knowledge, that is, the view that there is a plurality of knowledge relations. After a brief overview of some views that entail a sort of pluralism about knowledge, I focus on a particular kind of knowledge pluralism I call standards pluralism. Put roughly, standards pluralism is the view that one never knows anything simpliciter. Rather, one knows by this-or-that epistemic standard. Because there is a plurality of epistemic standards, there is a plurality of knowledge relations. In §1 I argue that one can construct an impressive case for standards pluralism. In §2 I clarify the relationship between standards pluralism, epistemic contextualism and epistemic relativism. In §3 I argue that standards pluralism faces a serious objection. The gist of the objection is that standards pluralism is incompatible with plausible claims about the normative role of knowledge. In §4 I finish by sketching the form that a standards pluralist response to this objection might take

Contextualism in epistemology

Traditional epistemology is universalistic, in that it proceeds on the assumption that we can fully specify conditions making for the correctness of attributions of knowledge (/justified belief) without adverting to 'context'. In Chapter 1 examples are adduced which cast doubt on this assumption, since they seem to show that the very 'contents' of such attributions are 'context-dependent'. But even if some form of 'contextualism' is thereby shown to be correct, if we are to avoid resting content with the foregoing near-platitudinous observation, we need to address the following two questions: How exactly should we conceive of "context"? And in what way, exactly, does context affect the 'content' of those attributions? More precisely, does context affect what is literally expressed by a given knowledge-attributing sentence (as the semantic contextualist claims) or does it affect what the speaker means by the utterance of that sentence (as the pragmatic contextualist maintains)? Here it is argued that 'context' is a psychological notion, referring to the psychology of the speaker (perhaps qua member of some larger group). Further, it is argued that in addition to its being favored both by a correct understanding of the notion of context itself and by methodological considerations, pragmatic contextualism avoids the intractable problems faced by the semantic contextualist. Finally, the broader implications for epistemology of the foregoing results are explored, and their application to non-epistemological theories/areas are indicated

Analyzing Knowledge Management Systems: A Veritistic Approach

Abstract. Knowledge management systems (KMS) are increasingly becoming popular and important in managing organizational knowledge. This motivates a closer inspection of the degree of usability of various types of KMS. This paper is an analysis of KMS from a philosophical angle: with the help of veritistic social epistemology we analyze which KMS are likely to be used more in comparison to others. Veritistic social epistemology is oriented towards truth determination; it seeks to evaluate actual and prospective multi-person practices in terms of their tendency to produce true beliefs (versus false beliefs or no belief) in their users. We distinguish between KMS that manage structured knowledge and those that manage unstructured knowledge. It is argued that structured knowledge is more credible to the users than unstructured knowledge and that, because of this, KMS that manage structured knowledge bring more veritistic gains than those that manage unstructured knowledge.