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This paper challenges some widespread assumptions about the role of the modal axiom S4 in theories of vagueness. In the context of vagueness, S4 usually appears as the principle ‘If it’s clear (determinate, definite) that A, then it’s clear that it’s clear that A’, or, formally, CA→CCA. We argue first that contrary to common opinion, higher-order vagueness and S4 are perfectly compatible. This is in response to claims such as Williamson’s that if vagueness is defined using a clarity operator that obeys S4, higher-order vagueness disappears. Second, we argue that contrary to common opinion, bivalence-preservers (such as epistemicists) can without contradiction condone S4, and bivalence-discarders (such as open-texture theorists and supervaluationists) can without contradiction reject S4. To this end, we show how in the debate over S4 two different notions of clarity are in play, and elucidate their respective functions in accounts of higher-order vagueness. Third, we rebut several arguments produced by opponents of S4, including those by Williamson.

This chapter has four parts. The first lays out Williamson's account of mental concepts and mental states, and his characterization of knowledge as the most general factive stative attitude. The second problematizes the account of mental states and the characterization of knowledge, and offers an alternative account of when a state is purely mental; according to this account, knowledge really is mental only by courtesy of the contained belief (an internalist intuition opposed to the externalism featured in the book). The third part reflects on possible sources and support for such a conception of the purely mental. The fourth and last part takes up the KK principle, Williamson's reductio of it, and the consequences of that for the possibility of reflective knowledge.

The anti‐luminosity argument is used to refute the KK principle that if one knows and one knows that one knows, or at least is in a position to know that one knows. Further iterations of knowledge are shown to involve similar cognitive gaps. The underlying phenomenon is diagnosed in terms of the need for a margin for error in knowledge. It is related to a family of ideas such as safety, reliability, robustness, stability, and close or easy possibility. The account is extended to knowledge of what others know.

Chapter 11 defends the thesis that some phenomenal and epistemic conditions are luminous in the sense that you’re always in a position to know whether or not they obtain. Section 11.1 draws a distinction between epistemic and doxastic senses of luminosity and argues that some conditions are epistemically luminous even if none are doxastically luminous. Section 11.2 uses this distinction in solving Ernest Sosa’s version of the problem of the speckled hen. The same distinction is applied to Timothy Williamson’s anti-luminosity argument in section 11.3, his argument against epistemic iteration principles in section 11.4, and his argument for improbable knowing in section 11.5. Section 11.6 concludes by explaining why this defense of luminosity is not merely a pointless compromise.

Knowledge does not require confidence. An agent may know without confidence because of misleading evidence or for other reasons. An agent may not believe what she knows. Misleading evidence never causes agents to lose knowledge. The vagueness of an expression may be visible to speakers or invisible. In the case of “bald,” it is visible; it is not visible for “know.” This is because knowledge standards are invisible. Vagueness is analyzed as being epistemic in the sense that our ignorance of whether a word applies in a case places no metaphysical constraints on the facts. Agential standards for evidence are also tri-scoped and application-indeterminate. There are cases where such standards determine no answer, knows or not; and there are cases where it is indeterminate whether, or not, standards determine an answer. Because Timothy Williamson’s argument against KK presupposes that knowledge requires confidence, his argument fails.

How we easily slip between metacognitive thought and assertion and ground-floor thought and assertion is illustrated; how, as a result, we easily confuse the two is also illustrated. “Do you know the time?” is often speaker-meant merely as a request for information as opposed to what it literally conveys, a question about the auditor’s knowledge state. Distinctions between having concepts, grasping one’s own concepts, and metacognizing one’s propositional attitudes (in various ways) are distinguished. Why it is so easy to confuse being aware of being in pain and being in pain is explained; that it seems it isn’t possible to be in pain without being aware of it illustrates metacognitive confusions. Similarly, kinds of justifications are distinguished that are often confused, ones that involve metacognition and ones that don’t. How “level confusions” bedevil philosophical arguments is illustrated.

A distinction between Cartesian knowers (who are capable of all forms of metacognition) and ground-floor cognizers are drawn. B.B., a virtual ground-floor cognizer, is extensively described: what it knows, what it doesn’t know, and what concepts can be attributed to it. The fragmented nature of iterated cognitions is described. That deduction need not require metacognitions of any sort is described: in successfully deducing q from p, an agent need not recognize or appreciate that she is using propositions, that she is using a rule (modus ponens), or that she is justified. A psychological study of deduction is described, and how it fails to illustrate metacognition is illustrated. The apparent ineffability of metacognition in nonhuman animals is discussed. A single anecdotal case of metacognition in chimpanzees is given, and an implicit knowledge generalization is attributed to the animals on the basis of this case. The use of Morgan’s canon is rejected.

This essential historical introduction to the main themes of the book starts with a close, sympathetic, and significantly novel analysis (with reference to associated arguments) of a famous argument in Plato’s Republic in which Plato draws a distinction of kind between knowledge and belief, and between their objects. It is then demonstrated that the distinction, broadly so understood, remained a dominant force, in one form or another, in all non-sceptical branches of the European philosophical tradition, including empiricism (not least, Locke’s), until the eighteenth century (the epistemology of the Stoics and of Aquinas being particularly striking examples). It is argued that there is much to learn from this history (so different from the myth of a ‘traditional analysis’ of knowledge as ‘justified true belief’), and specific features of the traditional distinction are identified as deserving the further, sympathetic consideration given, in effect, in later chapters.

A phenomenological analysis of perceptual experience, conducted with an eye on experimental psychology, addresses a series of questions. What is phenomenology? What makes perception of one’s environment as one’s environment? Does the phenomenal integration of the senses give decisive reason for ‘direct realism’? Do we perceive causal relations, or only infer them? Are we perceptually aware of acting? Are we perceptually aware of the causality of perception itself, and if so, in some cases or in all? It is argued that perceiving is not only direct cognitive contact with reality, but that the perceptual relation is itself an object of perceptual awareness. Accordingly, conscious perceptual knowledge comes with knowledge that and of how one has it. Other forms of knowledge (e.g. a priori knowledge) are analogous. A distinction is drawn between primary and secondary knowledge, such that that there could be no secondary knowledge without some primary knowledge.

Brief accounts of the motivation and form of some pre-Kantian conceptualist theories and of Kant’s transcendental idealism lead into discussion of the source of the conceptualist assumptions of much twentieth-century analytic philosophy. The arguments of a currently leading exponent, John McDowell, are critically examined, and his emphatic endorsement of two main conclusions of Chapter II are noted—that perception is direct cognitive contact with the world, and that perceptual knowledge is perspicuously so to the subject. But according to the phenomenological analysis in Chapter II these features are intrinsic to the content of preconceptual perceptual awareness, whereas McDowell sees concepts, coming only with language, as a necessary means to the former, and assigns the latter, in effect, to reason and the capacity for second-order reflection. Epistemological and logico–linguistic considerations relating to the identity, individuation and classification of material things present a further, arguably decisive challenge to conceptualist theory.

The concept of higher-order evidence—roughly, evidence about what our evidence supports—promises epistemological riches; it has struck many philosophers as necessary for explaining how to rationally respond to disagreement in particular, and to evidence of our own fallibility more generally. But it also threatens paradox. Once we allow higher-order evidence to do non-trivial work—in particular, once we allow that people can be rationally ignorant of what their evidence supports—we seem to be committed to a host of puzzling or even absurd consequences. The aim in this chapter is to have our cake and eat it too; it presents an independently motivated framework that lets us mimic the particular case judgments of those who explain how to accommodate evidence of our fallibility by appeal to higher-order evidence, but without commitment to the absurd consequences.

Explanationist (or abductivist) responses to skepticism maintain that our commonsense beliefs about the external world can be rationally preferred to skeptical hypotheses on the grounds that the former provide better explanations of our sensory experiences than the latter. This kind of response to radical skepticism has never enjoyed widespread acceptance in the epistemological community due to concerns about the epistemic merits of inference to the best explanation and appeals to the explanatory virtues. Against this tide of skepticism about explanationism, the chapter argues that traditional skeptical challenges rest upon central explanationist tenets and thus that one cannot harbor doubts about the general class of explanationist responses to skepticism while at the same time granting the force of the skeptical challenges they seek to answer. This chapter also shows how explanationist principles do a better job than epistemic closure and underdetermination principles in articulating the structure and force of skeptical challenges.

This chapter explores the essential subjectivity of belief, what marks a person’s perspective on the world as essentially hers. It argues that this subjectivity concerns, not what a person does believe, but what she alone must believe. It thus concerns the limits to belief. In this way, this chapter challenges the standard view that the subjectivity of belief involves essentially subjective belief contents or propositions. The chapter first defends the claim that to believe something one must believe that one believes it—the so-called BB principle. After clarifying the principle and distinguishing it from several closely related ones, the chapter shows how it grounds the essential subjectivity of believing, and explains why we should accept it. It then considers the so-called transparency of belief and whether the nature of rational action requires more than just these credal necessities. It concludes that the essential subjectivity of belief is not about what a person believes but about what she alone cannot help but believe.